To paraphrase Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now ‘I love the smell of incompetence in the morning.’ Or perhaps the same phrase replacing the word incompetence with failure. What matters is that yes, DOGE did a lot of willy-nilly mass firings back when Elon Musk and Trump were best buds. Of course they wound up trying, in some cases begging to get people to come back. Others, and RFK Jr. made headlines announcing mass firings were coming too. As the Shutdown loomed there was plenty of tough talk from Trumpty and his minion Russ Vought that mass firings would take place due to the shutdown. It’s not worked out quite that way…
A document has been leaked that will make Trumpty bigly unhappy. As Raw Story tells us OMB Director Voss’s plan to cut jobs is falling apart. They cite a story from another outlet (Politico) that gives suggests a not so great hope incompetence might be partial salvation from the damage this second Trump administration wants to inflict might actually not be so crazy after all. As I said we’ve already seen examples of people being fired and quickly rehired. We’ve also see people given notices they were goners, I guess to make it look better to the public that their job was about to be eliminated. Then tons of those people got another message saying ‘No worries. Just delete that earlier notice about losing your job.’
As for plans Trump and Vought were eager to carry out during the shutdown it seems that Vought is issuing orders but for “reasons” they don’t seem to be resulting in much of anything:
According to a report from Politico, a leaked document reveals that Vought, who has made it his life’s mission to pare down government functions to a bare minimum, pressed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to do a mass layoff with a target of close to 8,000 jobs eliminated and they have yet to come close.
According to reporting Vought, who wants to purge the government of as many employees as he can has been doing a repeat of what we saw with DOGE earlier this year. And it seems to be ‘deja vu all over again.’ A target of the number of jobs that will be cut is announced and usually with a great deal of fanfare. Then the actual cuts wind up being far less than what the administration said. Oh, and don’t forget that rehiring has been part of this crap when it takes place:
“POLITICO obtained an HHS document from late September, the shutdown’s eve, that said the department wanted to cut nearly 8,000 jobs, based on guidance from Vought’s budget office. On Oct. 10, HHS only went ahead with 1,760. In the two weeks since, the number has dwindled to 954, as the department has rescinded nearly half of the total, blaming a coding error,” the report states.
Adding that the purge was “largely scuttled by top agency officials who intervened before the cuts could be made,” the report added, “the National Institutes of Health was to take the hardest hit among HHS agencies, 4,545 layoffs, or roughly a quarter of its workforce. It ended up firing no one.”
So, what we’ve got is managers pretty much slow-walking if not outright ignoring directives to fire gobs of people. Hopefully they’re experienced enough to have prepped themselves for a court battle if Vought compiles a much shorter list – one of those he sent ‘fire people’ notices to who didn’t immediately do just that. Perhaps given lawsuits that are already in the works and examples of indiscriminate firings followed by a hire them back order have led to memos being prepared and filed. And also given to lawyers. I recall reading months ago that there was a surge in federal employees buying legal insurance policies in case DOGE and other Trump crap that was expected might actually happen. Decades ago when I was a Disaster Temp with FEMA it would never have occurred to me to buy freaking insurance to cover the cost of a lawyer!
Well, the point is that this latest effort isn’t off to a good start and as the headline to the linked article says already falling apart. We shouldn’t be surprised. Just for fun Raw Story gave us an example of how such things have often gone. They note how RFK Jr. was going to reduce HHS from 82k employees to only 62k. That was many months ago. However a contingency plan submitted in preparation for the shutdown listed 79, 717 still employed there.
If you recall there was an offer to accept a buyout offered by Musk but it had to be requested by individuals by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. Here we are well over three weeks (pushing four) and no word on how many exercised the buyout option. With damned near 80k still on the payroll according to the HHS shutdown plan it seems not all that many!
In the end we have long known Trumpty has a short attention span. That was true even before his current mental devolvement before our very eyes. He doesn’t follow through much of the time, and it seems to have rubbed off on his minions. Could it be that like Trumpty himself they see the whole thing as a Reality TV show and are content with flashy headlines, and too lazy or incompetent to actually make good on the promises? That is starting to seem the case.
However, part of me loves the notion that some civil servants who’ve been around for a while and know the system (and how to work it) are just saying “No’ to bullshit orders. Perhaps they are even being inspired by the “come and get me” or “bring it on a-hole” talk coming from those Trumpty has put on his enemies list. That thought brings a big smile to my face.
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“…Then tons of those people got another message saying ‘No worries. Just delete that earlier notice about losing your job.’…”
They fired them and took away their email accounts.
When they tried to rehire them, they couldn’t get in touch with them.
Incompetence on top of cruelty and stupidity. What a mix.
But don’t worry, the hiring at ICE have had the physical rules relaxed so fat slob Joey can make it in, knuckle dragger that he is, 75 pounds overweight with an IQ of 6.
By the time they’re done, none of them will be smart enough to find their way to work.
I’m thinking the ones they couldn’t reach, maybe didn’t want to be reached.