I also live here but that doesn’t give me crystal ball-like insight into what every single fed and fed-adjacent employee is feeling. It’s a fairly big city!
Do you work in the federal space? I have acquaintances who do and their mood doesn’t quite match the hysteria you see on e.g. the regional subreddits.
I live far away from DC, but my friends in two different federal agencies (stationed outside of DC) are partly bemused and partly shocked at how unprofessional the emails and new directives they are receiving from this new administration are. All of their colleagues are expressing the same sentiment (and my friends usually do not fraternize after work with their colleagues, but they have all been doing that after work just to cope with what is going on). Your contrarian-ness about the 'hysteria' is misplaced. Professional and dedicated federal workers are deeply concerned.
I don't want to sound flippant, but if you have no familiarity with a system and what it does, then you won't be able to make any useful judgments about it. This new administration has made it clear that they do not know the function of these agencies but have decided to destroy their structures. As a concerned bystander who has some knowledge and stake in them continuing to function, it is deeply painful to witness
That's a totally reasonable opinion, I'm just pointing out that "professional and dedicated" workers being concerned is not evidence of anything because it has many possible interpretations. Only if you've already bought into a particular system being well designed and justified does it necessarily entail something negative.
This may be true, but it doesn't excuse psychopathic behavior on the part of public servants given the job of managing these agencies. This isn't supposed to be The Hunger Games.
Damn near every one I know is either worried about being fired OR is unclear on what their agency should be doing in light of the flurry of ambiguous EOs from Trump. The best case seems to be "my office is clusterfuck, but I'm a contractor in SCIF, so I guess I'm ok for now."
So basically you don't know, but are being dramatic. NSA and CIA and DoD in general?
The reason i say this is you mention experience and skill but ignore whether such people are in _roles_ that need to exist at all, which is what is being questioned, not the worth of individuals in those roles.
> US President Donald Trump has offered federal workers the option to resign and receive pay for eight months, in a major effort to shrink and reform the US government.
There's also no evidence they have the money to pay if the offers were in good faith. Combined with the fact the two people who came up with the idea have a history of deciding not to pay and instead go to the courts to avoid paying
From what I have seen, if a worker agress to it, they agree they could be reassigned or terminated early (and thus not paid the same or at all). Seems like a trap.
Replying to myself days later to correct this statement: I did learn later on that the deferred resignation does mean that the employee is free to stop working once they submit the resignation, and will continue to be paid for 8 months regardless of whether or not they continue working. I don't think it was clear from the initial "buyout" offer, but it was clarified in later communications.
> The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.
This time around it seems less targeted, which gives the perception that it is not really about streamlining, feel free to prove me wrong though.
From the document you linked:
> The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.
In the opinion of one person who has a grand total of zero minutes of experience of all US Gov. employees being offered resignation leters.
The GP comment was about accident investigators rather than air traffic controllers but the consquences are the same, a lot of regular gov. employees are distracted by a current situation with no prior occurrence.
That had always been the case. The new administration has already done a lot of things differently from previous administrations.
It was largely a matter of precedent, rather than law. It's unclear how much of the current path is legal. And, of course, whether it's good judgment is completely orthogonal to whether it's legal.
FAA-employed ATCs are like any other non-appointed federal employees - politics should have no impact on their employment and this arrangement is protected by federal civil service laws.
Which Trump is roundly ignoring because he wants to appoint every agency with burrowed MAGA loyalists, top to bottom.
If you haven't been following what this administration has said and done with a painful degree of critical focus, it's probably bleaker than you imagine.
> FAA-employed ATCs are like any other non-appointed federal employees - politics should have no impact on their employment and this arrangement is protected by federal civil service laws.
"Trump reclassifies thousands of federal employees, making them easier to fire":
> The federal civil service system exists to ensure that hiring and firing decisions are based on merit, not political favoritism. Legal and procedural standards, enforced by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, require managers to provide a reason for taking disciplinary action, give employees the right to respond and mandate that decision-makers consider both sides before taking action against a federal employee. This system is crucial for maintaining fairness; it prevents arbitrary and unjust terminations.
> Before this system was established, many new administrations fired their predecessors’ civil servants and replaced them with donors and cronies. This practice led to instability and inefficiency within the federal government. To address this issue, Congress established merit-based hiring and firing procedures that apply to civil servants who are not political appointees, ensuring that government agencies are staffed with qualified individuals who can effectively serve the public.
wasn't the situation then that the air traffic controllers walked off on strike, so new replacements had to be made to keep planes flying, which was realized by firings? (i was pretty young then, but that's what i remember reading)
IIRC, rather then negotiate with the experienced union controllers until an agreement was made - they brought in inexperienced non-union controllers..
source: my uncle was an ATC during the strike. I believe he was a shift lead/supervisor and was NOT part of the walk out. He was appalled at how bad the replacements were and was going crazy trying to get them up to snuff.
How do you know this?