The head of the office of Management and Budget said on video, that you can watch:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
It's most startling to me that there seems to be this implicit assumption that people working in the bureaucracy are the ones making the rules. The rules are being requested by Congress. One can like it dislike the rules but if we want fewer of them it's Congress who most remove them. It also should be possible for any reasonable person to see that if we ask the government to do something we should want to do it well. The worst outcome is creating lots of rules and regulations that then get badly implemented and I need to wait years for my permit, passport renewal, tax return etc or our national parks turn into fire hazards and similar.
> there seems to be this implicit assumption that people working in the bureaucracy are the ones making the rules
Most regulations come about due to agency rulemaking under vague or broad statutes, so this implicit assumption is likely generally true.
Given that power, it doesn't surprise me that Republicans would be uncomfortable with organisations like 18F that had zero ideological diversity, in much the same way that I would expect Democrats to be uncomfortable inheriting an agency composed entirely of MAGA types.
Regardless of their technical prowess, as a government organisation, they should have taken more care to avoid becoming completely partisan, and shouldn't be surprised at this outcome.
> it doesn't surprise me that Republicans would be uncomfortable with organisations like 18F that had zero ideological diversity
Ideological diversity within the federal bureaucracy is exactly what the war against the permanent civil service is directed against, in favor of partisan patronage and Führerprinzip.
That's one of the side effects of hiring on merit rather than voting patterns
The best of the best that actually want to take part in making effective change for the better within goverment services will tend to have a progressive outlook.
I love how it's "We KNOW diversity makes us stronger" kinda stuff right up till it's all people you agree with then we don't need diversity any more and it's all merit.
I've known this was true forever but it's interesting seeing it said out loud now.
> W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ m̶e̶n̶ DOGE can't be ideologically diverse?
In theory DOGE could be diverse. In practice, at this specific time there's no real indication they're age diverse, gender diverse, or even messiah diverse.
You would first have to ask scarab92, dragonwriter, and hypothesis if they ' really mean "ideologically" ' and then address the question of why did you substitute DOGE with White men .. which is all getting a tad meta for me.
As for that part of "there" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43228187 ) which is all me .. I very much meant that the DOGE operatives do not appear to suffer from any form of diversity by any metric.
> Are you assuming that the current makeup of the civil service is ideologically diverse?
On the whole. Yes. Given the lengths of careers, the structure of the civil service system (both the formal structure and the way it has, until last month, been applied in practice), and the different and (in some areas more than others regional and occupational-area biases in who is attracted to it, that would be hard to avoid.
> There were no conservatives at 18F.
Even if that were true, the mass firings of federal civil servants haven't been limited to 18F.
How do you legislate "ideological neutrality" into an agency? There's nothing left-wing about 18F's mission.
If Republicans are unhappy about how agencies use rulemaking power, they have had many opportunities over the past few decades to pass bills more clearly defining the powers of those agencies.
He’s a Christian nationalist. He thinks the Feds doing normal things like science, environmental protection, etc, are not “Christian” enough, or at least somehow are in support of an anti-Christian movement. He therefore wants to dismantle the government so as to reduce the anti-Christian elements of government.
A
If that sounds like conspiracy level crazy, it’s because it is.
> If that sounds like conspiracy level crazy, it’s because it is.
Stating the facts of this situation makes one sound like a conspiracy nut, which is strategic. It's part of the fascist project of reshaping the perception of reality. We're all supposed to (and over time we will, if it's left unchecked) question our own lying eyes and begin believing it when they say things like "the sky isn't blue in fact it's green".
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.