This is clear from other other departments where they fired everyone they could.

"Coding error" is just a modern version of "the dog ate my homework". Lame but people will swallow it. They knew what they were doing, they just regret getting caught.

Sadly, once the firings, rehirings, refirings, court cases, and compensations are done, there won't be any money saved at all, probably more wasted.

That public servants do important work under less than ideal circumstances and funding is entirely ignored.

Any "savings" today could easily be obliterated by the long-term damage of needing to pay +X% more for equally-qualified applicants for the next few decades.

1. Fat is useful leeway. In critical times, it can be trimmed without otherwise disrupting the operation. Once you have eliminated fat during the good times, you can’t do it in the bad times.

2. A lean system without any fat by definition is tailored to just the current situation. It has much fewer degrees of freedom and is harder to steer to a new course if necessary.

Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for the director of the Office of Management and Budget (a job he held during Trump’s first term), has said: “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.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...

On the other hand corporate America has a terrible track record. We have Boeing and GM who exist only because the government keeps bailing them out to prevent economic ruin. Look me in the eye and tell me Sears was an efficient operation.

How many of us look at our cloud spend and think to ourselves “I’m certain we haven’t wasted a penny.”

Look at all the VC money that was lit on fire to do food delivery and taxi dispatch. It works now but I can’t say that was financially efficient and it still isn’t affordable. DoorDash provides worse service for more money than a teenager with a used Corolla left to their own devices.

Waste is everywhere but I’m really not convinced the government is the worst or even particularly bad.

It's illegal. Any judiciary statement is ignored and unenforced. Trump will blanket pardon anyone anytime he wants to do so. Besides violating centuries of precedent and well-established policy from the age of the spoils system.

The only small solace is watching the conservatives get owned by Trump's tariffs. I'm sure they'll make the best of it (fundamentally it is a consumption tax and highly regressive and probably is just regulatory moat once exemptions are bribed out of Trump).

What should we spend the next dollar on to achieve this goal?

Its a trap. They'll get these folks back, there will be nobody else to do the work and they'll come back and say "see, these people were useless, we were right in firing them".

This has never been true for this administration, which A) already had a previous term to show us how incompetent its leaders are, and B) is working from a decades-old playbook of making government more dysfunctional so that people lose faith in it and want to eliminate it.

"Coding error" could mean anywhere from "we wrote an actual good-faith attempt to measure some sort of performance, there was a bug, and we blindly followed what it said without double checking" to "the code we wrote to 'select * from employees' when firing people was in 'error' in hindsight because we now wish to have some of those people working for us again".

No matter how you cut it, in the absolute best case scenario, the people doing the firing were so incompetent that no one can tell they weren't being malicious.

The median scenario, they were simply being malicious.

So it's Incompetence or Malice. Pick your poison.

- They were able to get them reinstated within 24 hours.

- A presentation seen by Science said the overall NIH RIF (reduction in force) was based on administrative codes and that some “may not have been intentional.”

“… fix the broken systems left to us by the Biden administration.…”

Blaming people you just fired for a mistake you made firing people is as timeless as it is pathetic.

Dealing with the bureaucracy is generally awful. Most of the time you will go through several employees over the course of hours/days/weeks or even years and you wonder how they manage to get dressed each day. Eventually you get someone who solves your problem in about 20 seconds.

I don't know if you have ever dealt with the TSA in any meaningful capacity but they are by far the most competent government agency that interacts with the public.

I've worked with law enforcement dealing with computer forensics and our state investigators are reasonably competent. We have had to deal with people in federal agencies and it's mind boggling. I'm talking like a PDF emailed of html source code for a login page with the subject "Run this in power shell". That's coming in on a Friday at 4:55 when we have been waiting for a week and they don't respond back until Wednesday with a reply like "team is checking this out".

Eventually someone will mail you a DVD of a screen recording of them logging into a system that's running on a local IP and then 12 minutes of explaining boolean operators.

All we can do is wait for the empire to tumble enough until people without empathy become personally affected and turn sour. My guess is it won’t take the full 4 years.

1) exercise in venting/speaking out/awareness raising

2) networking events for activists.

Eventually the activists and movements aim to get votes in the next election. Get funding for the opposition party’s legal fights and campaigns. That sort of thing.

So, for the most part it’ll be the Trump & Friends show until the midterms at least. It isn’t complacency I think, I mean the opportunity to pick an alternative happened in the past. Is it complacency to live in the outcomes of what has already happened?

   NASDAQ
   Fri Close  Mon Open    Change
   18,656.47  16,746.00  -1,910.47
   https://www.cnbc.com/pre-markets/

The top cause of death among US children is drowning, and the CDC is the only national group studying and giving prevention training to at risk kids, particularly states with high drowning deaths like Florida. That entire team is gone now, along with many others.

I for one didn't even know we had an agency like USAID, which sounds like it has done wonderful work around the world. Most people (again, myself included), probably don't know just what the DOE's main function is. Turns out it's a pretty hands-off agency, and shutting it down will mostly just harm kids with disabilities. Why we shut these agencies down is beyond me, but I guess it makes them look like they're doing something without going after the actual big fish, like our national "defense" apparatus. Oh no, there we're going to build a "golden dome". A very "efficient" one I'm sure.

No, that was mostly people just living their lives with a few standard shows about "housing prices are high again and people are worried" followed by months of "houses are worth nothing now and lots of people cannot pay their mortgages and cannot refinance" and then a few years of "this was a 100% illegal eviction notice, did you even check or just assume none of your customers paid?"

Nothing at all like what's currently going on in the US federal government right now.

Some people were warning about possible problems in the markets, but no, in general the media were chugging along as normal, they're most excitable when they're either against the ruling force or there's blood in the water. This reminds me of 2016-2020.

Now he's surrounded himself with enablers, and the Dems won't even make a real effort to oppose the stuff he's doing.

- The workers were put on paid leave pending termination, for procedural reasons (they could not legally be fired immediately).

- Only ten were reinstated, and nobody knows why. The agency that reinstated them (NINDS) is not the same agency that issued the firing (HHS directly)

- The staff in question were explicitly told a "computer error" (quotes as such in the article) led to their termination notices.

This is not how a functioning management system works. It's also not an effective way to operate a government research program. There's no hyperbole here; it's just bad work.