They are Coming For the Bureaucrats

They won't have time for that DOGE stuff. We will be too busy sending Gen X to fight in Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Panama. Lord help us all.🤯

I have never felt so warm and fuzzy about talk of the deep state😂. Truly the system should be adjusted, it’s horrible to think of commands and large groups fighting over tax dollars.

There are about 2.9 million federal employees today. In 1970, there were about…2.9 million federal employees.

President Eisenhower administration cut my agency off from the tax payer teet requiring a considerable downsizing since then. I’ve been there 19 years and I have to stay close to field work so I’m hopefully not on the next round of RIF. I’ve never got to work from home, had to work through COVID and if the snow apocalypse comes tomorrow I’ll still go to work. My agency was established by FDR in 1933, I’ll let you figure out what the alphabets are.

Fighting over limited resources. Napoleon Bonaparte was correct.

"A man will fight long and hard for a bit of colored silk ribbon."

Two things I think you missed. First, bureaucracies tend to grow over time. If you are a GS-14 and want to be a GS-15 then you create an empire where you supervise a bunch of GS-14s and then voila! You get promoted to 15! Second, when cutting budgets within DoD at least, it's not hack one guy out but always "share the pain" and all other programs get cut proportionally.

There is already an office that handles Government efficiency and waste GAO(Government Accountability Office), making a new one instead of leading the one already there IS wasteful and bureaucratic bloating.
Literally nothing will change except for more Government spending on bureaucrats and new "audits" to waste the time of the people actually doing work.

Agencies change over time, too. Their focus can shift in a different direction but programs for the old objective keep going. Eventually you end up with the USDA helping people pay their mortgage. Something that should be under HUD.

I certainly hope DOGE is coming for the bureaucrats. Though like the bureaucrats themselves, the American people are hopeful, if they think about it, that DOGE will spare bureaucracies that fit their individual interests. But it’s time for the Deep State to go. The tail has long since been wagging the dog and we the people can’t trust anyone with that power.

And I second @GentlemanJack295’s assessment on how bureaucratic empires grow. I saw numerous redundant military bureaucracies pop up during GWOT this way. They were especially successful growing because they could write a proposal to accomplish a mission that would record for posterity that if “The Big Man” (or his subordinate senior bureaucrat) ignored that mission catastrophe would result. With big bucks flowing into the Pentagon it was easier for “The Big Man” to reduce the risk and grant them their empire.

Oligarchs vs Bureaucrats, Round 1

Just observations from military, contractor and GS experience.

Once upon a time the typical S1 had +/- 8 soldiers in it. 20 years later the S1 still had about 8 soldiers, BUT the bulk of what they did 20 years before (typing TDY requests, OER and NCOERs, awards etc.) had been pushed down to company or individual levels. Yet, they had the same number of soldiers as they did when the workload was significantly higher.

Something else I noted was conversion from military to civilian or contractors. The concept was that military duties took those folks away from the core job too much, and you could replace two with one. YET, within just a handful of years, that former military shop that had 8 folks, went to 4 GS/contractors, was back up there at 8 personnel. With no additional mission.

Bureaucracy grows itself. Sometimes it is necessary if you have additional mission requirements, but many times it is (as Gentleman Jack says below) empire building. And programs are almost never really cut - they just live on forever even when the original purpose has been met.

As much as I hate saying this I suspect that the only way to cut government now is to take a chainsaw to it. We're beyond using an axe at this point. This however, takes political will and risk. Everyone is for the cuts until it affects THEM, so the politicians will have to deal with constituents. You gotta understand that most folks only real experience with government workers is the DMV or something - not the federal workforce. Perceptions matter.

The bureaucrats are the ones who protect us from rapacious businessmen like Musk.

Can't happen soon enough.

I like bureaucrats a lot more than South African sociopaths

Bye bye VA. It was nice knowing ya.

You said it. “No one likes a bureaucrats”?

How can a bureaucrat spend money or prevent the spending of money if the money they cut has nothing to do with their own personal experience?

Is this why you guys are trying to cut veterans pensions and compensation?

Trained and cultivated to cut budgets that they don’t know anything about?

It’s like the financial media made the claim that the

“Veterans benefits are too generous?” Based on what? The statement made without any reference or standard to determine what “generous” is?

A key principle is to always have representation at any meeting where a decision is made regarding who is getting hosed. Never ever let a council of colonels go by without having your guy in the room. The GOFO without representation is the GOFO who gets his funds cut.

Idk man I pretty much love bureaucracts. Yes them and bureaucracy have their (major) flaws - but if I had to personally deal with every tedious aspect of how my life intersects with every aspect of a government adminstrative structure, I will not like the person I will become.


May Your God Bless The Bureaucracts, So You Shall Not See (Actual) Hell.

We will see with this coming administration's efforts. I'm with you, that any impacts would likely come on the front end. We might not end up with much of an impact on head count, but we could end up with an impact on where much of the bureaucracy for the government departments and agencies reside. If any job was telecomute for the last four years, then that function doesn't need to be performed within the expensive wider DC metro area. That alone will kill significant personnel and real-estate costs.

They always take a cut

A “federal department of government efficiency”? Just when I believed ”military intelligence” was the biggest oxymoron.

Trump needs to shut down this corrupt government

Did they get you?