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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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The obvious issue here is that you would then have a hard time getting anyone to take these jobs.

They already;

  1. Have laughable pay compared to their private sector counterparts. With the exception of SCOTUS judges, no Federal employee can make more in a year than the Vice President. That's $286k. (Fun fact: Some Federal positions are non exempt from overtime and so every year there are these small pockets of folks at way lower levels who bump up against that cap.)
  2. You can't exactly select your whole team and you definitely can't fire people at your whim. In private sector, you get to do both of these things (within reason, and you have to perform when you bring your people in).
  3. Congress can at anytime call your ass up to "testify" - But we've all seen enough of how that goes to understand it's just a public shooting gallery - and you're the duck.
  4. The administrative overhead is insane. Half of your year, every year, is budget justification and preparation. 99% of the time its useless and just rushed together with everything else Congress passes, but then one year you have the head of a committee asking you about how much you spent on remedial uniform inspections for new trainees.

If you add on top of that "Your ass goes to fuckin' Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison" if someone or someone's down the line in your department / agency fucks the dog, you aren't going to get anyone interested in taking the job. Those that do are simply going to micromanage the shit out of everything to cover their own ass and the already ineffectual Federal government will become even more so.

Yeah, that's why it's something that grumps me, not something that I expect to ever actually change.

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