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Notes -
Looking at just the effects of the executive orders Trump has made so far:
Direction to State Department to not recognize trans gender identities. Unclear exactly what this means in practice, but this will likely make it difficult or impossible for many trans people to get/renew passports. I know many trans people renewed their passports early expecting this (and the Biden State Department literally worked overtime to fulfill those requests before January 20th).
Less serious, but Return to In-Person Work at best inconveniences many government workers. The intention is almost certainly to encourage federal workers to quit (just like tech company RTO policies are interpreted as stealth layoffs).
Those are the only two that I see that have immediate impact on the lives of people I know, but many of the others will likely lead to noticeable effects.
I'm honestly surprised that Republican platform isn't 100% telework for government employees (with the caveat that they cannot be within 15 miles of Washington DC and must accept lower locality pay) it would be a much more politically palatable way to decentralize the government and shift it into more red states and reduce power within a very blue stronghold.
Platforms are not, generally, perfectly rational technocracy.
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It will be quite the inconvenience to some and drive separations. There are multiple different types of situations. There are the folks who live right around the corner from the office, but they only go in one day a week or are even on full remote for whatever reason. Those folks will be inconvenienced, but they'll just do it; only a very few will actually leave. Other folks live halfway across the country from their agency's official locations. Perhaps the agency has other interests in that area, but hasn't set up an official office building, because they only want a small number of folks there. I've heard of some people whose remote work was literally a retention deal - their spouse got a job elsewhere, and they could do their job perfectly fine remotely, so they moved halfway across the country. This could basically force them to decide who is going to have to quit which job and whether they want to pick up and move again. Perhaps still an 'inconvenience', but a pretty significant one. The people who are likely to actually leave are these folks, and it's unclear to me which strata that's going to primarily affect.
One friend of ours doesn't work for the gov't, and she's not remote; she's hybrid. She was telling us about her situation, and it's actually dumb for her to have to go in to work, because she's in a global role, and the vast vast majority of the people she works with on a regular basis aren't local anyway. She commutes in to work, time that, let's be honest, she would normally spend working on the days that she stays home, just to sit in her closed office at work and be on Teams meetings with people from different countries all day. Some of her coworkers are remote, and yeah, they'd probably just drive those folks off to different companies if they said, "Sure, we told you that you could be remote, so you bought a house and set up roots and stuff, but now we're going to demand that you move halfway across the country so that you can sit in Teams meetings all day from here instead of there."
If you happen to by trying to drastically reduce the size of an organization, voluntary separations are actually pretty great...
Correct, if that is your only terminal value, a la Vance's "fire everyone with an odd/even SSN" approach. Any selection/self-selection process will have its own mix of results. For example, the odd/even SSNs will be totally random, up and down the chain. Versus, for the classic example, if you lower everyone's salary, then you're selecting out the people who have better alternatives and could perhaps be more productive elsewhere, leaving yourself with probably the lower-quality folks. Versus the Schedule F approach, which targeted higher-level, policy-making positions. Versus the Musk-at-Twitter approach, where he just personally made decisions based on code commits, likely selecting on some combination of gross code output and a subjective quality/value of code assessment. Versus, say, firing people based on recent performance ratings, which mostly just lets management get rid of the people they already didn't like. Every method has its own results.
Going after remote work is going to merely inconvenience the folks who live nearby but drive disproportionate separations from those who live far away for various reasons. As @atelier points out, one might have a competing terminal value that would drive someone to want almost the opposite of this policy, but a lot depends on what your terminal values look like. My guess is that, unlike the Schedule F approach or atelier's idea, this is likely to mostly impact lower-level folks who weren't "in the club" of the top-level policy-making folks. Those folks are mostly all located pretty close, because 1) until COVID, they had to be, and 2) they're likely older and further in their career (thus higher level management) and had already established roots there and likely had less incentive to move in the last few years. This is likely to chip away at the raw numbers, but have very little impact on the power bases of the deep state.
Probably true -- I think the DS almost definitionally lives in & around DC.
Draining the swamp will need to be approached more directly -- but everyone who quits over RTO will be someone you don't need to pay anymore (nor severance probably, tho it depends on the contract I guess), which is a step in the right direction budget-wise.
My limited understanding of gov't budgeting is that they don't have money earmarked for personnel. I.e., there is not some pot that you can 'pull back' if they have fewer salaries to pay. (I've heard about separate head count caps, but I think those operate independently of the budget figures.) Congress attaches money to funding purposes (i.e., "Do this thing"). So unless Congress is making changes to their appropriations, they'll still get that same pot of money, and they'll still spend it... on, I guess, who knows what? Contractors, consulting, other contracts/grants, hell, they'll spend it on DEI programs if there is any gap in the language trying to shut that down. One thing I've heard from economists who analyze gov't spending is that the number one priority of those folks is spending their money, so they always have a pile of things backburnered and ready to go if they run into a surprise surplus of funds. I'm pretty skeptical that edging out a few remote workers is likely to have a remotely sizable effect on expenditures. Probably would only matter to the extent that those remote workers are actually some sort of bottleneck on funds getting out to whatever they're being spent on (and this is highly unlikely for the real big ticket items like, e.g., entitlements). In fact, to the extent that one thinks they'll be more "productive" if they're in the office in-person, the thing they're probably going to be more "productive" at is spending all their money.
So, my guess is that when we retrospectively look back on the budgetary impacts, it'll have a very small impact on salaries paid, approximately no impact on total federal expenditures, and the difference will be thrown at more and more marginal things. The long play here is convincing Congress that "look at all these marginal things that we're spending money on" and convincing them to draw back on subsequent appropriations.
That is definitely true; I've been one of those contractors. But in the context of Elon and his DOGE the (optimistic) assumption would be that those stable budgets are out the window next fiscal, whether they are spent or not.
Involving Congress would certainly be the "conventional" play (to the extent that reducing federal expenditures can ever be called "conventional"), but who knows what these guys will dream up.
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How? I don't see how it prevents you from getting a passport that states your biological sex.
As for other things that it means in practice, a few things that are mentioned in summaries (though I haven't looked at the EO itself so I'm not sure if it's listed there), are no males in female prisons, and not allowing to use anti-discrimination-against-women laws and regs to be construed as anti-discrimination-against-trans. Will probably also have impact on sports, though I haven't seen it mentioned explicitly.
Trans (or intersex) people may not have or be able to acquire identity documents that state their "biological sex". And if they do, photo IDs showing a mismatch between the sex marker on the ID and the gender presentation in the photo (or in person) are at risk of being rejected as valid ID.
The other effects you list also have some pretty awful consequences, but I don't know anyone directly affected by them, while I do know people who failed to renew their passport in time and will be left without one, and therefore be unable to leave the country, at some point in the next 4 years.
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