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Did you also maybe believe that Milei would fail in Argentina or Twitter would collapse when Elon fired 80% of staff? The government workers I know tell me it’s a joke and few people work hard. (True of white collar private sector too)
Argentina is a basket case, so the chance of a positive outcome from pushing Argentina hard in roughly the right direction without thinking about the details is high. I would have given Milei a 20% chance of success if he applied a Trumpian chainsaw and a 50% chance of success if he spent a week thinking and cut the 10 most obviously stupid things.
America is the richest and most successful country in the world, and considerably better governed than average, so pushing hard in roughly the right direction is almost certain to make things worse unless you do the work to find out precisely what the right direction is. The 10 most obviously stupid things to cut aren't as stupid as they look, because the US system is functional enough that anything that obviously stupid either has already been cut or is hard to cut because the stupid is supported by a powerful constituency.
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No, but then, Argentina is not the US.
Twitter is a billionaire vanity project (or alternatively, an influence op). It is markedly worse as a service post Musk takeover and sacking 80% of the staff hasn't made it any less unprofitable.
The divisions of Twitter where 80% of the staff were sacked stopped functioning (temporarily in the case of HR and finance, permanently and deliberately in the case of content moderation, permanently and accidentally in the case of ad sales). The actual numbers haven't been published, but my read is that only about 25% of the core technical staff were sacked.
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I've never worked in government, but I've witnessed how bloat and apathy have rendered many workers borderline-useless in the private sector—where the profit motive demands efficiency. So I have to suppose that bloat is off the scales where no such motive exists.
The profit motive in the private sector largely doesn't apply to individual employees (or rather, doesn't demand efficiency), who are mostly incentivized to work just hard enough to not have to worry about being fired.
What the market really does is punish (too much) inefficiency. But that logic can't be applied to the government, because the government can't fail (at least, not in the way a mismanaged firm fails).
Per FRED, Federal staffing was approximately 2.3 million in 1955 and 3 million in 2025 (and has remained steadyish since the late 60s). The US population in 1955 was 160m; in 2025 it was 340m.
Fed staffing is a politically contentious issue and there is a lot of pressure to keep it low even as the country grows. Bloat largely comes in the form of contractors - since hiring adequate civil servants is politically impossible, contractors are used to make up the shortfall, and if you thing the Feds have bad incentives, wait until you meet the contractors. USG habitually overpays for services for the sake of keeping nominal headcount down.
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