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I don't know what makes you think these jobs are cushy. The benefits are good and it's hard to get fired, but the pay is low and there's a certain rigidity compared to the private sector. As I recently mentioned in a prior post, I worked for the state when I first got out of law school, and it wasn't for me. The pay is decent enough that you're not going to starve, and if you save your pennies you can put your kids through college, but if you want to see Europe, it better be on your television set. You can look at the schedule provided with your orientation materials and know how much you'll be making every year for the rest of your career, which may give a certain peace of mind but also resigns you to knowing that there is absolutely zero chance you'll ever make more than that. Want to make 100k? You'd better be a doctor or have some other highly specialized degree where you could easily make double what the state's paying you on the outside without them looking twice at your resume, or have a title like "Senior Administrator" or "Director" and I'm talking like running an entire state agency. You can of course work your way up the ranks through promotion, but unless you get that every few years you're taking a pay cut, since you start out at the bottom of the scale again. When I left and went to the private sector my pay increased by 50% despite having no experience in the field I was going into.
But the real bitch of it is the lack of flexibility. As a normal salaried employee, no one pays too much attention to where I am as long as I get my work done. With the government, I had to sign in at the beginning and end of each day, and when I left for lunch. If I was more than 15 minutes late, I'd get vacation time docked. When I first started, I didn't have enough leave accrued to take two days off and my request for unpaid leave had to be approved by the HR people in Harrisburg. Every aspect of your work is micromanaged. They monitor internet usage. If you don't have any work to do they actually make you pretend to look busy, which is true of everybody when they first start and don't have a high caseload. The pointless drudgery weighs on you more when the government is involved; if a client insists I do something pointless now at least I can take pleasure in the fact that they're willing to pay by the hour for it and I can use the work to pad my billables and get a nice bonus. When I had to do it for the government it was because it was part of some internal policy memo that no one has actually looked at in 20 years but has become customary to the point that not doing it is a fireable offense.
This may seem like the exact kind of inefficiency that Musk et al. are trying to prevent, but it's a balancing act. If a private company wants to make a business decision that the constant logging calls and diary entries and filling out timesheets is a waste of time that prevents employees from being productive, it's one thing. But if it's not done then the DOGE people come right back at you with the opposite argument of asking you to justify what you do all day and them saying "how does it take all day to do that", and politicians wondering how taxpayer money is being spent, and the people claiming disability wondering why their claim was denied, and Elon Musk wondering why the other claim was approved, so it's better to just have a bunch of comprehensive reporting requirements so that when people ask questions you actually have answers.
Like I said, it's annoying, and it wasn't for me, but some people like the stability and predictability of government employment. By threatening that stability what they're doing is removing all the advantage of government employment. If you want government workers to be like private sector workers, now you'd better plan on paying them like private sector workers, since you can no longer convince them that they have their jobs for life unless they seriously fuck up. If this goes as far as Trump seems like he wants to take it, you may pare down the Federal workforce, but there are still critical jobs to be done, and the only people willing to do them will be the kind of people who are willing to work for a fraction of the going rate and don't care if they get fired in four years.
Did you work for the federal government or state?
I have friends in DC. Yes I make more money compared to them but my hours are significantly worse. In many ways their lifestyle is better. If you are married and you both work these relatively cushy DC jobs you’ll be doing just fine.
Sort of both. Social Security is a Federal program, and most employees (e.g., if you work at the Social Security office) are Federal employees, but disability determinations were done by the state Department of Labor, so I was employed by the state, but was administering a Federal program. I'm in Pennsylvania, which pays its employees more than other states, and if I had been doing financial determinations on the SSA side my salary and benefits would have been similar. I didn't mean to imply that you couldn't do reasonably well working for the government, just that these jobs aren't cushy by any stretch of the imagination. Like anything else in life, there are tradeoffs, and when Republicans talk about eliminating the advantages of Federal employment without addressing any of the disadvantages I think they're making an unfounded assumption that this is going to make things more efficient.
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