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PaperclipPerfector  15hr ago (text post)   2790 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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There's a great Patio11 Twitter thread about the repeated failures of government payroll modernization inititives.

On revealed preferences, every government suborg's primary objective is paying employees. In light of this, which no stakeholder is allowed to say out loud, the projects are invariably ludicrously underscoped. Everybody knows that there is a century or more of special spiffs and set asides and clawed out benefits. Everybody knows that there is no document or set of documents actually listing these; the function of the government entity is only actually described by the function itself.

You can't "play by the rules" and get anything done. Every inefficiency is someone's personal cutout. The agency will not simply allow DOGE to cut waste. DOGE has to force the agency to do it.

You can't "play by the rules" and get anything done. Every inefficiency is someone's personal cutout. The agency will not simply allow DOGE to cut waste. DOGE has to force the agency to do it.

The best way to do that would be to devise the appropriate plan and then get the head of the agency, the one selected by Trump, to supervise and execute it.

DOGE has to force the agency to do it and the worst conceivable way to force it would be by not having the direct leadership of the agency on board.

I feel that 'appropriate plan' is hiding a gargantuan amount of assumptions where you ask the civil service to reduce headcount and they return to you and say that they need to hire more. It's a Yes, Minister bit, but it would be exactly what would happen. If the civil service had the ability to de-bloat itself we wouldn't have a ketamine-fueled billionaire taking a chainsaw to the institutions. There is no 'best way' to do it: you're going to be Washington Monument'd for a papercut, you might as well go for the head.

I mean, there is this institution called Congress that can set funding and headcount and whatnot. In this respect, the Presidency is much unlike a modern CEO who has both supervisory and fiscal authority.

When the dust settles, if this all fails, the blame will be placed on the blob rather than on the ham-fisted execution. So it goes.

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