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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire

ROFL at "huge percentage". The article says like 50k positions. There's close to 2M federal employees. And they wouldn't become "contractors"; they'd just be more politically-controlled. There's something like 4k political appointees currently. Going to 50k would be a significant step toward making civil service leadership more politically-accountable when someone actually wins an election, rather than it just being de facto Democrat-controlled, but who knows how deep the rot is. In any event, it's definitely not putting a huge percentage of federal employees on the political chopping block.

You will be surprised how little summary executions are needed especially if you signal that you will keep them for as long as needed.

Agreed that they're totally targeting upper management, and this won't affect the vast majority of individual mail carriers/nurses/etc. Could potentially be a significant change in how much an incoming executive can control the Executive branch against #Resistance. The language they're using in their targeting is “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” positions. My point is that it won't be the vast majority of individual mail carriers/nurses/etc; it won't be a large percentage of overall employees. That's not to say it has no chance of being effective. I have longer and more complicated thoughts on whether/how/where it will be effective or not.

50k potential federal employees turning over every time a president changes would be a pretty massive change in how the government runs. It would make for excellent fireworks.

50k more than were there in 2016.

I’m not sure what your point is. Is it hopeless? Maybe. Likely. But what have we got to lose?

I trust trump more than desantis. And Nikki Haley might as well be a democrat in my opinion.

My point is that it's not a "huge percentage". Like, that's my point. A very very simple point. It's not a matter of complicated argumentation. That point is just a dead simple comparison of two numbers. I'm definitely definitely not saying that it's hopeless. I said:

Going to 50k would be a significant step toward making civil service leadership more politically-accountable when someone actually wins an election, rather than it just being de facto Democrat-controlled

Meaning it does have hope/potential in being effective. A full analysis of the factors for how effective it will be for various agencies is significantly more complicated. But no matter where people come down on that question, it's an extremely simple matter of pointing at two numbers to see that it's not a "huge percentage".

I don’t get this view. What has DeSantis done that makes your trust Trump more? Trump turned most of the country over to Fauci.