Elon Musk publicized the names of U.S. government employees he wants to cut. It's terrifying federal workers
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/elon-musk-publicized-the-names-of-u-s-government-employees-he-wants-to-cut-it-s-terrifying-federal-workers-1.7125005Open linkView original on lemmy.world575
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Screw them and hold on to your job for as long and as hard as you can.
Sure one person fighting is nothing to a billionaire .... but a few thousand employees taking the government to court for this stupidity will definitely affect the billionaire.
Authoritarianism wins as soon as we all just give up and allow them to take control.
100% this. Not only that, but if you quit you can't apply for unemployment.
You also can't resist and annoy the fascists as easily.
It very much depends. In many states, if your employer significantly changes the terms of your employment, you will get approved.
The reality of living in this country is a factor. Not everyone is in a position financially to quit their job and probably blacklisted from their industry.
We do not have an adequate social safety net in this country. To be able to make principled stands without having to worry about your future prospects, you'd have to be independently wealthy, like the fuckers doing this shit. And that's entirely by design with the policies they've made happen over the last 60+ years. Over a quarter of this country lives paycheck to paycheck now, that will include a lot of federal employees.
Ah, so a couple questions to see if you're just a fucking idiot that thinks idealism can be reality, or if you're even relevant to the conversation.
Most of that user's comments have been removed (with good reason), so I'm guessing they're just a troll (aka an idiot).
Former J1+H1 counterexample right here.
I shortened the last sentence. The 1st point literally covers that type of scenario.
But that's cool. Taking things out of context on purpose to manufacture a point is literally what the internet does best.
Some of us have children who depend on us.
Do you have a family? Kids? Anyone you are responsible for? Would you be so flippant about making them homeless?
Okay you're one of those people. This conversation is pointless. Have a good day.
WTF Indeed, yes it's more impressive to stand for something if you are willing to sacrifice your whole life, be willing to live on the streets etc...
Fact is there's not that many people that can do that. There's no safety nets in this country, losing your job isn't just the possibility of having to move to a smaller house, it's the possibility of begging friends and family to stay with them, as the bottom rung of employment isn't even enough to afford a 1 bedroom apartment, and that's of course assuming only you are the one to pay that price, IE wife, kids who need college etc...
Godwin time here, as much as everyone wants to say they'd be the person who hid jews in their attic in ww2, reality is while you can applaud those who did, you can't really look down on those who didn't. The risks of completely ruining not just your own life, but the lives of those who you care the most about, to save complete strangers, is not a decision that is ever a given for anyone to make.
I'm not sure what you missed there
What even is your point here? My reading: "Ooh look how tough you are, see how you feel when you lose your job!"
It's much easier to tell somebody else to sacrifice than do it yourself isn't it?
Over half of federal workers are unionized so if Elmo fucks around too much, he just may find out. Many government workers are getting below market rates in exchange for good benefits, security and some sense of helping the commonwealth. They did not sign up for dealing with this chucklefuck. Replacing a bunch of sysadmins, accountants, lawyers and scientists at government pay levels would be challenging.
Thats the trick… They don’t intend to replace them. This is a thinly disguised austerity measure, intended to cripple agencies to later “show” their ineffectiveness.
Its called Starve the Beast
Make them bad by fucking them up, then privatize it giving your buddies the $$$
It's entirely possible that the richest man in the world can fuck around and still not find out.
Dude took a 30Bn hit on twitter and is still the richest man in the world, I think it's probable he won't find out.
I don't think that he took a hit on Twitter at all. He deliberately destroyed it to kill a very effective voice of independent news and commentary. 30 billion was chump change for that. Look at Twitter now, it's a hot mess of garbage. Mission accomplished and he's still getting three squares a day and shooting bullshit and spy satellites into space.
Court costs and being out of work are both fun. But, as it turns out, personal justice is way less important than the food/clothing/shelter triumvirate the money can fund instead of legal fights.
And what's why musk will win.
No one understands this part. We had the largest demonstrations of my 30 years of life during the pandemic of all things....why? Because everyone was getting government stipends to stay home from work and people had time to fight for what's right instead of putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads.
The government is going to round them up soon enough.
Laws don't apply to God King Trump, why would they apply to anyone in his administration?
Didn't this guy ban the @elonjet account for doing a lesser version of this?
Yeah I think that's the frustrating part of this. Either allow elonjet back or get banned for doing this. But having it both ways shows how shit a person Elon Musk is.
If anyone asks, to me, it's THIS aspect of it that's the big problem. Musk is literally doing the thing that he hated about elonjet.
He's always been a hypocrite and entirely untrustworthy. If you believe he is doing ANYTHING in good faith, it's kind of on you at this point. If people stopped interacting with these fucking musk articles we wouldnt see them every 2 seconds.
The public learning that efficiency is billionaire's dog whistle for mass layoffs.
We destroyed public education half a century ago to cut the oligarchs taxes.
Half of our public still thinks giving the oligarchs the remaining crumbs they can no longer make corporate landlord rent with will somehow be urinated back on them as prosperity.
Our public can't learn.
The ideal laborers. You can exploit them until they're bruised and bleeding, then then just point at the powerless, starving, dying homeless person on the sidewalk and say they did it and you should hate them for it. Problem solved.
This is vile. These are non-elected positions and the people who hold them are doing a job the government asked them to do.
You can complain about the positions but you do not attack people personally over it. Especially if your followers are as stupid and dangerous as musk's.
This from the guy who smoked weed on the Joe Rogan p;dcast, talked about how he does ketamine at parties, and has been talking to Pootles for the last year, all while having a security clearance. Yeah
How's Rogan even allowed to own a gun?
His friends are cops who don't care. They get different rules from us.
I feel like the ATF would be more than willing to act like assholes given even the thinnest of excuses, wait does Rogan have dogs?
And yet Blizzard gets criticized for their writing of villains being too obvious and over the top.
Writing cartoonishly evil villains is one thing, but the Lich King doesn't hold a candle to Bobby Kotick
So misogynist Musk went after a bunch of women for online harassment?
I hope they sue him. I seriously do.
SCROTUS: Lol
Incel King's got priorities: start with all the women who said no.
It's sickening. I just read about the professor who had to leave her job and home after he sicced his deplorable fanbois on her all because she was critical of Tesla's driver-assist.
Professionals too afraid to speak about their area of expertise. Public servants quitting because they know what's coming for them. And Trump's not even started his second run yet.
Trump has been proven to be above the law, what makes you think his oligarchs aren't?
Well yeah, that is clearly the point.
Wow elon is stupider than he looks. And he looks super stupid.
He wants to give the US the Twitter treatment. Deport his ass back to South Africa.
And seize his American assets.
DOGE isn't an actual department with any power, as it wasn't created by an act of Congress. I guess Elon's power will just be telling Trump who to fire?
Directing angry mobs at people in these positions could be an effective way of vacating them whether it's an "official" department or not.
Im hoping when the time comes to actually create the department someone will inform Trump that's not really something he can do, and Trump will just shrug and forget about it, while Musk starts crying in the corner.
205 names?
That seems very low, tbh. I was kind of expecting more, this just feels like a weird power move.
That's his entire thing.
Yeah but he's not very good at it, hence the weird part.
It's not about the cuts, it's about sending a message.
It's why he starts by going after women who said no to him.
Just like the prof in the article said, he does it so you'll be threatened and harassed into leaving your job (and in her case, her home as well).
I would like to publicize the name of a piece of human shit: Elon Musk. I would also like to cut him from the government as well.
I wonder how many of them voted for Trump...
Honestly, I’m half expecting some disenfranchised kid to learn from the Ukrainian conflict, and take one of these muppets out with a drone. It’s pretty tricky to shoot even as large a target as trump with his security cordon, but this pillock wanders around in public, and it really would be pretty ironic for someone to live-stream the tech-daddy moron getting fpv’d into a fine paste
I was kind of thinking the same thing lately. Trump hides behind bulletproof glass now, but he's not completely surrounded and certainly doesn't have a top on it. People have made bombs out of common household chemicals in the past and performance drones with a fairly long signal range are commercially available to everyone. Would be pretty easy for someone with a bit of ingenuity or craftiness to possibly take him out . I'm actually surprised nobody has tried that yet which leads me to believe they have some kind of signal jamming technology to prevent that exact scenario.
As the IRA famously put out once, you have to get lucky every time we have to get lucky once. Its one of those things where if enough people keep trying and improving they will find a chink in the defenses. I suspect it will probably be seen first with either Musk or one of Trumps other toadies.
I watched a video by Botgrinder on YouTube called “you can’t mini whoop the president” or something similar, where he was messing about with an fpv drone at a Kamala rally. Turns out that the Secret Service won’t let you buzz her with a small drone for fun, and if you stand around in fpv goggles they’ll come and give you some grief. He wrote a very funny ai country song about it, worth a watch. However, he didn’t say much about jamming, it was being stood about in the goggles that got him I think. I’d assume that the Secret Service’s jamming is a fair bit better than the Russian’s, but the way the Ukrainian drones have been dealing with that shows that jamming only does so much - if the drone is falling toward the target on an essentially ballistic trajectory, jamming it won’t do jack
If anyone needs cutting it's him
Imagine if we could cut Musk and spend his trillion $ on infrastructure
I can see why it would.
"One of the posts reads: “I don’t think the U.S. taxpayers should pay for the employment of a ’Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)’ at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation,”"
Let's then speak a bit about hyperloop you turd. Is that where you think tax money should be spent?
Obviously tax money that goes to his companies = good.
Tax money that goes to anything else = bad.
Friendly reminder that SpaceX is almost entirely funded by launching starlink and government satellites. Without government contracts, our tax dollars, SpaceX could not afford to exist.
And so naturally he's been placed under arrest for reckless engagement or something appropriate.
Don’t like him and not sure how well this is gonna work out BUT there are too many useless people in government jobs in a lot of countries and with their work ethic they often couldn’t hold jobs in the more competitive free market so I agree with the core principle of what they want to do, but I am sure the approach will be total ass.
Yes, there is a shit ton of dead weight in the government contractor sector, just soaking up that delicious tax money for minimal effort. But I have a feeling these aren’t the employees being targeted right now.
That'd be cutting federal contracts. I read the headline as dealing with people employed directly by the federal government, not indirectly hired through private companies.
I am you that it'd be a much better way to cut fat from the budget.
The problems in government are structural and systematic, not individual. The bureaucracy was built into what it is through the accumulation of regulations, poorly implemented policies and agendas, as well as plain mismanagement. Likewise, when the cost of a failed project is a political shitstorm and a parliamentary enquiry, and beyond that you are expected to be entirely accountable and transparent, you need to be risk averse.
You can't just fix these issues by proclaiming to fire everyone. You need to fix structural and leadership problems.
We just those useless folks Congress. But, seriously we can't let a few lazies clogging up the works be the reason to allow Republicans to continue destroying our institutions.
Honestly fuck federal workers as a whole. I spent 6 months working under the USCG through DHS and every single last civilian worker was either a nepotism hire, married to a service member and got handed the job, outright incompetent, or some combination of the 3. Trying to get in touch with ANYONE from HR was a 2 week wait minimum to answer the most basic questions, and it's a coin flip whether the answer you got was even relevant to what you originally asked. I have never worked with a lazier bunch of entitled shitbags as I have in federal employment.
They deserve every bad thing happening and more.
Personally I like to keep getting paychecks while I line up my next job opportunity
Malicious compliance. Do what you're told, exactly what you're told, no more, no less. Have you been doing "something" that nobody has told you to do, that's outside of your job description? Stop doing that thing.
Make sure you take your time. Don't hurry. Haste burns you out, stop it. Do not start working before the start of your day, and do not work past the end of it. If you are doing this, you are enabling wage theft. Go home, your time belongs to you.
![email protected]
The trick is to practice malicious compliance that targets Trump, and not American citizens who want watchdogs.
Trump wants to run these agencies his way, with his people? Fine. In the context of people who need to keep drawing a paycheck, doing exactly as you're told is appropriate.
Will this undermine these agencies? Of course, because they're being run Trump's way, with Trump's people in charge. Will innocent bystanders experience fallout from this? Of course, because [same as above].
There's no going back to the way it was. The only way out is through, and the quicker we get to the tipping point, the better.
Don't quit. Government workers are entitled to more recourse than normal employees if they are going to be fired. Usually you can't just fire them for no reason.
Quitting would also prevent severance pay.
Sue for defamation. He called your work "fake jobs". Now his followers are threatening your life.
Class action?
They're working class people and the job market is shit. "Just quit" is a much bigger statement when you don't have another job lined up and have bills to pay.
What the fuck are you talking about? They had a job doing whatever random thing they were paid to do. Keep airplanes from falling out of the sky, checking water quality, doing accounting.. The right always politicizes government jobs. For example, they under funded the 2020 Census in areas that had left leaning growth. That directly impacts the number of congressional seats.
That's a really bad take. A) Doing a job which is not specifically to carry out Trump's will is not supporting him. B) Federal jobs are not inherently political, in fact very few are. C) even if they were in positions to effect political outcomes, they could use those positions to counter Trump's agenda. They can't do that if they quit. D) Nobody should be expected to abandon their livelihood for themselves and their families because they are tenuously, barely, kind of in a position that forwards Trump's administrations policies. A USDA meat inspector quiting to spurnTrump will do nothing to Trump and yet ruin their career.
Civil service positions are apolitical. You are supposed to do them regardless of which party is in charge. That's the whole point. Otherwise literally nothing would ever get done.
In office? What are you talking about?
Civil service jobs are not elected positions.
"If you don't like this country, move somewhere else" energy
That's exactly what they want and I guarantee they will make it difficult for most employees so they do quit. An employee that quits on his own is a lot less expensive to the company then a fired one.
A indefinite strike until musk is fired from his position in the goverment however...
They've already explained that as their strategy... first thing they are targetting is removing remote work? Why, because they know some people don't want to work in the office, and that's a good way to get a lot of them to quit.
That's what Musk is trying to do. Intimidate folks into quitting. So you're just basically saying let Elon do the thing Elon wants to do.
Yeah, that's not the outcome anyone should want. When a function fails, we can't just pop it back up when Trump isn't President again. I had to go over this with the Trump term one tariffs. The reason Biden didn't do away with them is because we violated the trade agreement to implement them. Once we violated the agreement, it doesn't matter anymore what anyone does. It's not fixable anymore. We have to go through decades worth of regaining political favor with the foreign country to repair it.
Same thing here. When the service fails, we can't just pop it back up once Trump is no longer in office. If people start to hurt because a function fails, those people are going to be hurting for decades while we try to repair the damage. It's one of those stack of cups kind of thing. It takes a significant amount of time to stack the cups compared to the half a second it takes to knock them all down.
All that's saying is that the next two decades should be complete shit for everyone except the insanely wealthy. I would rather not have that lesson, I don't think it's required. I also don't think a lot of people would even learn the lesson even if they experienced it first hand.
Not sure if you haven't noticed somehow... that's exactly what the Republican party campaigns on and has been doing for the past 60+ years.
They literally campaign on the idea that Government does not work. They get into office, then don't do the job well, proving that it doesn't work well. All while reducing funding and cutting programs until they fail. People that actually know what they're doing leaving just helps them.
They don't want any of those programs or services, because they don't give a shit about them. The wealthy don't care about public education, their kids go to private schools. An educated workforce is harder to control. Critical thinking is a threat to propaganda. They don't care about you wiling situation as long as they keep their quality of life at the top, which just requires money, which they make through indirect means off the back of everyday workers in destitution. They'd rather you be in jail for a bullshit offense where slave labor is literally still legal. Don't have to pay the inmates.
The programs they want still get plenty of funding and are in no danger. Things like the military and anything that can support the wealthy who don't need it.
And thousands if not millions of people die, depending on how long it goes on for.