How much worse can things get for Federal employees? How many more of us are going to get the axe before the bloodletting end? I've never seen anything like this and I've been in Gov't since the 1980s.
I feel for you, Gene, since you devoted a big chunk of your career to the WaPo, only to see it swirling down the crapper. I canceled after Kamalagate, and with each passing day I put more miles between myself and an institution I used to admire. I now liken the WaPo to the house I grew up in: after Mom died a couple years ago, we sold to a builder, who will soon demolish it with no regard for the place or the memories formed there. Bezos came in with a sack of cash and his wrecking ball is on site.
With Musk, Melonhead and J d'Fashista, we can call this a junta. Certainly more apt than an administration or even a regime. Reich comes to mind too but the total ineptness and greed really scream junta.
Congrats - MAGA you've made us into a bigger, more dangerous Myanmar (for the stray MAGA reader, Myanmar is a country in SE Asia where democracy is routinely erased and the poor people, which is everyone not in the junta, has learned never to complain about the price of eggs or anything else.)
They are only inept if you assume that the purpose of their actions is to run the government. If the purpose is to destroy the government, then they are doing a great job.
Personally, I think if we are specifically referring to the Don the Dotard, there has never been any question of his complete lack of eptness. If it were just Orange Julius Seizure he'd just be busy golfing and enriching himself. All the other stuff is just way too much effort for RumpledTrumpSkin.
But I concur, the de facto president - and the rest of the X cabal - are quite effectively carrying out their destruction of the country. Not that destroying things is that tough if you have no concern whatsoever of direct and collateral damage, and no plans to rebuild.
"The wheels move so slowly ..." And in 1972, I thought Nixon had it made. He won election by a landslide. Then in 1973, he was out. It was a different Congress then. But we still have a Congress with no room for errors on either side. How much will Trump have to mess up before they turn? We will see. It is his to lose. And he does seem to believe his own propaganda. That is always a big mistake. Will he manage lower food and housing prices with fewer workers and tariffs? Good luck with that.
Il Douche has no worries. He is above it all, having delegated the dirty work to the Muskrats, who themselves are following the 2025 playbook assembled by the Heritage Foundation.
The key, like the last term, is the House. I think that in any swing district, or blue district - if there is a vacancy - a Dem will win. It only takes two. And as Dotard is a lame f....duck that could stop most of the Nazi plans, IF the Dems learned their lesson about fighting hard and dirty. When they get the house, they should keep passing popular legislation that MAGA senators vote down, focusing pieces of legislation at swing states and districts (get the Canadians to be consultants as they know how to do it.)
The only way Dribbly Don can lower inflation, is by monkeying with the Dept of Labor agencies who set the CPI, filling it with Musky Flunkies - which he is already starting to do. Producing fake stats will be easy as cake (heretofore presidents only learned of the new CPI stats, 2 hours before they were released to the public. Now the stats will be written by the WH in advance.)
The WaPo is no longer a newspaper, it is an infotainment tabloid. It gets more readership from its Ann Hax and her "Help the Oblivious" column than any news. There is a reason we all cancelled, there is a reason journalists, editors, cartoonists, fled the building. Call it what it is now, a rag, a tabloid, a carefully calculating propagandist mouthpiece. It spinelessly supports a particular political party who will destroy it if it misbehaves. Catherine is retching in her grave.
Consider the paper formerly known as the WaPo as now a house organ --- in every sense of the word. Even the slavering rabid right "unitary executive" theorists must be pissed. We now have a binary executive stuck in an endless loop of Abbott and Costello's routine, "Who's on first?" A perfect example of the clear and present danger of a bunch of functionally uninformed and incompetent techies allowed to rummage around in the government is what happened recently at the National Nuclear Security Administration, where the Muskrats again took a meat ax to staffing for the nation's nuclear weapons programs. These include critical programs managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there doesn't further contaminate nearby communities --- a good many of which are in red states. When it dawned on the dimwits that firing for firing's sake probably wasn't a good idea in this case, many who had been reinstated could not be reached and more than a handful of others were said to be reconsidering whether to return to work, given the uncertainty created by DOGE.
It's the Trump regime alright, but I reiterate this recommendation: Let's refer to it as the Republican administration to prevent the Republican congress from hiding from the Frankenstein they enabled and continue to kowtow to.
But how do you save money if you are the government? Well, you don't randomly slice through the budget like a hippo trampling the village. You do cuts incrementally, a word Elon doesn't understand (I bought Twitter - everyone on this floor is fired. Now, you people on the next floor, you get to do the work of al those people leaving the building). Incremental changes....let's first review what everyone does, how their job supports the bigger picture, how we can phase them out slowly or through job attrition. But how do we cut grant funding? Do we offer grants, have a process by which the grants are administered, then just say "Psych! No money for you! HAHAHA!" No, what we do is wait until the next grant cycle and then not offer any grants - no one has to go into the hole, then wait for the repayment that will never come: we just don't offer them next year, rather than going through all the trouble of offering grants and then not paying what we owe. It is very simple economics, really. You first review this year's expenditures, THEN you look for places where cuts can be made, THEN you make changes that make sense going forward. I deal with budgets. I have cut my budget every year for the past 12 years. It happens at the end of the fiscal year after reviewing the expenditures of the last three years to determine where cuts can be logically made, how these cuts can be made without disrupting services, and how I can reduce waste by bulk purchasing or finding less expensive ways of providing the same level of service. It really is simple if you have the patience to sit down and review the expenditures and make a plan that will pay off later, rather than stampeding over the people who make your services work.
Library story: University administration wanted a lowered cost library. Why store all those books that nobody ever reads? So, send a team to see what is not read and get rid of it. But how to know? Just look for books that do not get checked out. OK. However, the library has some books so important that the never go out. Non-Circulating reference books stay in the library. And are never allowed to be checked out. (Well hardly ever.) I bet those in the Administration had never been in the library. Not ever.
So funny you mentioned this. We used to have a great printing staff - they did so much for us (printing, binding, copyright permission, purchasing case studies for classes, internal billing, copier repair, copier replacement material, Scantron grading, putting together student packets and selling them directly to students - billing grants and financial aid). One day we were told that 'no one uses the print shop' and that they were closing down. I asked "How will we bill financial aid for student packets?" and was told "You can print the student packets and sell them to the students." How? I can't bill financial aid and I don't happen to have a cash box in my office to make change. "Then stop having student packets." Copyright? "Just get the copyright permission yourself (adding hours of work per week) or don't bother with it - I'm sure no one will mind a little stolen intellectual property." Scantron grading? "How hard can it be to do that by hand?" With 300 students in some classes, this takes forever. With a machine it is done in five minutes. Only a few of us complained about the disappearing print shop - until the next semester and suddenly everyone wanted me to schlep across campus to the only remaining copy shop left. The guy whose idea it was to close the copy shops got promoted and the rest of us have to live with his decision because he personally never used a copy shop - his department admin did, but who cares if she has to walk half a mile with a cart to pick up bulky printed items?
Your head will explode from the effort in trying to apply logic to what is a blatant, cynical effort --- not to rationally reduce waste and inefficiency (such as there is...) --- but to feverishly give the impression of paying for a coming multi-trillion dollar tax break for the 1%.
Remember back in the olden days when the government at least put up a facade of taxing the rich? Good times. Good times.
I just wish their go-to wasn't always to attack and spread lies: USAID sends medical aid to war-torn countries and some idiot on social media said it was $50m in condoms. Must be true (it isn't) if someone posted it on social media. Cool photos and graphics = 100% true. I want them to, now that they have snuck into offices, show us the receipts for the condoms. They won't be able to, of course, because they will purge and destroy all records they find - no evidence, no way to prove yourself innocent. They make me sick.
Well, considering USAID spent a total of $8.2 million worldwide for both male and female condoms in FY 2023, the claim is batshit crazy, but of course the truth is irrelevant. What's worse (if anything with this administration can be worse than it already is...), in her first WH briefing, press parrot Karoline Leavitt gave the lie an official blessing, noting with a straight face, I might add, that Demento paused foreign aid to thwart the nefarious plan in which “there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza (for Hamas condom bombs, no less).” $83M in general aid was sent to two provinces in Mozambique, one of which is (surprise!) named Gaza. Latest fringe social media claim? That works for us. Allows us to keep the firehose pumping out the mis- and disinformation. Then to top off the totally cynical and incompetent effort, the miscreants are using what I call the "Pinto" strategy --- or the "let 'em sue us" game plan --- where Ford had prior knowledge of a design flaw that ultimately resulted in the death of at least 27 people but decided that the cost of recalling and fixing the popular model would be greater than the amount of money the company was likely to pay in lawsuits over the accidents. The difference here obviously, is that we the taxpayers are paying to defend the indefensible. So we get screwed twice.
Trump should fire Musk because he has not been confirmed as a cabinet member or anything else by the Senate. But it wouldn't make a difference, because it would be just as illegal and unconstitutional for Trump to send a legitimate federal official to break into federal agency offices, take over their computers, and freeze government funds that Congress has appropriated, killing hungry and sick people in foreign countries in the process. I think that we're making too much of the fact that it's Musk who is doing these things. The buck stops with the president.
Yet I haven't seen a single impeachment proposal. Even though it would go nowhere, the Democrats would be emphasizing the seriousness of Trump's illegal actions, and they'd be putting Republicans in the position of having to defend them.
I was reading about a fired employee who was told he had 15 minutes to take his personal effects and leave, with no hope of getting back into the office. 15 minutes? It will take me that long to gather up my coffee mugs. "Our office is just one big family," means some of us have entrenched ourselves in our offices - I have little appliances in my office and cake mixes (what if I forget someone's birthday and need to quickly make cupcakes using my BabyCakes appliance?), spray cans of air freshener (in case someone decides to make squid in the microwave or leave the restroom 10 feet from my office smelling bad), a spare coffee maker (in case someone comes to me last minute and says "I have 15 people in a meeting and everyone would sure love coffee"), my academic regalia (in case someone is a no-show at graduation), a suit and dress shoes (in case the Governor shows un in the building on a day I am wearing jeans and tennis shoes).....I have five six-shelf bookshelves that are full of 'do you have a spare.....?' that I brought from home. A water pitcher you can borrow? Got it. Wrapping paper for a birthday gift? Sure. Decorations for party? Of course. I'd be damned if I left that all behind after I paid for it out of pocket. I imagine Elon and his teen minions going from office to office searching drawers for cans of soup and jars of peanut butter left behind by workers so they can make themselves a free lunch. That's all this is, really - a free lunch for these people.
They hate federal workers, because federal workers demonstrate that the federal government helps people. If I were in the position of that federal employee, I'd take my time packing up. What would Musk's goons do--call the police and have me arrested for trespassing? Maybe they would.
Make every fired fed into a "poster child" in their local neighborhood and let the people all over the USA see what this purge has done. it is not some nameless person in the District of Columbia. It may be your neighbor.
The Washington Post has become a vanity project of Bezos. While you correctly point out that they can refuse an ad for any reason, you also (correctly) point out that that they need to provide a reason. If the contracts were signed, and then the ad was pulled, as you state, then I think that Common Cause has an easily winnable court case.
Having lived in many countries with authoritarian governments, I've started to call this the Musk-Trump regime. As the ad notes, an un-elected billionaire is largely calling the shots abetted by unvetted accomplices. Congress is a rubber stamp. I wish I could write something funny about this, but it lacks all humor.
How much worse can things get for Federal employees? How many more of us are going to get the axe before the bloodletting end? I've never seen anything like this and I've been in Gov't since the 1980s.
Thank you for your public service.
The bloodletting may be in the streets when our protests grow. Steve prepared for that?
The Post has gone the way of Fox News. So sad. I remember the glory days when the Post called out corruption. Missing that truth now.
I feel for you, Gene, since you devoted a big chunk of your career to the WaPo, only to see it swirling down the crapper. I canceled after Kamalagate, and with each passing day I put more miles between myself and an institution I used to admire. I now liken the WaPo to the house I grew up in: after Mom died a couple years ago, we sold to a builder, who will soon demolish it with no regard for the place or the memories formed there. Bezos came in with a sack of cash and his wrecking ball is on site.
His wrecking ball doesn't compensate for the lack of any other balls.
With Musk, Melonhead and J d'Fashista, we can call this a junta. Certainly more apt than an administration or even a regime. Reich comes to mind too but the total ineptness and greed really scream junta.
Congrats - MAGA you've made us into a bigger, more dangerous Myanmar (for the stray MAGA reader, Myanmar is a country in SE Asia where democracy is routinely erased and the poor people, which is everyone not in the junta, has learned never to complain about the price of eggs or anything else.)
They are only inept if you assume that the purpose of their actions is to run the government. If the purpose is to destroy the government, then they are doing a great job.
Personally, I think if we are specifically referring to the Don the Dotard, there has never been any question of his complete lack of eptness. If it were just Orange Julius Seizure he'd just be busy golfing and enriching himself. All the other stuff is just way too much effort for RumpledTrumpSkin.
But I concur, the de facto president - and the rest of the X cabal - are quite effectively carrying out their destruction of the country. Not that destroying things is that tough if you have no concern whatsoever of direct and collateral damage, and no plans to rebuild.
"The wheels move so slowly ..." And in 1972, I thought Nixon had it made. He won election by a landslide. Then in 1973, he was out. It was a different Congress then. But we still have a Congress with no room for errors on either side. How much will Trump have to mess up before they turn? We will see. It is his to lose. And he does seem to believe his own propaganda. That is always a big mistake. Will he manage lower food and housing prices with fewer workers and tariffs? Good luck with that.
Il Douche has no worries. He is above it all, having delegated the dirty work to the Muskrats, who themselves are following the 2025 playbook assembled by the Heritage Foundation.
“What me worry?” AN. Nixon won his election, too.
The key, like the last term, is the House. I think that in any swing district, or blue district - if there is a vacancy - a Dem will win. It only takes two. And as Dotard is a lame f....duck that could stop most of the Nazi plans, IF the Dems learned their lesson about fighting hard and dirty. When they get the house, they should keep passing popular legislation that MAGA senators vote down, focusing pieces of legislation at swing states and districts (get the Canadians to be consultants as they know how to do it.)
The only way Dribbly Don can lower inflation, is by monkeying with the Dept of Labor agencies who set the CPI, filling it with Musky Flunkies - which he is already starting to do. Producing fake stats will be easy as cake (heretofore presidents only learned of the new CPI stats, 2 hours before they were released to the public. Now the stats will be written by the WH in advance.)
If you get it, you don't get it.
The WaPo is no longer a newspaper, it is an infotainment tabloid. It gets more readership from its Ann Hax and her "Help the Oblivious" column than any news. There is a reason we all cancelled, there is a reason journalists, editors, cartoonists, fled the building. Call it what it is now, a rag, a tabloid, a carefully calculating propagandist mouthpiece. It spinelessly supports a particular political party who will destroy it if it misbehaves. Catherine is retching in her grave.
Democracy is Definitely Dying in Darkness—I cancelled my subscription when it was clear that Bozo was a total toady.
*Carolyn* Hax
I think he was suggesting that she's really no better than Ann Landers was.
PUTIN TO TRUMP: “LOVE what you’ve done with the place”.
"Though, to be fair, newspapers are free to decline any ads they feel may violate their standards."
Common Cause did say they were very careful to meet the Post's standards.
This was the last straw for me and the Post.
Consider the paper formerly known as the WaPo as now a house organ --- in every sense of the word. Even the slavering rabid right "unitary executive" theorists must be pissed. We now have a binary executive stuck in an endless loop of Abbott and Costello's routine, "Who's on first?" A perfect example of the clear and present danger of a bunch of functionally uninformed and incompetent techies allowed to rummage around in the government is what happened recently at the National Nuclear Security Administration, where the Muskrats again took a meat ax to staffing for the nation's nuclear weapons programs. These include critical programs managing massive radioactive waste sites and ensuring the material there doesn't further contaminate nearby communities --- a good many of which are in red states. When it dawned on the dimwits that firing for firing's sake probably wasn't a good idea in this case, many who had been reinstated could not be reached and more than a handful of others were said to be reconsidering whether to return to work, given the uncertainty created by DOGE.
Amazing how stoopid these “geniuses” can be.
It's the Trump regime alright, but I reiterate this recommendation: Let's refer to it as the Republican administration to prevent the Republican congress from hiding from the Frankenstein they enabled and continue to kowtow to.
Tammany Hall, only with non-Catholic Republicans.
But how do you save money if you are the government? Well, you don't randomly slice through the budget like a hippo trampling the village. You do cuts incrementally, a word Elon doesn't understand (I bought Twitter - everyone on this floor is fired. Now, you people on the next floor, you get to do the work of al those people leaving the building). Incremental changes....let's first review what everyone does, how their job supports the bigger picture, how we can phase them out slowly or through job attrition. But how do we cut grant funding? Do we offer grants, have a process by which the grants are administered, then just say "Psych! No money for you! HAHAHA!" No, what we do is wait until the next grant cycle and then not offer any grants - no one has to go into the hole, then wait for the repayment that will never come: we just don't offer them next year, rather than going through all the trouble of offering grants and then not paying what we owe. It is very simple economics, really. You first review this year's expenditures, THEN you look for places where cuts can be made, THEN you make changes that make sense going forward. I deal with budgets. I have cut my budget every year for the past 12 years. It happens at the end of the fiscal year after reviewing the expenditures of the last three years to determine where cuts can be logically made, how these cuts can be made without disrupting services, and how I can reduce waste by bulk purchasing or finding less expensive ways of providing the same level of service. It really is simple if you have the patience to sit down and review the expenditures and make a plan that will pay off later, rather than stampeding over the people who make your services work.
Library story: University administration wanted a lowered cost library. Why store all those books that nobody ever reads? So, send a team to see what is not read and get rid of it. But how to know? Just look for books that do not get checked out. OK. However, the library has some books so important that the never go out. Non-Circulating reference books stay in the library. And are never allowed to be checked out. (Well hardly ever.) I bet those in the Administration had never been in the library. Not ever.
The "Fire!" "Ready!" "Aim!" approach.
So funny you mentioned this. We used to have a great printing staff - they did so much for us (printing, binding, copyright permission, purchasing case studies for classes, internal billing, copier repair, copier replacement material, Scantron grading, putting together student packets and selling them directly to students - billing grants and financial aid). One day we were told that 'no one uses the print shop' and that they were closing down. I asked "How will we bill financial aid for student packets?" and was told "You can print the student packets and sell them to the students." How? I can't bill financial aid and I don't happen to have a cash box in my office to make change. "Then stop having student packets." Copyright? "Just get the copyright permission yourself (adding hours of work per week) or don't bother with it - I'm sure no one will mind a little stolen intellectual property." Scantron grading? "How hard can it be to do that by hand?" With 300 students in some classes, this takes forever. With a machine it is done in five minutes. Only a few of us complained about the disappearing print shop - until the next semester and suddenly everyone wanted me to schlep across campus to the only remaining copy shop left. The guy whose idea it was to close the copy shops got promoted and the rest of us have to live with his decision because he personally never used a copy shop - his department admin did, but who cares if she has to walk half a mile with a cart to pick up bulky printed items?
Your head will explode from the effort in trying to apply logic to what is a blatant, cynical effort --- not to rationally reduce waste and inefficiency (such as there is...) --- but to feverishly give the impression of paying for a coming multi-trillion dollar tax break for the 1%.
Those who want more money for the government and in an honest way, will never cut IRS funding. Not ever.
Remember back in the olden days when the government at least put up a facade of taxing the rich? Good times. Good times.
I just wish their go-to wasn't always to attack and spread lies: USAID sends medical aid to war-torn countries and some idiot on social media said it was $50m in condoms. Must be true (it isn't) if someone posted it on social media. Cool photos and graphics = 100% true. I want them to, now that they have snuck into offices, show us the receipts for the condoms. They won't be able to, of course, because they will purge and destroy all records they find - no evidence, no way to prove yourself innocent. They make me sick.
Well, considering USAID spent a total of $8.2 million worldwide for both male and female condoms in FY 2023, the claim is batshit crazy, but of course the truth is irrelevant. What's worse (if anything with this administration can be worse than it already is...), in her first WH briefing, press parrot Karoline Leavitt gave the lie an official blessing, noting with a straight face, I might add, that Demento paused foreign aid to thwart the nefarious plan in which “there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza (for Hamas condom bombs, no less).” $83M in general aid was sent to two provinces in Mozambique, one of which is (surprise!) named Gaza. Latest fringe social media claim? That works for us. Allows us to keep the firehose pumping out the mis- and disinformation. Then to top off the totally cynical and incompetent effort, the miscreants are using what I call the "Pinto" strategy --- or the "let 'em sue us" game plan --- where Ford had prior knowledge of a design flaw that ultimately resulted in the death of at least 27 people but decided that the cost of recalling and fixing the popular model would be greater than the amount of money the company was likely to pay in lawsuits over the accidents. The difference here obviously, is that we the taxpayers are paying to defend the indefensible. So we get screwed twice.
Screwed twice with the same $50M condom....
NOT the Trump regime. It's the Musk regime. Trump is naught but a puppet.
Trump should fire Musk because he has not been confirmed as a cabinet member or anything else by the Senate. But it wouldn't make a difference, because it would be just as illegal and unconstitutional for Trump to send a legitimate federal official to break into federal agency offices, take over their computers, and freeze government funds that Congress has appropriated, killing hungry and sick people in foreign countries in the process. I think that we're making too much of the fact that it's Musk who is doing these things. The buck stops with the president.
Yet I haven't seen a single impeachment proposal. Even though it would go nowhere, the Democrats would be emphasizing the seriousness of Trump's illegal actions, and they'd be putting Republicans in the position of having to defend them.
I was reading about a fired employee who was told he had 15 minutes to take his personal effects and leave, with no hope of getting back into the office. 15 minutes? It will take me that long to gather up my coffee mugs. "Our office is just one big family," means some of us have entrenched ourselves in our offices - I have little appliances in my office and cake mixes (what if I forget someone's birthday and need to quickly make cupcakes using my BabyCakes appliance?), spray cans of air freshener (in case someone decides to make squid in the microwave or leave the restroom 10 feet from my office smelling bad), a spare coffee maker (in case someone comes to me last minute and says "I have 15 people in a meeting and everyone would sure love coffee"), my academic regalia (in case someone is a no-show at graduation), a suit and dress shoes (in case the Governor shows un in the building on a day I am wearing jeans and tennis shoes).....I have five six-shelf bookshelves that are full of 'do you have a spare.....?' that I brought from home. A water pitcher you can borrow? Got it. Wrapping paper for a birthday gift? Sure. Decorations for party? Of course. I'd be damned if I left that all behind after I paid for it out of pocket. I imagine Elon and his teen minions going from office to office searching drawers for cans of soup and jars of peanut butter left behind by workers so they can make themselves a free lunch. That's all this is, really - a free lunch for these people.
They hate federal workers, because federal workers demonstrate that the federal government helps people. If I were in the position of that federal employee, I'd take my time packing up. What would Musk's goons do--call the police and have me arrested for trespassing? Maybe they would.
Make every fired fed into a "poster child" in their local neighborhood and let the people all over the USA see what this purge has done. it is not some nameless person in the District of Columbia. It may be your neighbor.
Congress person Greene in Texas.
Greene has filed articles of impeachment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ33jBy9QDs
The Washington Post has become a vanity project of Bezos. While you correctly point out that they can refuse an ad for any reason, you also (correctly) point out that that they need to provide a reason. If the contracts were signed, and then the ad was pulled, as you state, then I think that Common Cause has an easily winnable court case.
But it's not really about the money, is it?
Having lived in many countries with authoritarian governments, I've started to call this the Musk-Trump regime. As the ad notes, an un-elected billionaire is largely calling the shots abetted by unvetted accomplices. Congress is a rubber stamp. I wish I could write something funny about this, but it lacks all humor.
Thanks Gene! Because of your post I subscribed to your stack AND doubled my contribution to the SPLC.