Should the Federal Government Exist?

Should we try to control it, or is it like the One Ring, fit only to be cast into the fires of Mt. Doom?

This post is a follow-up to my previous one sharing my thoughts about Donald Trump’s actions in his second term so far. My primary focus in this post will be the actions he’s taken within the executive branch itself, the various and sundry assaults he’s made against the federal bureaucracy. I want to focus on this for a few reasons that I’ll discuss next before moving on to some further thoughts.

Control or Destroy?

For starters, I want to ask the basic question of whether the right should aim to control the federal government or to simply destroy it outright. I pose this dichotomy because I think it is self-evident that this is, indeed, something of a binary choice—actions taken in pursuit of one of these goals will inevitably be at cross-purposes with the other goal. Obviously it’s going to be more difficult to steer something that you are also actively attempting to slaughter.

This principle becomes fairly clear once you consider the different actions taken and sort them into one of the two categories, either “control” or “destroy.” For starters, we can see that DOGE has been operating as Trump’s political commissars, being given broad authority over the various agencies and seeming to report only to Trump and/or Elmo themselves. Trump has even given DOGE control over hiring decisions, with the power to veto agencies from hiring people that DOGE doesn’t approve of.

If we put aside concerns about the expansion of executive authority more generally, this is a Good Thing. Of course a right-wing President should force the bureaucracy to actually obey him, and to only hire non-leftists whenever possible—these are root-level political basics that the left has utilized since forever, while the old “conservative movement” was asleep at the wheel, still foolishly believing that political neutrality was desirable or even really possible when it comes to staffing institutions. So far we are in the “control” bin.

Now let’s take a look at the “destroy” side of the coin. The most egregious action taken here is the mass firing of federal probationary employees. From what I recall, over 200,000 people have been fired so far, a number which makes me wonder if this might be the single biggest mass firing in American history. For starters, this action is almost certainly illegal, if you care about that sort of thing. Federal probationary employees are not “at-will” employees who can be terminated for any reason or for no reason at all—if they are terminated, there is a specific set of acceptable justifications, justifications which must be made with specificity, and political whims are specifically called out as an unacceptable motivation.

It seems that Trump (or the DOGE people carrying this out on his behalf, whichever) has cited “performance” as the reason that all of these hundreds of thousands of people are being let go, since technically probationary employees can indeed be fired if their performance is found to be lacking. This is a laughably flimsy justification and I imagine that it will not hold up in court, although I suppose we’ll see. But it is obviously implausible that every single probationary employee in the entire federal government all of a sudden got bad performance ratings right after Trump was inaugurated. It’s obvious that the firings are indeed politically motivated in the sense that Trump (or possibly Elmo more or less acting through Trump) simply wants to light the federal service on fire, whether it’s for ideological reasons or just out of spite.

This is bad because now the entire federal bureaucracy is going to be completely at war with MAGA, Trump, Elmo, and the right more generally. “But they already are!”, you probably say. Well, to some extent, sure, maybe. But not like this! There was absolutely a choice to be made here—to try and reconcile with the feds, or to escalate the conflict. To quote a line from (I think) Game of Thrones, Trump chose violence. He and Elmo really haven’t been hiding the ball in their rhetoric, either, with them saying that basically the public sector shouldn’t exist, federal employees are lazy and “ripping the American people off,” etc.

Remember, these are the people that work for the President! If you run a company, and you treat your employees this way, how well do you think your company is going to do long-term? Is this the way you would treat a company that you actually expect to do things for you, or is it the behavior of a corporate raider who is simply looking to liquidate the entire thing? Even if Trump is actually able to get rid of all these probationary people permanently, there will still be millions of federal workers left in their jobs. Elmo’s ridiculous “Deferred Resignation Program,” which is a bit too much of a tangent to discuss further here, only got 75,000 takers—about 3% of the federal workforce, below their target range of 5-10%. Odds are that many of the people who took it were close to retirement anyways and saw it as an opportunity to free-ride for a bit before checking out.

All the feds who last through this period and saw this stuff go down first-hand will never forget it. They’ll have permanent and serious grudges against Trump and Elmo and anything to do with them, forever, and it’s probably too late to avoid that outcome, unfortunately. Membership in federal unions is at all-time highs in response and these groups are now extremely energized to resist what they consider, perhaps rightly, as an existential threat to their livelihoods. Lots of people who probably would’ve been happy to just clock in and do their jobs, one way or the other, will now be extremely motivated to act against the right, to strike back at Republicans by any means possible, and that’s going to last long after Trump is out of office. He only gets to be President for four more years, many feds stay forever, and it’s very unlikely Trump will be able to change that. He has started (or perhaps unnecessarily escalated) a war that he almost certainly will not be able to finish.

Additionally—what right-wingers are going to want to work for the federal government now? We already had a shortage of “our people” in this space, to be sure, but how in the world do we expect to get those numbers up under these conditions? Our two “leaders,” if we want to grant that title to Elmo, are explicitly saying that feds are basically bad people who should all lose their jobs. They are trying to make federal jobs as crappy as possible in order to encourage more people to quit with the punitive blanket banning of all telework and remote work. Why would anyone sign up to work in that environment, much less conservatives who are already heavily predisposed not to take these jobs? Given that the federal government ultimately isn’t going to stop existing, whether we like it or not, it probably would’ve been more worthwhile to encourage conservatives to apply for these jobs while there is a friendly administration in charge to back them up during the hiring process.

Meanwhile, any existing feds who were friendly towards Trump (yes, some of them do exist, or did) or who were at least fairly neutral and apolitical, will now probably never vote Republican for the rest of their lives, and may be much more politically active on the other side of the aisle. These are not the people you should be alienating if you want the government to cooperate with you! This is what I mean when I say that the two approaches of “control” and “destroy” are at cross-purposes. By slashing and burning the government where he can, Trump will make the rest of it much harder to control, particularly into the future when he is no longer around to personally call the shots.

I find this to be unfortunate because it’s both a missed opportunity and an unforced error. The missed opportunity here was to try and make some degree of peace between MAGA and these institutions. The easy, obvious way to do this would’ve been to exercise strict control over them in targeted areas that are of particular interest to the right—for instance, the complete dismantling of DEI, which was necessary and good—while otherwise leaving them alone so long as they cooperate with the administration’s policy goals.

A lot of people will say this is naïve, impossible, etc., and that you would be stupid to even try it, all feds are badmeanevilwrongstupid so the only option is to basically just hit them and hurt them as much as possible, all in, fight it out to the death. This is wrong because people respond to incentives, always and forever. It is never true that, at scale, millions of people will simply ignore incentives outright to the detriment of their own self-interest. The notion that federal workers are ontologically evil and should therefore be subjected to pointless cruelty, because they are basically Middle-Earth orcs who are incapable of not being evil, is pure nonsense. This would be like suggesting that we should subject blacks to weekly public floggings because, as a whole, they tend to vote heavily Democrat. Not only is that obviously wrong and retarded, but it actually turns out that making inroads with minorities was a big part of Trump’s victory this time around. If Trump had this level of contempt for minorities, that certainly wouldn’t have been possible!

As far as using incentives goes, the President’s authority over remote work/telework and other working conditions would’ve been an easy lay-up in this regard. If Trump tweeted out that he’d let federal workers continue to have these privileges for now, but that he might revoke them if the bureaucracy obstructed DOGE’s activities, I can absolutely guarantee you that most feds would be more cooperative, and they wouldn’t mind the idea of working under Republican administrations nearly so much in the future, either! But instead this card was burned immediately to no apparent point or purpose.

This is what I mean when I say that this is also an unforced error. None of this does anything to achieve MAGA’s important policy goals. You can certainly say corners of the government that were clearly leftist projects did deserve to burn (hello, USAID). I’d agree with that. So why not burn the places that really deserve it without torching the entire forest? Trump’s mass firings, RTO mandate, etc., have been applied indiscriminately. People have been randomly fired from the FAA, the forest service, the Department of Energy, everywhere. The people that were fired appear to be nearly anyone on “probationary” status, which has included anyone from fresh college grads taking their first job up to disabled veterans who have recently left the military over to people who are just starting a federal job after decades in the private sector.

There appears to be no rhyme or reason at all behind the scope of the mass firings, or of the blanket RTO mandate—many people have signed leases and taken out mortgages after being hired remote or signing union-backed remote work agreements, and now they’re being told they might have to choose between selling their house and moving with essentially no warning or losing their federal job that they thought was a safe bet to provide for their family. What good is this doing for anyone? Is any of this necessary in order to achieve the policy goals that actually matter to Trump voters? Are these the things that first made people support Trump, or are people simply cheering them on because Trump, who they’ve supported for years now, is the one doing them?

Now on to some further quibbles.

Why Am I Such a Debbie Downer?

I get that most people on the right are probably still riding high from the victory in November. It feels like everything is going our way, the world is finally starting to heal a little bit, the left is finally on the back foot, and so forth and so on. Obviously, criticizing Trump has never been popular in right-wing circles, but especially right now when he’s out doing so many good things, I’m sure people must think I’m a total retard for saying anything critical of him.

My reason for focusing on criticism is simple: I don’t have anything to say about all the things he does that I like, other than that I like them. Yes, he is doing a lot of very good things. Yes, I’m glad that he is President instead of Kamala. The levels of winning in some areas, such as on DEI and trannyshit, are beyond what I would’ve thought possible just a couple of years ago. I thought Trump wouldn’t be President again, and I thought that if he was the election wouldn’t be called right away, and I thought that even if he got back in he wouldn’t do very much. I’ve been wrong on all of those points!

Still, “Trump does good thing that I like” simply isn’t worthy of a post, and I struggle to even make it a Note. Do we really need a post from me explaining why DEI is bad and why it’s good that Trump is getting rid of it? No, everyone is beyond familiar with all of those talking points. I write when I feel that I actually have something to say that maybe at least a few people haven’t heard before. When the right is in power, that means I will probably focus on where I think the right is misusing said power. I have no interest in writing slop that just talks about how we’re doing SO MUCH WINNING and the libtards are just SO OWNED right now. Maybe I’d be more popular if I did that, but meh, not for me.

Am I a Cuck Who Just Isn’t Willing to be Extreme Enough?

This is a line of thought that I saw in some of the comments on my last post. I think people who use this line are getting things confused. I am in favor of extreme action when it is properly oriented. On DEI, extreme action is warranted. Trump’s actions targeting DEI have been exactly as extreme as they should be given the issue. Nuke it from orbit, salt the earth on which it once stood. I am very much against taking aggressive and unprecedented—“extreme”—measures without good cause, when such action isn’t aimed at a worthy target.

This is because, obviously, when you take extreme actions that are not properly aligned in their purpose, the negative consequences tend to be severe. You could say that all of leftism suffers from this fundamental problem, taking people’s natural desire for extreme action and big change, and aiming it in unworthy directions. When the right does this, it harms my interests very directly, so I would prefer that the right not do it.

Political Capital is Not Infinite

This brings me to something that, in light of November’s outcome, people seem to have lost sight of—no one stays in power forever, and that’s triple true here in the US, where we typically alternate which party is in the White House every four to eight years. In the post I made right after the election, titled “Welcome to 2016,” I emphasized that I’m most interested in what things look like in 2028. Getting policy wins is nice, but to me, they only really count if they last past the current administration. If it’s all washed away the second a Democrat steps back into office, then I’m staying pretty checked out from the whole voting thing.

This is why I believe that some sort of truce should be pursued with our opponents, especially the ones who work in and adjacent to the federal government. In order for changes in policy and cultural attitudes to become permanent, they must be accepted to some degree by both sides. This requires the process of “re-normalization,” where everyone gets used to the new status quo and more or less accepts it, even if they resisted it when things were still up in the air. The left did this successfully for generations and have only recently screwed it up by simply pushing too hard and going too far. Engaging in pointless cruelty towards our opponents, even after we’ve won, is in direct opposition to this process and will actively prevent it from occurring.

It may be tempting to think that all the things we hated about the left, all the stuff that made many of us right-wing in the first place, is dead and buried now—it’s never coming back, so let’s just dance on its grave. This is short-sighted and, with a cursory glance at American politics, extremely unlikely to be true. This is exactly the sort of thinking which led the left to where they are right now, being tossed around by a second Trump administration. After 2012 there was a broad feeling that leftists would never lose power again, that they were now the permanent rulers, and shortly after that election wokeshit really went mainstream.

It didn’t happen overnight, it took several elections and a lot of fighting, but sure enough that cocky attitude came back to bite them in the ass. The left’s excesses over the past 10-15 years are the reason why Trump is President again and doing all of the things that he’s doing. They didn’t have to go crazy on race communism. They didn’t have to try and force tranny nonsense on everyone. They didn’t have to try and engage in a “global reset” based around COVID. Those were all unforced errors—they were unnecessary expenditures of political capital. The left had a lot of political capital to burn, but they thought that capital was infinite, that they could just do whatever they wanted and it would never run out. They were wrong.

If the right goes down the same path, eventually we’ll get the same result. Obviously we aren’t there yet—Trump hasn’t even been President for a month. But I focus in on some of these really stupid, heavy-handed executive actions, because I see in them the beginnings of the same process starting to take place. Unnecessary, aggressive actions that really screw with a lot of people’s lives, that are cheered on by our side because we just hate the left so much that we don’t care. This is exactly the attitude that the left had when they took their own actions of this sort, everything was justified by TDS, the right is so evil and horrible that anything goes as long as it hurts them, no matter how pointless or retarded it is.

I find the mass firings and general poor treatment of federal workers to be especially troubling as I believe the left’s next form will be economic populism. Wokeshit and cultural leftism have been refuted beyond any doubt and are going to go dormant for a while. Given that the left has historically been driven by economic populism and “working class” concerns, it just makes sense that they’d go back to that well given the current situation. You already saw the hint of this with Bernie’s popularity, and in hindsight I imagine some Democratic actors are questioning whether or not they were right to shut him down the way they did. You also see hints of it in the way that so many people, both left *and* right, were fawning over Luigi Mangione.

Donald Trump has overseen a transition in which the Republican Party is currently viewed as the party of the working class, a flip from historical norms which has worked out to his benefit. This was driven in large part by cultural leftism alienating people, but it’s also because Trump genuinely spoke to working class interests in a way that no Republican had for generations, if ever. He promised from the start not to touch entitlements and never really cared about cutting government spending—putting aside whether or not that’s smart policy, it certainly won him points among the “working class.”

If a wedge is driven between between Republicans and this group of voters, that will be a serious threat to the current right-wing coalition, and that is the obvious weak point that a successful left-wing resurgence would go after. The Republican party was traditionally seen as the party of rich people who didn’t give a shit about the working man and were happy to screw him over in order to make a few bucks. Republicans were characterized as being owned by heartless corporate executives who abused their employees, sabotaged unions, and imported cheap labor or outsourced jobs to the detriment of the average American worker (something Elmo was defending zealously just a couple months ago).

The actions taken by the Trump administration towards the federal workforce are absolutely in line with that characterization. This matters because the employment standards observed in the federal government, the signals sent from the center of power, trickle out into society more broadly. When the President says that remote workers are lazy and “everyone is replaceable,” that emboldens management in the private sector to follow in those footsteps. The administration is clearly sending the message that this is what jobs should be like in general, you know, in the name of “efficiency.”

I don’t like that, not one bit. I don’t think jobs should be like that. I think people should have benefits, work-life balance considerations such as remote work and parental leave, job stability, and all the other things that actual workers are typically interested in. In other words, all the things that federal jobs had up until two seconds ago, which the Trump administration is now trying to take away. I think these things are important because they make a big difference to regular people trying to have a family and build a decent life. Elmo has tweeted out about the problem of falling birthrates, but he doesn’t seem very interested in promoting the conditions under which people would actually feel comfortable having kids. Maybe that figures since it seems unlikely that he’s ever been much of a father himself to his dozen-plus children.

I think this is the result of a particular sub-set of people—the “tech right”—and perhaps a certain individual in particular successfully hijacking MAGA and getting Trump’s ear, then using the movement’s political capital to advance their own ends, some of which run directly counter to the interests of populists more broadly. These are the sort of actions I would expect from libertarians who do indeed want to just destroy the government as much as possible, which in the case of people like Elon Musk, probably makes sense to him because he has only ever experienced the government as something that gets in his way when he’s trying to do things.

MAGA is not a libertarian movement, though, and libertarianism has never been popular in the United States, and I don’t think that most people reading this who voted for Trump are libertarians. This is why I am very guarded about such actors wielding Trump’s political capital for themselves. I want that political capital to work for my interests, not theirs, and I also believe that the ways in which they want to use it might threaten the right’s power as a whole if it leads to left-wing economic populism gaining momentum.