USDA fired officials working on bird flu, now trying to rehire them

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/usda-accidentally-fired-officials-bird-flu-rehire-rcna192716

by pmags • 1 year ago

192 153 1 year ago

stephen_g• 1 year ago

This whole thing seems like such a farce... The conservative side of politics in Australia likes to do a much smaller version of this to "save money" whenever they've been in opposition and then get back in to Government - and all it leads to every time is paying far more to have the same work done by the big consulting companies.

You hear stories like people being fired from their public service jobs, then being hired by the consulting firm and being back the next week, now with the consulting firm charging more than double what they were paid before for their time - and they're doing the exact same job they were doing...

defrost• 1 year ago

The taxpayers lose out, the rent seekers that own the middle man consulting companies now get a good chunk of the increased charge to taxpayers .. this is why they suppport the conservative side of politics that makes this possible.

__d• 1 year ago

And the consulting companies provide lucratively paid, post-politics jobs to those who cut the public service payroll.

alexpetralia• 1 year ago

This is exactly what "small government" and "big business" means

suraci3• 1 year ago

This looks like stories of some public services, like bus services. The government sold 'unprofitable' public services to companies. companies raised the price, but somehow it's still 'unprofitable', so the government has to provide subsidies to companies, or buy it back at a higher price than they sold it for

tutorialmanager2• 1 year ago

A great example is the city of Chicago selling its parking meters for 1.15 billion dollars. Now considered one of the biggest financial mistakes the city ever made

pjc506• 1 year ago

See UK trains.

The track is unprofitable (legacy maintenance) and had to be brought back into public ownership for safety reasons. The staff are shuffled between various paper-thin "franchise" employers. The one profitable bit is train leasing; the privatization created ROSCOs, which are train landlords, who get the real profits from public subsidy.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/18/profits-of-...

johnnyanmac22• 1 year ago

"government" and "unprofitable public services" Should never be in the same sentence. Especially for the 4th largest country by landmass.

The only legitmate ways you justify cutting public transit is

1. a superior form of transit has been established for a while

2. Literally no one is using the transit for whatever reason (which is nearly impossible)

3. mass extinction occurs and there's no one left to transit (though at that point transit is the least of our issues)

It's not supposed to be a direct profit. You Transport people around to businesses to sell to, work to operate the city with, and overall stimulate the economy.

RicoElectrico• 1 year ago

Conservatives of the US seem to be positively evil when compared to conservatives most elsewhere in the developed world, who at least seem to have some notion of social contract.

blooalien4• 1 year ago

"Conservatives of the US seem to be positively evil" ...

This is because the U.S. has become so excessively politically polarized in recent years. The typical "conservative" here is more like the "extreme right" elsewhere around the world. They're literal "extremists", taking those political views to the furthest extremes they can think of, and actively hating anyone and anything that's not totally in line with that extremist viewpoint. (The political "left" has become much the same in the other direction here these days as well, thus exacerbating the issue from the "other side".) It's really not a "winning combination" for humanity in general. When (some) folks say "both sides are the same", I suspect that's what they're referring to. They're both becoming increasingly "extremist" in their respective viewpoints, and unwilling to move toward "the middle" even a tiny bit to allow for any productive discussion or compromise that could benefit everyone involved.

ciconia• 1 year ago

every time is paying far more to have the same work done

Some predictions:

- The 2025 US budget will increase compared to 2024. - The 2025 US budget deficit will increase compared to 2024. - At the end of 2025 the US national debt will have increased compared to 1/1/25.

pjc506• 1 year ago

This is very likely. They'll do a Liz Truss budget of massive tax giveaways. I'll add "bond yields will go up" to that list.

rtkwe2• 1 year ago

Not exactly groundbreaking predictions given the trillion or so dollars in tax cuts being proposed.

lionkor3• 1 year ago

"The U.S. is only divided because of them, not because of us"

pabs3• 1 year ago

Isn't that the whole point of those sort of actions? Send public money into private hands. Just like when they sold off public assets like a telco (Telstra), or a bank (CommBank) etc.

alsoforgotmypwd• 1 year ago

Of course it is. It's both for show and a distraction from whatever else is going on like seizing unitary power and normalizing deviancy.

jrs235• 1 year ago

then being hired by the consulting firm and being back the next week

Who owns the consulting firms? They are tied to the conservatives doing this. They are now getting a free cut from the backs of the people.

chneu• 1 year ago

It's called starve the beast.

The strategy is to identify government agencies or programs that conservatives don't like. Then they cut funding or put up obstacles for that agency. Over time the agency can't complete it's stated goals because of a lack of funding or restrictions. Then conservatives claim the program doesn't work and it's a waste of money.

I've seen this repeatedly my entire life in American politics. It's so dumb.

spwa42• 1 year ago

Of course ... were you expecting the people who got fired to just forgive and forget? No, go to a large consultancy, get hired for twice your normal pay, renting you out to your previous employer for ... nobody cares, but WAY more than they paid you before.

dashundchen• 1 year ago

What a clown show. After they made the same fuck up firing the inspectors of our nuclear weapons.

The layoffs concerned a number of Republican lawmakers, who privately warned the Trump administration that such cuts could hamper the government’s bird flu response and asked them to reconsider, according to two Republican sources with direct knowledge of the situation.

This is so infuriating - "privately". You know a good chunk of Republicans in Congress are educated people aware these many of these cuts are a mix of illegal, unconstitutional or dangerous to national security. But for the sake of their reelection campaign two years from now they're rolling over and ceding any oversight authority they have.

Show a spine, if you're going to give all your Branch's power to a dictator you might as well let DOGE dissolve congress and save us the salaries.

koolba5• 1 year ago

You know a good chunk of Republicans in Congress knows these many of these cuts are a mix of illegal, unconstitutional or dangerous to national security

When the dust settles on the buckshot of related cases and they make their way to the SCOTUS, it will be confirmed that the executive branch has unilateral power to fire people working in the executive branch. If it’s constitutional, it’s de facto legal. And I think it will be at least 7-2 as well.

adgjlsfhk1• 1 year ago

The executive branch has the power to fire people, but not to cut departments when those departments are established by congress.

eightysixfour• 1 year ago

Ahh yes, the constitutional power the executive has to say “I don’t like what the legislative signed into law and funded, so I just won’t do it.”

harimau777• 1 year ago

If "legal" just means "whatever the supreme court says it is" without regard to corruption or logic then the word legal has more or less lost any useful meaning.

dcrazy2• 1 year ago

it will be confirmed that the executive branch has unilateral power to fire people working in the executive branch.

Do you hold the opinion that the Civil Service Reform Act is unconstitutional? What about the Reorganization Act of 1939? If the President can unilaterally fire any employee of the Executive Branch, why bother with Senate confirmation at all?

avidiax• 1 year ago

it will be confirmed that the executive branch has unilateral power to fire people working in the executive branch

I could see it playing out like this, except that you can't fire so many that the departmental mission enacted by congress is substantially or totally hindered.

Fire any one particular person? Maybe. Fire everyone in a department? What power does congress have if that were allowed?

convivialdingo• 1 year ago

You can thank Biden, actually.

On the merits, this Court previously held that no provision of § 8468 prevented the plaintiffs' removal. See Mem. Op. at 7. First, the Court noted that “the power of removal from office is incident to the power of appointment” “absent a specific provision to the contrary.” Id. at 6 (quoting Carlucci v. Doe, 488 U.S. 93, 95 (1988) (citation omitted)). Second, the Court held that the plain text of § 8468(b), which provides only that Board members “serve for three years each” on staggered terms, does not meet that standard. Id. at 7. Third, the Court read Parsons v. United States, 167 U.S. 324 (1897), and Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 (1926), to hold that term-of-office provisions, standing alone, do not confer removal protection.

https://casetext.com/case/spicer-v-biden-1

mimd• 1 year ago

Well, it will be really funny when the executive branch starts firing all the judiciaries security (USMS JSD, under DoJ) to save costs. But secondary outcomes have either not dawned or dissuaded the recent courts on their path to increasing executive power.

Sabinus• 1 year ago

So if Congress passes a law that a department must be created and has this budget and these powers and must do these things, but the President just refuses to hire anyone to staff it, you think that is legal?

jdlshore• 1 year ago

“Sources with direct knowledge of the situation” is often reporter-speak for “the person who did it talked to me.” So its more than private conversations… it’s raising a ruckus in the press.

TomK323• 1 year ago

If I were one of those working at the NNSA, I'd only come back with a job guarantee for the next eight years.

Congress is a joke, it fails to do it's job which is keeping the other two powers in check. But then, the founding fathers never had strong political parties in mind and thought the size of Congress and the geographic distribution would be enough to have a Congress with a representative range of opinions.

Regarding reelections, with gerrymandering and many more districts being a sure win for either party, the focus shifts to the primaries where an extreme voice can win easy if they can activate their supporters. This mess isn't easy to fix if those in power don't seed the need that they have to fix it.

johnnyanmac22• 1 year ago

Who on the right is trump trying to please? Russia. I don't remember anytime in 2024 where Conservateives said "I want unserpervised nuclear warheads" or "I don't want to know about future pandemics" (even if their behaviors suppoted that one". What's the line with these people?

suraci3• 1 year ago

This happened multiple times over the course of a few days, and it makes me think, what's the pattern behind it?

My guess is, departments don't want layoffs, but they don't want to contradict the higher-ups either, so they fire and rehire.

this can work because DOGE only has administrative power and cannot decide the budget, only those who can decide on departmental budgets truly have the power to influence the size of the department

btw, i just found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfzCjHCTmo

selectodude• 1 year ago

My guess is, departments don't want layoffs, but they don't want to contradict the higher-ups either, so they fire and rehire.

Your guess is very wrong.

Everybody is hired and fired by OMB (run by loyalist Russell Vought). They are now firing people directly without going through any sort of triage of who is actually somebody that needs to be let go - they are running pulls on internal HR data and firing every person who fits the criteria of "can be fired".

Shockingly, this sort of insane scattershot firing of the federal workforce is stupid! and catches a lot of people who need to be doing their jobs for us to do things like keep track of nuclear waste and track the spread of bird flu.

rtkwe2• 1 year ago

Their default play seems to be across the board firing all probationary employees. It's happened at so many departments it's hard to deny/ignore. Then anywhere that was/has investigated a Musk company gets an extra layer of layoffs in their investigative arms.

yibg3• 1 year ago

Externally it doesn't even seem like there is a "can be fired" criteria. It seems like there is some high level bucket of "these shouldn't be fired", and the rest is just pull plugs and see what breaks immediately. Which incidentally also spills into the "shouldn't be fired" pool as in this case and the earlier nuclear one.

This seems like the same approach as the Elon going into twitter's data center to physically remove servers story. Except instead of pulling servers, they're pulling jobs instead.

trhway• 1 year ago

it reminds how about 20 years ago at Sun Microsystems they laid off several hundreds in one org with intention to rehire back pick-and-choosing ~100 best. Fail. Pretty much everybody took the package and went onto better pastures, especially the best ones.

TomK323• 1 year ago

Yeah, humans are funny with their feelings and such. Maybe Musk is an autist afterall and not a sociopath.

blooalien4• 1 year ago

"Maybe Musk is an autist afterall and not a sociopath."

Maybe he's a little of both. I doubt they're mutually exclusive. One can be both of those things I believe, yes?

me_me_me• 1 year ago

I am so happy it was a drink driver that hit me, I was afraid they did this on purpose.

Why does it matter what musk is, when he is actively trying to make your life worse. No matter the motives.

alphager• 1 year ago

We autistic people have feelings and empathy. We have trouble expressing feelings and reading feelings of others, but we know that we and other people have feelings.

Musk may or may not be an autist, but his deranged treatment of people is not because of autism.

ben_w5• 1 year ago

Similar story is how my dad got early retirement. Offered to everyone, management very upset that he, with a decade or so of experience on that specific project, actually took it.

m463• 1 year ago

On the other hand, maybe management knew the value perfectly well but were powerless and the hiring/firing/etc came from "above".

zombiwoof• 1 year ago

The smugness of silicon valley meets the inefficiency of big government

What could go wrong

janice1999• 1 year ago

It's becoming clear much of that "inefficiency" is hidden complexity which non-experts fail to grasp, redundancy and safety (e.g. nuclear safety) and areas that lobbyists just don't want to exist, like every regulator acting in the public interest.

snailmailstare• 1 year ago

The stranger part is that AFAICT, eliminating all of this complexity is a rounding error unless the topic is the military or mandatory spending. They went white as sheet when someone suggested they would touch something that could matter.

npteljes• 1 year ago

People, including me, are really, really bad at estimating risk and the real price of safety. It all looks very inefficient and everyone is so sad being parted with the safety money when there is no apparent danger. But when danger comes, suddenly the mood changes and people pay out of the ass to get out of trouble.

This push and pull is at a lot of places where decisions around resources are made. Like in their private lives, when people don't really talk to each other right up until they are about to lose the other, like a parent, or their partner.

unyttigfjelltol• 1 year ago

You'd think from all Elon Musk's press with DOGE that this is his only job. But he's actually simultaneously CEO of 4 major companies, which explains how he's spread a bit too thin to correctly supervise the "Big Balls" layoff machine.

jjulius3• 1 year ago

Yet all of his employees, at all of his companies, had better damn well be in the office.

ivewonyoung3• 1 year ago

Not a good comparison, anyone's higher ups have the authority to call for an RTO with a consequence of being fired. Trump can do that to Musk, Tesla's board/shareholders can do that. SpaceX investors can potentially gang together and do that depending on Musk's voting share control. Same with XAi, Boring Company etc.

TomK323• 1 year ago

When is Musk's next attempt at an insane Telsa share package due? With his current workload (plus another child) I don't see his chance improving :-)

etchalon2• 1 year ago

Apparently Musk thinks his "cut everything and then see what we really need" approach was successful at Twitter, despite revenue being down, usage down, and numerous competitors appearing which are decimating its user base.

But hey, the site is still running. So, success.

dpkirchner• 1 year ago

Don't forget the company being so weak it has resorted to suing its former customers because they decided to stop buying the company's product. I wonder what the government equivalent will be.

ben_w5• 1 year ago

Legal requirement to loan to the government at negative interest rates.

Just imagine the voice:

"It’s not a tax, folks—no, no, the fake news will say that, but it’s not a tax. It’s a beautiful, tremendous investment in our great government, the best government in the world—people are saying it. And look, some very smart people, the best people, they tell me, ‘Sir, this is how we build a stronger economy,’ and I say, ‘You know what? You’re right!’ Because let’s be honest, negative interest—some people don’t get it, but I get it—it’s a winning deal, okay?"

(No, not a real quote).

sillyfluke• 1 year ago

But hey, the site is still running. So, success.

more like, I'm the co-presidennt of the United States. So, success.

pfannkuchen2• 1 year ago

He did remove the censors in a way that makes the site unappealing to a lot of people, but at the same time 1,000x’d the amount of discussion on previously censored topics.

Like the discussions on there look like something out of 4chan these days.

A generous interpretation might be that Elon thought that re-enabling public discussion in certain verboten topics is important enough to light a big wad of cash on fire.

It’s not hard to predict that letting people talk about those things openly will scare off a lot of people. I would be surprised if he is surprised.

regularjack• 1 year ago

Yeah, it was his plan all along to drive people away from the thing he paid I don't remember how many billions for.

etchalon2• 1 year ago

He just changed what is and isn't verboten, in favor of the right.

matwood• 1 year ago

But hey, the site is still running. So, success.

What that really shows is the quality of engineering before Musk took over. Many of the changes since Musk have been buggy and/or have to be rolled back. Twitters future is really what Musk sold to save money in the short term. Of course none of that may matter since he’s POTUS and bribery/corruption is the new law of the land.

ProfessorZoom• 1 year ago

if you aren't re-adding, then you're not deleting enough

tbrownaw• 1 year ago

Move fast and break things!

Jiro• 1 year ago

If you read the wording of this article carefully it says that the employees were fired in error. By referring to several different firings and by juxtaposing statements, the article tries to give the impression that Trump's rules demanded that they be fired and that Trump then had to change his mind, but it doesn't say that. Don't believe it when articles insinuate more than they actually say.

watwut5• 1 year ago

Your argument amounts to "they were different kind of harmful and incompetent then you assume".

If you fired necessary people in error, you are the incompetent one doing damaging firings. No one has the duty to pretend it was something better.

Obviously Trump personally did not changed opinion, people executing his policy under his terms made predictably bad firing.

johnnyanmac22• 1 year ago

the employees were fired in error.

Gee, almost like there should be a process to fire public employees instead of treating it like a private business.

They did this multiple times with other adminsitrations (the DoE as an example) so I'm not giving the benefit of the doubt.

spwa42• 1 year ago

Do what consultants do "you fired me (or rescinded my contract)? You want me back? Not a problem! I will charge double (you will pay me double), of course"

I got a "yes" to this twice. One of those, double the pay I was hired for for 2 years.

You'd think they'd get better at this. How many times has Trump/Musk made idiotic decisions to fire people? The nuclear safety inspectors (and rumored, some nuclear weapons experts) they fired was ... last week?

https://time.com/7225798/doge-fires-national-nuclear-securit...

Morons.

USDA fired officials working on bird flu, now trying to rehire them

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