> everyone is expecting to be fired regardless of their experience and skill.

How do you know this?

Presumably because Trump just offered an 8month severance package to all fed workers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvqe3le3z4o

> US President Donald Trump has offered federal workers the option to resign and receive pay for eight months, in a major effort to shrink and reform the US government.

Has nothing todo with it..

https://x.com/PeterHamby/status/1884827909954621502

"Mary Schiavo — former Dept. of Transportation inspector general — with a reality check on CNN:

“Air traffic controllers do not come and go with the change of an administration … The politics of the situation should have had no impact whatsoever on air traffic controllers”"

In the opinion of one person who has a grand total of zero minutes of experience of all US Gov. employees being offered resignation leters.

The GP comment was about accident investigators rather than air traffic controllers but the consquences are the same, a lot of regular gov. employees are distracted by a current situation with no prior occurrence.

"A reality check"?

FAA-employed ATCs are like any other non-appointed federal employees - politics should have no impact on their employment and this arrangement is protected by federal civil service laws.

Which Trump is roundly ignoring because he wants to appoint every agency with burrowed MAGA loyalists, top to bottom.

If you haven't been following what this administration has said and done with a painful degree of critical focus, it's probably bleaker than you imagine.

> FAA-employed ATCs are like any other non-appointed federal employees - politics should have no impact on their employment and this arrangement is protected by federal civil service laws.

"Trump reclassifies thousands of federal employees, making them easier to fire":

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-execut...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy/Career_appointment

> The federal civil service system exists to ensure that hiring and firing decisions are based on merit, not political favoritism. Legal and procedural standards, enforced by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, require managers to provide a reason for taking disciplinary action, give employees the right to respond and mandate that decision-makers consider both sides before taking action against a federal employee. This system is crucial for maintaining fairness; it prevents arbitrary and unjust terminations.

> Before this system was established, many new administrations fired their predecessors’ civil servants and replaced them with donors and cronies. This practice led to instability and inefficiency within the federal government. To address this issue, Congress established merit-based hiring and firing procedures that apply to civil servants who are not political appointees, ensuring that government agencies are staffed with qualified individuals who can effectively serve the public.

* https://thehill.com/opinion/5107846-federal-employees-civil-...

Trump et al seem to want to go back to the system where folks can be hired and fired at will:

* https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/ex...

Do a search for "Schedule F" for more on the topic.

Trump's written order threatening the jobs of FAA employees does exist.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/keep...

And this is in the context of a Republican argument that DEI hiring at the FAA for Air Traffic Controllers is a big problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240308145022/https://ag.ks.gov...

I don't believe the environment Mary Schiavo experienced in the 1990s was the same as today's environment.

Ronald Reagan?

wasn't the situation then that the air traffic controllers walked off on strike, so new replacements had to be made to keep planes flying, which was realized by firings? (i was pretty young then, but that's what i remember reading)

IIRC, rather then negotiate with the experienced union controllers until an agreement was made - they brought in inexperienced non-union controllers..

source: my uncle was an ATC during the strike. I believe he was a shift lead/supervisor and was NOT part of the walk out. He was appalled at how bad the replacements were and was going crazy trying to get them up to snuff.

That had always been the case. The new administration has already done a lot of things differently from previous administrations.

It was largely a matter of precedent, rather than law. It's unclear how much of the current path is legal. And, of course, whether it's good judgment is completely orthogonal to whether it's legal.

Like Clinton did? Which ended up being great? https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-buyo...

> While committed to cutting the work force, we want to do it in a humane way. We faced the same dilemma that confronted many private companies; they needed to downsize but wanted to avoid firing large numbers of loyal employees. Many of them have given people an incentive to leave by offering "buyouts." We wanted to do the same.

This time around it seems less targeted, which gives the perception that it is not really about streamlining, feel free to prove me wrong though.

From the document you linked: > The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.

> The buyouts were not offered in a random fashion, however. We targeted them to reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots. We made sure that departments and agencies tied their buyout strategies to their overall plans to streamline their bureaucracies. As a result, almost 70 percent of our buyouts in the non-Defense agencies have gone to people at higher grade levels, such as managers.

this isn't how it's being done now

It's not even a buyout. They have to work for those 8 months; it's not a severance package.

There's also no evidence they have the money to pay if the offers were in good faith. Combined with the fact the two people who came up with the idea have a history of deciding not to pay and instead go to the courts to avoid paying

From what I have seen, if a worker agress to it, they agree they could be reassigned or terminated early (and thus not paid the same or at all). Seems like a trap.

Replying to myself days later to correct this statement: I did learn later on that the deferred resignation does mean that the employee is free to stop working once they submit the resignation, and will continue to be paid for 8 months regardless of whether or not they continue working. I don't think it was clear from the initial "buyout" offer, but it was clarified in later communications.

Because I live here.

I also live here but that doesn’t give me crystal ball-like insight into what every single fed and fed-adjacent employee is feeling. It’s a fairly big city! Do you work in the federal space? I have acquaintances who do and their mood doesn’t quite match the hysteria you see on e.g. the regional subreddits.

I live far away from DC, but my friends in two different federal agencies (stationed outside of DC) are partly bemused and partly shocked at how unprofessional the emails and new directives they are receiving from this new administration are. All of their colleagues are expressing the same sentiment (and my friends usually do not fraternize after work with their colleagues, but they have all been doing that after work just to cope with what is going on). Your contrarian-ness about the 'hysteria' is misplaced. Professional and dedicated federal workers are deeply concerned.

I have no stake here, but I'll just point out that "professional" can also be interpreted as "entrenched norms that led to waste and diffusion of responsibility", and "dedicated" can be code for "vested interest spinning the wheels that have been going nowhere". These are features of any large organization, not just government. Any disruption that seeks to destroy such wasteful norms by refocusing on direct language and meaningful goals will look "unprofessional" to "dedicated" workers.

> I have no stake here

I don't want to sound flippant, but if you have no familiarity with a system and what it does, then you won't be able to make any useful judgments about it. This new administration has made it clear that they do not know the function of these agencies but have decided to destroy their structures. As a concerned bystander who has some knowledge and stake in them continuing to function, it is deeply painful to witness

That's a totally reasonable opinion, I'm just pointing out that "professional and dedicated" workers being concerned is not evidence of anything because it has many possible interpretations. Only if you've already bought into a particular system being well designed and justified does it necessarily entail something negative.

This may be true, but it doesn't excuse psychopathic behavior on the part of public servants given the job of managing these agencies. This isn't supposed to be The Hunger Games.

They're blindly and foolishly tearing down Chesterton's fence.

Damn near every one I know is either worried about being fired OR is unclear on what their agency should be doing in light of the flurry of ambiguous EOs from Trump. The best case seems to be "my office is clusterfuck, but I'm a contractor in SCIF, so I guess I'm ok for now."

So basically you don't know, but are being dramatic. NSA and CIA and DoD in general?

The reason i say this is you mention experience and skill but ignore whether such people are in _roles_ that need to exist at all, which is what is being questioned, not the worth of individuals in those roles.

This is a disgusting attempt to use ATC to attack efforts to cut non safety critical government jobs.

Maybe if the orders weren't so ineptly or maliciously ambiguous and overly broad, then people would have more confidence that safety critical jobs aren't being cut.

The "Hiring Freeze" seems to clearly and explicitly exclude cases like this. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/hiri...

I think they really do want to hollow out the federal government, and we should expect things like planes falling out of the sky as part of that.

Given the release of this memo[1] offering the buyout of any federal employee who wants to step down, what I think we are looking at is the Musk-Vance-Thiel axis of the MAGA movement is implementing Curtis Yarvin's "R.A.G.E." plan to install a king dictator atop a neo-feudalist executive branch. I wish those words weren't as crazy as they are, but I mean, what else am I supposed to believe when the crazy plan Yarvin is pushing[2] is coming out of the Office of Personnel Management, which is being run by a billionaire who just gave a neo-Nazi salute behind the presidential seal?

  Under his Moldbug pseudonym, Yarvin gave a talk about "rebooting" the American government at the 2012 BIL Conference. He used it to advocate the acronym "RAGE", which he defined as "Retire All Government Employees". He described what he felt were flaws in the accepted "World War II mythology", alluding to the idea that Hitler's invasions were acts of self-defense. He argued these discrepancies were pushed by America's "ruling communists", who invented political correctness as an "extremely elaborate mechanism for persecuting racists and fascists". "If Americans want to change their government," he said, "they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia."[39]

They're trying to do a greenfield government like it's a startup, turning the US government into a company where they are the shareholder lords who own everything and get to decide who the king dictator is, while we are the employee peasants who don't own shit and have a say in nothing. I really wish that weren't my conclusion but those are the literal words of the guy whose plan they are doing. Quote: "get over their dictator phobia". So what else am I supposed to conclude?

[1] https://fedscoop.com/trump-federal-workforce-buyouts-legal-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#:~:text=Under%20...

> I think they really do want to hollow out the federal government, and we should expect things like planes falling out of the sky as part of that.

I am no fan of Trump but it is possible that 1) The Federal government has grown far too large and is bloated in many areas. And 2) The size of the Federal government can be reduced while maintaining safety and essential services.

I don't know if the current administration is doing or even can do that but it's hard to deny there is a very real problem or that the problem is, at least in concept, solvable.

That said, I highly doubt this tragic accident was caused by or related to the change of administration last week. It could just as easily have happened two weeks ago under the prior administration. It's unfortunate that it seems to have become politically polarized (by partisans on both sides) even before the flames had been extinguished.

I think that would be a reasonable take if the people implementing this plan (Musk, Thiel, Vance) weren't literally citing Curtis "a government is just a corporation that owns a country" Yarvin as a thought leader.

Although you are right they're trying to do what Musk did with Twitter, but the thing is that didn't go very smoothly, and he thinks it went great. At Twitter it meant downtime and also making users feel unsafe. At the federal level, regardless of the motivation (reigning in spending or a neo-feudal takeover), it will mean planes falling out of the sky, an increase in fraud and scams, civil rights violations, and so forth.

I'm not as familiar with Yarvin as I am with partisan media narratives. My problem with these kinds of insinuations, is that one quote or citation of Yarvin is easily spun into the conclusion that the incoming administration is following all of Yarvin's writings, no matter how obscure.

Partisan journalists are incentivized to selectively quote Yarvin's works to scare their partisan audience. The wildest and most fearful conclusions gain the most clicks and views.

We are living in the parallel universe where Curtis Yarvin is being interviewed by the NYT, which is politely asking him to give his thoughts on the pros and cons of slavery in the US. I wish it were true that Curtis Yarvin was obscure and that his friends in the government were unfamiliar with most of his odious ideas. Unfortunately, that’s not the live scenario.

You’re throwing around all these buzzwords like “dictator” and “feudalist,” but what’s the word that refers to government employees openly declaring “Resistance” to agenda of the duly elected president? Because that’s not “democracy” either, right?

Trump literally campaigned with Musk on this very issue. He explained at length what he was going to do in long form podcasts and in lengthy rallies. Musk was Trump’s closer in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. And people voted for that.

Trump made his case to the American public that, no matter who wins the election, democrats control the government through their control of the bureaucracy. And it’s a reasonable case: do you truly believe the federal workforce will implement Trump’s immigration policies with the same enthusiasm as Biden’s DEI policies? Trunk made this case to voters, with Musk at his right hand, and voters hired him to do this. A plurality trust the billionaire who is on their side over two million federal workers who, although not individually powerful, collectively wield enormous power.

> You’re throwing around all these buzzwords like “dictator”

To be clear, I am not the one throwing the word "dictator" around, that would be Curtis Yarvin. I am repeating his words. These people believe they are implementing a dictatorship, and it's not a buzzword, it's their stated goal. I don't even need to exaggerate it, I just need to quote them.

I realize that Trump did in fact campaign on being a dictator, but I also am listening to a lot of people who voted for him, who don't really feel they voted for a dictatorship.

I mean, do you agree with the statement "If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia."?

What’s ambiguous about this order?