Nobody is guaranteed a job. Not in the private sector, not in the government.Government employees are now starting to get a bit of a taste of what's been going on in the private sector forever. I can't count how many times I was almost laid off, but survived in the end. I have had buyout offers where I could quite for cash. Ultimately I was laid off and since I was well enough to do, that became my early retirement date.
I am of the impression that government employees have seen a lot less of the kind of turmoil that I describe above. And that is hitting them hard now. Every single person who gets laid off thinks they are indispensable and should be immune. Everybody who gets laid off thinks it was unfair when it happened. Everybody who gets laid off worries about how they will provide for their family. Everybody who gets laid off thinks the people who are doing the layoffs are out of their minds and have no concept of the "big picture", which ironically the laid off person thinks they know this.
This is the real world. I think government employees have been insulated from it but now the insulation is falling off. Government has just gotten too big. It's gotten to the point that they are doing useless stuff and calling it work so they can justify the size of government. It's got to be cut down. It has to be. Unfortunately, that means laying off people. And there is no way you can lay off people without hurting them. That's the way it works. Because someone will be hurt by a layoff is not justification to keep paying them to do something useless. Especially when it is the tax payers that are footing the bill for useless work.
Not all government work is useless. But if government employees with the potential to be laid off get to decide what is good and what is useless - well, we will be waiting a couple hundred years for that report to come out.
So how does one handle the need to get rid of excess if there is no realistic way to uncover what is useless in a reasonable time frame? Well, you make some guesses. Probationary workers ("new hires" is a synonym for that) could reasonably be expected to be less critical than long term workers. Not in every case, but generally. People employed by agencies that do stupid stuff - like study psychiatric issues of transgender frogs - can generally be lumped into the useless category simply by being associated with an agency that does such stupid stuff.
There are certainly good people doing useless stuff in some cases. I feel for them being laid off. Not that many government employees offered me condolences when I got laid off in the private sector. But the simple fact is - we can't afford to pay people to do useless stuff. It is not sustainable. We are well past the point of realizing that. So much so that the argument du jour is that laying off government employees will be only a drop in the bucket and won't affect our debt. How did we get ourselves in such a mess that we're doing so much useless stuff that we can't quit doing it because it won't make any difference?
I have used the word "useless" above very liberally. There are some things that our government does that are good. But the bottom line is, we can't afford to keep doing it. We just don't have enough money. So while everyone probably thinks it's good to feed undernourished babies in Africa, it's in America's best interest to stop doing that and use the money to feed American babies instead. So our aid agencies for other countries simply need to go. Good people may work there. But we can't afford to keep paying them to do things that are to our detriment, even when they're good for those other countries. Some will say that if we don't continue doing it, our enemies will start doing it and this will hurt us. But all's we managed to accomplish doing this stuff is to bankrupt ourselves. So let those enemy countries take a turn and bankrupt themselves if they want. That's what Russia did with Afghanistan. They pulled out and freely let us move in. Probably laughing their heads off. Now that we've pulled out, maybe China will have a go at it?
