[rayiner]

There is an ulterior motive for these cuts, but please be honest about what it is. The federal bureaucracy is completely dominated by one party: https://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2016/10/federal-employe....

No matter who wins the elections, most of the actual decisions are being made by adherents of the same party. Trump had four times the support in AOC’s district in the Bronx than among federal employee donors. This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy.

[fabbari]

Did you actually look at the numbers? You should give it a try. The best you can get from those numbers is that people are more likely to donate to the Democratic party than the Republican one.

For example: true, 99.4% of the donations from the USDA employees went to the Democratic part. 99.4% of how many donations? Less than 3,000. - Source [0] - and that's an overestimate, since that filter will include donations from 2015.

How many employees work for the USDA? About 100,000 [1].

That means that 97,000 people made no donations - to either party.

[0] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...

[1]

[keeda]

Also, from the very same govexec link:

> The lopsided donations do not necessarily reflect how the federal workforce is voting. The former State Department secretary led the businessman by 5 percentage points among federal employees in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.

[rayiner]

Why wouldn’t donations be a reasonable proxy? 3,000 samples is more than enough to have a statistically significant analysis of a population of 100,000.

[bigbadfeline]

> 3,000 samples is more than enough to have a statistically significant analysis of a population of 100,000.

It's not a valid sample because it's not a random selection - statistical sampling isn't only about sample size.

One reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the above numbers is that the Democrats in government are less stingy about donations, or that the Republicans there don't really like the GOP and are there for the money alone.

[rayiner]

I think that’s an odd theory.

[rimunroe]

Nationally, Democrats raise significantly more money than Republicans[0], especially from small donors[1]. It wouldn't be surprising to me if this skew was stronger for people working in government.

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/political-parties

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/donor-demogra...

[tzs]

It's not as odd when you look at employment length. One of the stats I've seen is that Democrats who go into the civil service are more likely to stay long term. Republicans are more likely to leave for the private sector.

I'd expect employees who have been there longer, and so are likely making more money, to be both more likely than shorter term employees to make political donations and to be likely to make bigger donations than those shorter term ones that do donate.

[fabbari]

It is not a population sample - IE: we didn’t randomly pick 3000 people and observed who they donated to. Or in other words: we asked the whole population who they wanted to donate to and 97,000 said “none”.

[bigbadfeline]

> There is an ulterior motive for these cuts, but please be honest about what it is.

If you admit that the administration is up to "ulterior motives", you have to admit that they are likely to have more than one. There's no reason to assume there's only a single one and we should disregard everything else, no matter how well supported by the facts - looking at the composition of this admin, a drive to corpocracy is a a rather well supported assumption.

On the other hand, if a re-balancing was justified or required, it wouldn't be an ulterior motive, it would be up, front and center because it helps to paint the admin in a good light. The scope and reasons for the imbalance would be widely discussed... something that isn't happening. Also, to avoid disruption, it would be done gradually and absolutely NOT under the diabolical slogan "The Government is Bad".

I think, I practically proved the point of the parent of your comment, and disproved yours.

[tzs]

That link is looking at money donated which is not a very good measure because the amount a person donates is not fixed.

When you instead match up personnel and voter registration records you get that about half of the federal workforce was Democrats. Republicans were around a third in the late 1990s, but fell to about a quarter by 2019.

Polls of federal workers for specific elections also suggest that it is not nearly as imbalanced as the money totals. For instance in the 2022 midterms 37% of federal workers said they were voting Democrat in Senate races and 33% said they were voting Republican. In House races it 46% voting Democrat, 35% voting Republican.

[buran77]

> This is not a sustainable situation in a democracy.

Purging your enemies from everything and instead putting your buddies (especially as dishonest and unqualified as the ones this admin brought) will fix the current "unsustainable" situation? Is it even marginally less bad? Because looking from the distance what they're doing is changing from "not great" to "awful" for democracy, and looking close up I'm sure it looks even worse.

There's not a single illegal, abusive, or plain stupid thing that this admin has done where you can't find some "silver lining" that allows you to dilute the problem and make it look like you're part of some solution. "And well, the implementation may not have been perfect but we're trying to fix things".

Nothing about this was for democracy or the country, and who those people donate do doesn't matter. Only who they don't donate to.

[rayiner]

I think an independent civil service dominated by a single party is the single greatest threat to democracy. It’s highly destabilizing when the executive branch is on auto-pilot pursuing its own policies regardless of whom voters elect as President.

[buran77]

> an independent civil service dominated by a single party is the single greatest threat to democracy

Any party? I'm not sure if you realize what's coming next, or if you saw the irony as you typed this. No need for more mental gymnastics rayiner.

[amalcon]

The military is similarly dominated by the other party. Somehow, we expect them to be professional. Professionalism here means to faithfully execute lawful orders even when a Democrat is in the white house. There were no personal loyalty tests for the military under Obama, or loyalty purges.

That went fine (in that the military did in fact follow lawful orders under Democratic presidents, not in that those orders were necessarily good). It also went fine for the civil service under Republican presidents other than Trump. There are a number of explanations for the difference in perceived (and possibly real) professionalism, which I will not try to speculate on here - but this is not a partisanship problem. It seems to be something specific to Trump-as-President.

[rayiner]

The military is uniquely disciplined and socialized to follow orders in a way the ordinary civil service isn’t.

And in comparison to previous republicans, the difference is two-fold. First, the government has been affected by the same politicization of the workplace that’s happened in corporate America over the last decade.

Second, previous republicans are aligned with neoliberal democrats on certain key cultural issues. Reagan publicly opposed affirmative action, but his government kept implementing and expanding it. Reagan and Bush supported immigration and Reagan granted amnesty. Highly educated democrats were willing to play along with certain issues, but see Trump’s issues as fundamentally moral ones. E.g. Even today, there is almost no partisan politics within the FCC. The career folks will happily go back and forth on net neutrality all day long. Nobody sees it as a moral imperative the way they see immigration.

[ckemere]

Both of my parents worked at times for the Federal, state, and local governments. From that small sample size (also including corworkers, neighbors, etc) I would suggest that it IS the case that government workers will be strongly biased towards process-oriented changes. So “ignore the rules” will not go over well for most of them.

I think the most charitable interpretation of your argument might be that people would be more inclined to ignore the rules for ideas they believe in, but my data suggests that government employees in general (and not just the military!!) tend to be rule followers. I would argue that most people’s complaints about the government historically could be summed up by this???

[actionfromafar]

Don't worry, it's probably not a democracy anymore.

[UncleMeat]

Now do cops.

It is a pretty remarkable strategy to be able to spend decades shitting all over the federal bureaucracy as a party, obviously discouraging conservatives from joining the bureaucracy, and then using party affiliation (obviously further skewed by the fact that federal workers tend to have college degrees, tend to be more racially diverse, and tend to live in the DC metro area) to decide that the whole thing needs to be destroyed.

What happened to merit as a hiring preference?

[morcus]

Is this DEI for Trump supporters?

[SAI_Peregrinus]

It's Unity, Exclusion, and Incompetence. UEI is perfectly suited to Trump supporters.

[thisisit]

You are spamming the same comment all over this thread. And this is just the RW hypocrisy at full display.

Trump is apparently the strong man leader with lots of support but at the same time the weakest leader who can be obstructed by smallest of opposition.

If he cannot get his most ardent detractors to support him then he is not much of a leader.

The sheer amount of complaining is grating and not even backed up with facts. It seemed you ran with the first article you found on Google and didn't read the conclusion:

> in a July poll by the Government Business Council, the research arm of Government Executive Media Group, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Clinton, compared to 37 percent who said the same for Trump.

That is maybe Democract are driven more to contribute but in voting there is just 5% difference. So much for "dominated by one party".

[alphabettsy]

You can always count on him to go to bat for RW nonsense.

[mindslight]

The federal bureaucracy is only "completely dominated" by one party, because the other party embraced a several-decades-long marketing campaign about how the de jure government is inefficient, hostile, and needs to be destroyed. It's utterly disingenuous to cast this in some relativist context, when this makeup is a direct result of the Republican party's chosen actions.

And I'm saying this as a libertarian who shares most of those frustrations with entrenched bureaucracy - just one who has become extremely conservative now that open fascism is upon us.