Comment by phatskat

Looks like they started posting sole data - not sure what FPDS is but the documents all look rendered in OSX aqua theme lol.

A lot of cuts looks “sensical” at first, until you realize things like “cutting magazine subscriptions” are more like “cutting financial news sources off from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” or “not renewing reputable news subscriptions for people who really need to understand current events”.

And then there’s a lot of DEI/diversity training cuts which feel targeted not at their war on Actually Being Nice to People, but at the groups those trainings help employees serve - cutting DEI for SNAP…so, there’s a reported (haven’t verified but allegedly from USDA data) 5 ethnic groups, as well as “race unknown”, that are enrolled in SNAP. Now imagine how you’d train people to understand, interact with, and help people in different ethnic backgrounds _who need this assistance_. I believe empathy and understanding are incredibly good skills to have in a role like this, and DEI helps train that - for all involved.

The going notion on the right is that DEI is racist, and against white people, but it leaves out the idea that anyone non-white might also need this training? Like, DEI is about understanding differences, and then the right reads it as “understanding non-whites” and get offended that they even have to think about other cultures.

And another cut funding for training on gender, and that training was for an office involved in tech and engineering…a professional field notoriously male-dominant for a long time. Again, it makes sense to me that this kind of training would be good, because I’ve heard the way people in tech talk and act towards women and queer folx, so yeah let’s have some training.

These kinds of programs aren’t meant to tell people what to think - if they can’t empathetically interact with the world, work training won’t change that - but it will tell them that in a professional capacity they need to know how to interact and be productive. In business this is so you make more money, in government it’s how you help more people - including your own employees and also the communities you serve.

So Trump is doing what he said, and the details are grim.