Comment by phenol

I normally don't like talking politics on HN, but as someone who actually worked alongside talented and diligent federal employees I really can't abide this slander. Most of the people I worked with were brilliant and technical people. You think we didn't know we could pull down 2-5× the salary in the private sector? We stayed in the civil service because we were mission-driven and we cared about impacts beyond a quarterly profit motive, even though it paid like shit.

We are talking about people with STEM doctorates and 30 years of experience working 60-80 hour weeks for a 120k salary, because that's about where the GS scale caps. People are on the road for weeks, flying economy class and sleeping in roadside motels with a $50 per diem and when they visit a vendor or a lab or a client they cannot accept a meal or a beer or anything beyond a cup of coffee because of government ethics rules. I worked in an office in Washington, DC where all the staff pooled their money to buy a water cooler, and people gave voluntary donations of $2/month to join the "water cooler club" to defray the cost of maintaining an office water cooler because OPM considered that an unnecessary expense.

The first thing DOGE did, literally in the first week, they implemented a "deferred resignation plan" — they paid people 8 months of salary to not work. The smartest and most talented people saw the writing on the wall at that point — folks with PhDs from MIT or Stanford; self-made founders; crusty veteran engineers who preferred work to retirement. They took the money and they had no problem finding alternative employment, or they took it as a sign to hang up their spurs for good. Many of them were subsequently rehired by their agencies as contractors at 2-3× their previous salary when it became evident they were irreplaceable.

(I had friends in the NNSA, the branch of the US Department of Energy that manages the nuclear arsenal. DOGE fired hundreds of employees without realizing what they did, then attempted to rescind 90% of the firings months later. Plenty of the fired employees had already found new employment. Others simply did not want to return to a job with such contingent status where they would be treated disrespectfully. Several fired employees could not be rehired because they were fired so abruptly there was no way to contact them and offer reinstatement.)

You know who didn't take up the deferred resignation offer? The unproductive layabouts you claim to despise. The ones that knew they couldn't get a better job elsewhere. Yeah, there are bad employees in the federal government, same as anywhere else. DOGE bullied out all our best talent and now we're stuck with the dregs. They paid billions of dollars for people to not work for the privilege of doing so. "Department of Government Efficiency".

If you are interested in learning more about excellent and unglamorous work done by underappreciated American civil servants, I highly recommend the book The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.