Reply to DOGE staff admits government was actually well run and not that inefficient

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]After years of right wing smears and attacks on federal government "the bloated bureaucracy" and "the administrative state" and demonization and slander of federal employees "lazy unelected bureaucrats collecting cushy paychecks" and all that - the Silicon Valley DOGE folks are getting a reality check.

[i]“Upon arriving at the massive department that currently employs nearly 500,000 people, Lavignia was met not with bored bureaucrats lazily collecting cushy government paychecks, but with mission-driven workers who "love their jobs."

"In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [the agency's buyout offers], then we wouldn’t have to do much more," the tech founder said. "We’d just basically use software to plug holes. But that’s not what’s happening."

Unsurprisingly, Lavignia found that things work a lot differently in the halls of government agencies than they do in Silicon Valley. "I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions," he remarked. "But honestly, it’s kind of fine — because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins."[/i]

https://futurism.com/doge-operative-surprise

The majority of federal employees are there because they care about the mission and care about their country.  A much larger percentage of federal employees are military veterans than you will find in the private sector.  Is there the occasional instance of a federal employee who is lazy, abusing the system, wasteful?   Yes.  But they are rare and they are usually dealt with and gotten rid of, and meanwhile there are also plenty of lazy, wasteful employees also in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the private sector.  But what is far rarer in the private sector is that genuine care about the agency mission.  I'm glad this DOGE staffer admitted reality.  This administration and the Republicans as a whole need to embrace a lot more honesty and integrity like that, rather than fabricating one divisive strawman after another, rather than attacking valuable and important institutions and agencies.

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You are kind of playing into the stereotype.  The quoted language you highlighted from the DOGE staffer does not match your thread title.

As an aside, I actually think it is a major problem that civilian government bureaucrats love their job and are mission driven. Civil servants should be dispassionate professionals.  That’s why they are supposed to be insulated from the political process.  They should exert their authority without passion or prejudice. Much harder to do when your self-actualization and/or moral meaning are tied up together with the job.

I think a really good reform to the civilian government workforce would be to put in time limits for service. Something like a maximum of twenty years of service or something like that.  [/quote]

you’re deluded. Nobody anywhere (in or out of government) thinks it’s better to have employees MORE disengaged from the organization. This is like labor management 101. [/quote]

I did not say “disengaged”.  Reading properly is like life 101.   I said they need to be dispassionate professionals. And there are a lot of jobs which require that.

For example, because of the awesome power they wield, we expect lawyers, but prosecutors and judges in particular, to do their jobs without passion or prejudice.  A lot of our LEOs meet that standard, but when they don’t they end up on the news. High mortality areas of medicine require dispassionate professionalism or you will end up leaving the practice.  Mental health professionals in particular are required to be dispassionate professionals.

There have been simply been way too many egregious examples in the Trump era for me to believe that we do not have a serious problem within the civilian workforce.  Reform would be healthy for everybody. [/quote]

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