In 2022, the federal government spent around $271 billion on civilian employee compensation for the salaries of the appr 2.3 million civilian workers employed by the federal government. About 60% of this was spent on employees in the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security.

t's easy to know which departments they want to cut: justice, health and education. Those that help the majority and reduce inequality a little.

They won't hesitate to fire postal workers who don't go along with their opposition to abortion pills

Privatizing USPS has been a dream of theirs for decades - that’s about a 20% cut

Total Govt. spending on Wages and Salaries is about $800 billion per year. So after Musk and Ramaswamy fire everyone in Govt., they will still have to find $1.2 Trillion of cuts. Watch out for cuts in Social Security and Medicare! Why aren’t the Dems talking about this? #SmartDemocratsWinElections

In 2022, the federal government spent around $271 billion on civilian employee compensation for the salaries of the appr 2.3 million civilian workers employed by the federal government. About 60% of this was spent on employees in the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security.

I did before the election. The MAGAs didn’t listen.

The top 2.

They want to kill the postal service, dept of ed

Years ago I saw some Economist propose every taxpayer get a receipt: $XXXX of your taxes went to the Pentagon & VA, $YYYY to Social Security & Medicare .... XX cents to NASA, YY cents to medical research, ZZ cents to foreign aid... to correct delusions about budgets.

My property tax bill in Portland, Oregon does this. It’s helps me understand how those monies are used.

I would love to see a chart that includes contractors. After half a century of pushing everything to privatization, Republicans still want to pretend that it's the Fed govt that is too wasteful and bloated, and not Lockheed Martin and their other big donors that fleece us.

My god this is frightening

Thing is, all they have to do is fire one poor sucker and make a big stink out of it, and boom, all their dreams have come true.

Russia and China are LAUGHING at 🍊🐖💩's cabinet picks who are completely unqualified and DANGEROUS for America national security. China is also LAUGHING at 🍊🐖💩's very bad economic plan. It's humiliating.

Murikah voted for chaos, Murikah gets chaos.

Populist BS is just easier for people to digest. Data? Statistics? Empiricism? Nope, its about narratives and vibes to these people. We need to get people to care about the facts and understand how the government actually works

J V Last says that total federal payroll is less than 5% of the federal budget. So if he fired all of them, it won’t help the deficit.

So much DEI! #smh

This makes me so damn mad. I am starting to sputter. My son is a GS 14, is a civil engineer with an MBA, works 70-80 hours a week with 3 young kids. 🤬🤬🤬

You forgot the FAA, but maybe that is included inside the Department of Transportation. It’ll be great when planes start falling out of the sky! Dumpkoffs.

The FAA wasn't forgotten. It's part of the department of transportation.

It has a lot more employees than this.

I think this is about right, give or take (it should be a little larger if you add in contractors). DOT headcount is mainly all in FAA. The other agencies are rather small comparatively. DOT became much smaller after USCG and TSA were moved to DHS.

Are there any plans to reach out to wrongfully fired ppl? I feel like we need a team of lawyers ready to go and flood the courts with lawsuits on their behalf…

I guess we’ll be cutting military readiness by at least 60%. So much for small gov and a strong military folks.

This only works Day 1 if trump insiders have been making lists the past 4 years, right?

www.nixonfoundation.org/2013/07/cutt... www.npr.org/2011/01/17/1... www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/u... The southern Democrats of Johnson / Kennedy have become the southern Republicans of Bush Jr and every president since.

Suckers and Losers indeed. He has no respect for any of them. Grrrrr.

I'm guessing that cuts will be made by people who have no idea what the agency does, so it would be too much to ask that they know anything about what specific employees do. They will then cut important jobs, and probably positions which others rely on, causing the whole thing to collapse

Any job with a liberal word in it “climate”, etc…are going to be targeted.

except that Musk admitted they know they can't actually do that. Instead he is just trying to constructively dismiss everyone in general by making working conditions miserable and by harassing workers online.

And it's all a distraction anyway so that people are busy defending or demonizing individual depts and employees meanwhile the real $$ walks out the door and into the waiting arms of any contractor offering the "solution" through privatization. Elon, first grifter in line.

Thinking about what Elon Musk is hinting at, he wants to either: – downsize the military, – privatize the postal service, – completely ignore any, support for the veterans – or go full anarchy. Am I reading this right?

Most people have no idea what federal employees actually do. They think they all sit in big offices in DC. I’ve been one for over 24 years and it’s the same old over and over.

I still don’t see this talked about enough. If they cut the VA of healthcare providers with the intention of privatization, that will collapse our healthcare system. The private sector cannot take on all those patients. VA trains 60-70% of all MDs. Med schools will have to limit spots.

VA also trains all types of healthcare providers and there are already many staffing shortages as is. They also want to cut the VA because it’s a business case for universal healthcare in the US.

I don't think this is about efficiency or federal savings. It's dismantling the functioning federal apparatus. To either replace with privatized options he can pass off to his other billionaire buddies like oligarchs. Or too just hamper any resistance to whatever chaos he intends to create.

An update from @pkrugman.bsky.social on the efforts of DOGE to find government waste, fraud and abuse Hint: they're not finding any big ticket items paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-fraudu...

There are many more contractors working for the Federal Government.

📌

MAGA never lets mere fact get in the way of a conspiracy.

I'm stealing that! Well said.

Than you. You are welcome to steal that line.

It's very Twain-esque.

📌

And why wouldn’t people want the government to hire people? To set good employment standards?

The devil is in the details 😕 Again!

Wonder how my retired veteran Trump-voting dad is going to feel about this. He probably figures, I already got mine so fuck it 😞

Trump hates the military. Pass it on.

Also even if he fired all of them payroll costs are only like 5% of the budget. Firing some fraction is not going to be an appreciable savings, but will almost certainly come back around to cost us, both financially and in lived experience..

As a foreigner I’m curious about the Dept of Veteran Affairs. What are the functions of that department?

Mostly deals with medical care for people who were injured during their military service, as well as disability and some retirement functions.

VA has three parts: Veterans health (a national health care system for Veterans), Veterans benefits (for Veterans, families, and widows), and Veterans cemetery (funerals, burials, cremations, and maintenance of national cemeteries across the country) Administrations.

OK, thanks, I can see now how it’s got a decent budget. In my UK terms it’s mainly like a National Health Service and benefits safety net, but specifically for veterans.

Yes, that’s a good comparison. Most of the employees are health care workers at hospitals and clinics.

remember all the talk about Trumpism marking the end of neoliberalism? guess who's gonna do all the work these employees are doing.

They fire everybody and they will be missing the point of what made Hitler popular. He put everyone in the army giving them jobs. Given that they are following the rest of the playbook.

I guess that’s who he’s going to use to fill the large crater of migrant jobs

SEC and NHTSA is probably enough for Musk.

Post office. That’s on their list.

Post Office is old enough that it’s mandated by the Constitution. I don’t know how much they could eliminate or even privatize it.

My Trumper mom was complaining a while back about how slow mail delivery was now and it was all I could do not to say, you voted for the fucktard who appointed Louis DeJoy. As for it being constitutionally mandated, haven’t you heard, he’s doing away with the Constitution too

They tend to ignore the constitution anyway.

They’ve been working on it for years. Underfund it, claim that it’s inefficient, offer privatized alternative. I can’t foresee the constitution being an obstacle for much over the next term.

You can bet Jeff Bezos would love to provide that alternative.

The post office delivers a lot of Amazon packages for Bezos. He’d prefer not to spend more money on delivery

it's just gonna be people with Diversity in their job titles.

All 30 of them!🤣 In 2022, the federal government spent appr $271 bn on civilian employee compensation for the salaries of appr 2.3 million civilian workers employed by the federal government. Abt 60% of this was spent on employees in the Department of Defense, Veteran Affairs, and Homeland Security

As a retired air traffic controller, let me say this...the FAA, (which falls under the DOT) still hasn't recovered from when Reagan fired all of the controllers in '81. 43 YEARS ago, and counting. Wait until there is gridlock in the national airspace system.

Hopefully it's the guys on the supreme court