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There are 2.4M workers in the US government. If the country has 258M adults, then 1 in 100 people are "administers" for the other 99. Just seems strange to me.

There are 2.4M workers in the US government. If the country has 258M adults, then 1 in 100 people are "administers" for the other 99. Just seems strange to me. Elon reduced twitter by 80% and it still runs today. (It had some glitches during the transition, obviously) Is there a possibility that all bureaucracies are 80% overstaffed?

ttyprintk 2y ago
We’ve heard there will be “hardship”. Will any disruption in the delivery of Social Security checks and veterans’ disability checks signal an incompetence further than forgivable hardship? If the excuse comes from the richest man in the world, most Americans will say, “he didn’t get that way by giving out money.”
- coding123 2y ago
  Sure, that can happen, but there's still a question: Do we need to have 2.4M employed to distribute those checks?
  - helveticabold48 2y ago
    Just look at Argentina's overnight transformation. It's literally Musk's playbook. One can argue that most governments and most public institutions and most publicly funded NGOs (which is weird) are stuffed full of inefficiencies and wasteful policies. It's not the people themselves, they are fully capable of producing values (and they want to) if placed in the right spots, it's the architecture and the system that evolved over the decades. When the government is the single biggest employer of the country, it's time for a cleanup.
  - ttyprintk 2y ago
    2.4m seems low to me. It takes a huge amount of time to investigate fraud. I’m a “Law and Order” kind of guy.
    - quantified 2y ago
      Less than 2.3M, but who's counting? Examine the numbers yourself: [https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/ https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/] The VA is the largest at over 400,000 employees. But all the DoD components add up to more. I'm sure firing all the VA staff and all the soldiers/sailors/airmen will work out great.
      - ttyprintk 2y ago
        Thank you. I hope we can rebalance what it means to be compensated for disability. Sen. Duckworth lost both legs and has a rating of 20%. I think about that whenever I hear a veteran describe the process of shopping for a high rating.
- bediger4000 2y ago
  How much hardship will the 2 DOGE Czars experience?
thesuperbigfrog 2y ago
>> Elon reduced twitter by 80% and it still runs today. (It had some glitches during the transition, obviously) Both advertisers and users are abandoning Twitter / X in droves [1]. It is failing as a business [2] and has failed at every high profile event that has been hosted recently (e.g. political campaign events) [3]. It does not look like a business that is growing and thriving. It looks like it is on life support and dying. >> Is there a possibility that all bureaucracies are 80% overstaffed? There is always room for more efficiency and improvement, but the heavy-handed sledgehammer, top-down approach that Musk took with Twitter is definitely not the best way to do it. Instead, a bottom-up approach is probably better. Who knows better where the waste is than those who work in the organizations and carry out the processes? Ask them where the waste is and what needs to happen to make it more efficient. Firing a bunch of people and axing whole organizations is likely to break things and cause major systemic problems just like it did with Twitter. [1] https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1851624340 https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1... https://www.deseret.com/business/2024/10/02/x-twitter-loses-80-percent-value-elon-musk-advertising-revenues-antisemitic-tweet/ https://www.deseret.com/business/2024/10/02/x-twitter-loses-... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/x-sees-largest-user-exodus-musk-takeover-rcna179793 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/x-sees-largest-user-e... [2] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-revenue-falls-x-payments-plans https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-revenue-falls-x-payme... [3] https://gizmodo.com/x-twitter-down-outage-elon-musk-threads-signup-1851117310 https://gizmodo.com/x-twitter-down-outage-elon-musk-threads-...
quantified 2y ago
It "runs" but it lacks a lot of business support. You can see what happens when there is no trust and safety department.
dialup_sounds 2y ago
Most federal employees are not administrators or bureaucrats in any reasonable sense of the word.
rsynnott 2y ago
I mean, Twitter still exists, for some value of 'exists'. North Korea and Sudan still exist, too, if that's the measure of "how much mismanagement of a company/country is too much" we're using.

ttyprintk 2y ago

We’ve heard there will be “hardship”. Will any disruption in the delivery of Social Security checks and veterans’ disability checks signal an incompetence further than forgivable hardship? If the excuse comes from the richest man in the world, most Americans will say, “he didn’t get that way by giving out money.”

coding123 2y ago
Sure, that can happen, but there's still a question: Do we need to have 2.4M employed to distribute those checks?
- helveticabold48 2y ago
  Just look at Argentina's overnight transformation. It's literally Musk's playbook. One can argue that most governments and most public institutions and most publicly funded NGOs (which is weird) are stuffed full of inefficiencies and wasteful policies. It's not the people themselves, they are fully capable of producing values (and they want to) if placed in the right spots, it's the architecture and the system that evolved over the decades. When the government is the single biggest employer of the country, it's time for a cleanup.
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  2.4m seems low to me. It takes a huge amount of time to investigate fraud. I’m a “Law and Order” kind of guy.
  - quantified 2y ago
    Less than 2.3M, but who's counting? Examine the numbers yourself: [https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/ https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/] The VA is the largest at over 400,000 employees. But all the DoD components add up to more. I'm sure firing all the VA staff and all the soldiers/sailors/airmen will work out great.
    - ttyprintk 2y ago
      Thank you. I hope we can rebalance what it means to be compensated for disability. Sen. Duckworth lost both legs and has a rating of 20%. I think about that whenever I hear a veteran describe the process of shopping for a high rating.
bediger4000 2y ago
How much hardship will the 2 DOGE Czars experience?

thesuperbigfrog 2y ago

>> Elon reduced twitter by 80% and it still runs today. (It had some glitches during the transition, obviously) Both advertisers and users are abandoning Twitter / X in droves [1]. It is failing as a business [2] and has failed at every high profile event that has been hosted recently (e.g. political campaign events) [3]. It does not look like a business that is growing and thriving. It looks like it is on life support and dying. >> Is there a possibility that all bureaucracies are 80% overstaffed? There is always room for more efficiency and improvement, but the heavy-handed sledgehammer, top-down approach that Musk took with Twitter is definitely not the best way to do it. Instead, a bottom-up approach is probably better. Who knows better where the waste is than those who work in the organizations and carry out the processes? Ask them where the waste is and what needs to happen to make it more efficient. Firing a bunch of people and axing whole organizations is likely to break things and cause major systemic problems just like it did with Twitter. [1] https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1851624340 https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1... https://www.deseret.com/business/2024/10/02/x-twitter-loses-80-percent-value-elon-musk-advertising-revenues-antisemitic-tweet/ https://www.deseret.com/business/2024/10/02/x-twitter-loses-... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/x-sees-largest-user-exodus-musk-takeover-rcna179793 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/x-sees-largest-user-e... [2] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-revenue-falls-x-payments-plans https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-revenue-falls-x-payme... [3] https://gizmodo.com/x-twitter-down-outage-elon-musk-threads-signup-1851117310 https://gizmodo.com/x-twitter-down-outage-elon-musk-threads-...

quantified 2y ago

It "runs" but it lacks a lot of business support. You can see what happens when there is no trust and safety department.

dialup_sounds 2y ago

Most federal employees are not administrators or bureaucrats in any reasonable sense of the word.

rsynnott 2y ago

I mean, Twitter still exists, for some value of 'exists'. North Korea and Sudan still exist, too, if that's the measure of "how much mismanagement of a company/country is too much" we're using.