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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

So 211B in salaries? That's incredibly small on a ~7T budget, like 2-3%. Also it averages less than $100k per person. Seems like to me we're getting a great value out of the federal workforce.

When will we see all the contracts that flow into Musk's companies that we can cut?

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> Seems like to me we're getting a great value out of the federal workforce.

Especially since, even with a growing population and arguable more complex world, the number of employees has stayed the same for decades:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001

A reasonable argument can been made that governments actually need more bureaucracy is actually needed:

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...

To know the value we'd have to know the benefit from this work. Maybe it's a great deal but we can't know from the average pay alone. It could be a massive net negative if these workers are, in aggregate, making everybody's lives harder with bad decisions.

I'd argue that's precisely the point of electoral politics, checks and balances and the federal rulemaking process: a bad-decision making agency to Elon (say, FAA oversight of SpaceX) is a good-decision making bureau to others. None of the three are involved at this point, and by the time these cuts are litigated in the court of public opinion (and not, say, Twitter), it'll likely be too late to reverse them if desired.

Decisions are still going to be made, it's just that now they're going to be made by people loyal to Trump and Musk. That doesn't inspire confidence that they're going to make decisions that benefit the average American any better than the career civil servants who have been in these positions for decades.

In his first term, Trump focused on: huge tax cut for the rich and gutting EPA regulations, cutting back on Climate Change action, tried to cut ACA which would have brought back "pre-existing conditions" (don't know if you remember that, but it was pretty bad, and as someone with a child with a disability that would have been devastating), uh, what else?

We're seeing a repeat of that same stuff here, only worse (as in, now you can bribe foreign officials).

I haven't seen anything announced so far that benefits me as an average American citizen, just a bunch of culture-war stuff (like cutting DEI, or making sure transgender athletes can't compete in sports -- what do I care about any of that?)

The price of eggs hasn't gone down since Trump took office. I thought that's what people were concerned about.

Do you think people should be paid more or less if they are making everybody's lives harder with bad decisions?

My dad was a civil servant retired as a GS13. A GS13 would report directly to a division head. Think vice president at a fair sized company.

You can see the pay scale for the San Francisco Bay Area here.

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Ideological nutters are completely ignorant or delusional about how much government workers get paid.

Perversely if you wanted to save tax money you'd hire more government workers and issue fewer contracts to glorious free market private enterprise. They're cheaper and upper level managers are vastly cheaper.

> Ideological nutters are completely ignorant or delusional about how much government workers get paid.

How much did the government pay your dad after he retired? Guaranteed lifetime income is a big reason govt pay is lower, and should be included in the calculation.

The Feds pay about 23% of an employees salary into the Federal retirement system And the employee contributes a couple more. Which is part of the reason Federal employees are paid less.

If one is wise in the ways of economics one understands that employees pay for their retirement no matter how it's set up.

What I'm saying is that in order to do a fair comparision, you should include the total amount of (inflation adjusted) income your father got from the govt for his job, not just the yearly income recieved during working years.

To illustrate, it would cost about a million dollars today to buy 20 years worth of $60k/year income (inflation adjusted). And that's using TIPS which have favorable rates right now. 5 years ago it probably would have cost more than double that.

Sure, someone could fund that themselves, but then they'd need to make more while they're working to stash that away on their own. Which is why you need to look at total income.

> When will we see all the contracts that flow into Musk's companies that we can cut?

Not just that, but all the gov investigations into Musk companies which have now been terminated (directly or indirectly because there's no one to pursue them anymore)

> averages less than $100k per person

tsk tsk tsk, using averages in tech forum...

100k for a good developer is US is kinda low, but IMO too damn high for most bureaucrats. On flip side you wanna keep salaries high so they aren't too tempted by fraud.

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