Degrading the ability of government employees to do their jobs leads to greater inefficiency and more failure, which can then be pointed at to validate assertions that government isn't efficient and produces bad outcomes.
It used to be that the US government had pride in its own professionalism. The US is now acting like the countries it loves to destabilize.
Russia has no military advantage against ours, so there is no reason to placate them due to a threat of war (nukes excluded here, unless Russia has rapidly outpaced us). The only thing that's left is the relationship between the leaders themselves.
If Trump were truly interested in isolationism, he'd instead have simply pulled support for Ukraine and not offered to be a part of negotiations, but many more things were offered for no obvious gain to us.
Recent battle experience is kind of an advantage.
Russia is running a full-scale war against US and NATO weaponry in Ukraine for three years, studying it and refining its tactics.
What was the last battle for USA? Houthis in Yemen? Few airstrikes and limited engagements.
It is very naive to believe Putin doesn’t want to cripple the US economy or that war is not a real threat. The US is critically dependent on semiconductors, and TSMC is much closer to Russia than to America. Think it through.
At best you can suggest it would be too allocated to counter insurgency but combined arms battles is the heart of American doctrine and its shown its value in Ukraine not its weakness.
I think there are real questions about US military composition, particularly its navy, but battle experience is not a problem.
You may be surprised how the public can be united against a human enemy. The success of the Right during COVID was turning the outrage away from the invisible virus and onto the humans forcing them to wear a mask.
The US military has been engaged in conflicts for decades, but most of them involved fighting non-state actors or weaker conventional forces, not a high-intensity war against an advanced military.
The US military is far a cut above everything else, in terms of tactical readiness, sheer firepower and especially effective size.
We outspend any other nation - China included of which we spend an estimated 2.5 times more than - and we have been in that lead position for decades, not just years.
While yes, US forces haven’t squared off against conventional militaries of any note in some time, the US military has at least been engaged in real conflict. To my recollection the Chinese military have undertaken no significant military campaigns in the last 20+ years and lack the air & sea power to functionally match anything the US military can throw at it by comparison.
Which leaves ground forces, which is both vulnerable to air power and is effectively the numbers game the Chinese can win outright in a protracted war that escalated to that level, and cyber warfare, which the Chinese have proven to be quite adept at but the US military has been aware and developing counter measures against that for a long time as well
This talking conventionally of course.
China being a nuclear power means it would be unlikely to escalate past a certain point if anyone is acting rationally. There’s no reason you want to give another nuclear power a reason to use those weapons, and certainly the US nuclear arsenal is not one anyone wants to see fired either.
So in all likelihood this continues as a Cold War
Nonetheless, I feel the need to point out that it's budget is a terrible indicator for that.
I'm not even american and have heard just how massively overcharged everything is that's sold to the US military.
It's entirely possible that i.e. China, that can produce their military equipment could actually be way better equipped then it's budget implies. I don't think that Chinas military has caught up to the US yet, but the military spending feels like a bad comparison considering how differently they're financed.
To which I want to add, that even though the DoD modes have its own (and worth addressing) budget process issues they’re at least largely getting what they are paying for in most circumstances as well as continuing to fund R&D at a fairly robust clip.
In the area of defense R&D in particular that large gap in budgetary spending will matter a lot more than building any “well known” military equipment as the next generation will come online faster than other nations can keep up without ramping their own spending
Well, Russia is a nuclear power, and not everyone is acting rationally. Russia got part of it's own territory occupied now, and some important oil and gas facilities are literally being bombed, not talking about regular cities and homes.
Russian nuclear doctrine is: Russia could launch nuclear weapons in response to an attack on its territory by a non-nuclear-armed state.
Their warheads are still at bay, why is that? I don't believe they will ever fly, because no-one is stupid enough to make the first move, and the war can go on neglecting them.
Prior to invading Ukraine one might have thought so, but the experience there shows the challenge in thinking that.
Meanwhile the last time the US military deployed to a traditional battlefield the opponent army lasted a matter of months.
Lord willing we’ll never know about these hypotheticals.
The famous example is the F4 Phantom getting beat in dogfights against the Mig 21 in Vietnam. It was mostly solved by changing the tactics and to improvements to later model aircraft.
Obviously dogfights aren't realistic in the modern age but that is just one of many variables which might lead to an unexpected deficit. Robustness, reliability, repairability, availablity of parts, ability to operate out of unimproved airfields, using poor qualify fuels etc.
Western military tactics are still working well against Russian commanders, but they being simply larger population wise, can if they’re willing, win a war of attrition simply because the Ukraine doesn’t have the bodies or internal resources to fight forever. It’s the same strategy general Grant used to decisively win the US civil war
Putin really waited out the US election. For reasons I can’t seem to grok Trump wants to ally with the world’s dictators. He’s proven himself a reliable ally to Putin at this point.
Had Trump lost the election I imagine we would see Russia seriously considering or even starting its withdrawal from the conflict.
Back to the military bit again: there is no way the war in the Ukraine is showing anything other than how vulnerable and poorly aged the equipment of the Russian military is and how their tactics have not improved much if any since the 1980s
Of course, if they get fired and there's nothing else for them to do, there will be uprisings.
There is almost zero causality in the U.S. government’s hiring and firing right now. Particularly relating to current conduct.
To the extent anyone has received job protection, it’s by getting politically fired and then seeking court protection.
So no, this is base cowardice and a lack of patriotism. Not rational action.
The first firings were all people who knew a guy who knew a guy who wronged Trump. With that kind of retaliatory example, do you not think openly trying to course-correct would result in being fired?
So in each workplace most were already marginalized or learned to hide these traits for their benefit. There are way more people in the ‘flight’ than the ‘fight’ camp.
there's a medium sized chunk the American Right, which has now won, who unrelated to Russia or China or whatever actually want the US to become sci-fi dystopia of authoritarian christo-white-nationalism.
The US is destabilising itself with the help of Russia.
I don't have to pick up a sign to try and defend my country, it's Russia's fault.
I don't have to fight against my president to preserve democracy, it's Russia's fault.
It used to be that voters actually cared about professionalism, principles, and critical thinking.
Campaigning on really any of those doesn't work these days, its not surprising that our government has those same shortcomings.
Ironically, it's destabilising itself on its own.
I’m not talking primarily about agent Krasnov allegation from a top Kazakh ex-spook (though that is an actual possibility), but about the well known Russian influence operations by financing what used to be extremists (both far-right and far-left) across the West.
And one day they'll get into an accident, run into the wrong person, or die of old age and then what? Their legacy will be AI generated gold statues and maybe their name on a building.
If they ctually used that wealth to advance the human race (on the ground, not a hypothetical but infeasible future on another planet) that'd be another matter. A percentage of Musk's theoretical wealth can solve every American's financial trouble, give them an education, and make the US great again. But that means giving some of it away and they may need it for... What, anyway? What does Musk use his money for besides buying companies and spawning babies against their will?
At least MBS (an autocrat whose wealth and country are one) spends his money on stupidly large building and opulence like The Line and whatnot, which will either make the UAE the center of world wealth and prosperity, or which will be interesting to archeologists in 2000-4000 years.
But that's the problem of the 'capitalist west' (i'm not sure what is better or what would work); everyone is out for short term gain. Most people care about themselves and some of their close family/friends, but in the end, they couldn't give a flying f if the entire planet implodes when they die. We should be planning on a 2000 year timeline as humanity but instead we plan on 4-8 years instead. So far (but that might be reading the wrong propaganda), China seems to have a plan beyond 4 years and beyond Xi's life and not be in such a neckbreaking hurry of breaking everything over a few years more or less.
Or in jail. We’re not at the coup stakes of life and death, but we’re also like two months into this Presidency. (For what it’s worth, Trump isn’t currently being coup-ish. That’s been left to the pretender.)
It seems like they're spending 30% of effort on the areas that are likely to foment a counter-coup and 70% of their time attacking groups they have personal beefs with.
But of course they're not just focusing on the powerless, they're also annoying the powerful enough that I don't see how it ends well for them.
It's not like he's stopping aid to Ukraine while ruminating on dropping sanctions on our second largest enemy state and repeating word-for-word Kremlin talking points after having a prior relationship with their criminal enterprises for his real estate and an intelligence community espouse the use of foreign power to influence his election outcomes. That would be nuts.
It's not like he attempted to overthrow the government when he lost an election 4 years ago, then pardoned the violent criminals who were incarcerated for that act. Or outright saying he will ignore judicial rulings from unfavored judges while making executive orders that change explicitly language in the constitution, with an EO making it illegal for his executive branch employees to oppose his interpretation of law and installing Aparachniks in each agency to report those in non-compliance. That's a loony idea.
It's not like he's destroying all trade partnerships with allies and internal infrastructure/manufacturing investments simultaneously. That would be silly.
Reaching the altitude of space is much, much, easier than reaching orbital velocity.
This meant that during the Global War on Terror, people had legitimate questions about if Al Qaida could damage the ISS. The answer then was "no", but amateurs reached the Kármán line in 2004, students in 2019, and the current altitude record holder is 143 km.
I suspect that it is well within the capacity of random drug cartels in the US, Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Haiti and Jamaica to destroy a Starship during launch, if they so desired.
A functioning US government is a reason not to do that. Nobody in any of those countries will want to risk Musk asking Trump for a favour in the form of a USSOCOM operation.
Destroy the US federal government, and there may well not be an USSOCOM left afterwards. And so far, DOGE has shown zero regard for the value of who they cut, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/02/doge-nucl...
There are two problems: You have to have enough greater acceleration that you can catch it, and you have to have good enough targeting (and maneuverability) to actually hit it. Those are highly non-trivial problems.
Aiming is one of the easier things: huge target, multi-gigwatt heat signiature.
You’re describing boost-stage missile intercept. It’s incredibly hard.
For an extremely well advertised launch into a predetermined flight path of something which isn't even trying to hide its signature and where you can watch the livestream of the countdown?
Perhaps I'm still underestimating the challenge, but I think boost stage vs Starship is a much less of a challenge than boost stage vs. an actual weapon.
But yeah, given your background, if you say I'm wrong, I know to defer to you on this.
The phrase "good enough for government work" has never been a positive in my lifetime.
But I'm sure the Dulles brothers were proudful...
This IS what people voted for. American business practices applied to the government.
I very much doubt this is what people want. But people aren't asked their opinion, and there's a difference between disagreeing and starting an insurrection to prevent a coup.
They think they have little invested in the stability of the system.
The lowest income voters trended towards Harris. As did the highest income voters. Trump's support lies solidly in the middle class.
If somebody is middle-income and thinks they aren't benefiting from a stable government and economy, I'm not really sure what to say... could we collectively do better? Absolutely. Is burning it all to the ground even remotely sensible? No, not even close.
It is not what people want. The Trump administration’s popularity is already below 50%, and much lower among independents (around 30% depending on the poll).
Many people aren’t yet aware of what’s happening. A lot of the electorate is getting their news from filtered sources like Fox News or various far right media outlets. Joe Rogan has gone all in on praising Musk and Trump. People who get their information from Trump are being fed lies that are obvious to anyone not inside the bubble. They don’t know what’s happening because their heroes are telling them it’s all necessary and good.
When you start polling people on the actual actions taken, things being cancelled, and consequences the approval is very low.
Anecdotally, I have some extended family who were very pro-Trump. One of them recently discovered that her job was funded through a federal grant, and now it’s likely going to be cut even though she doesn’t work for the government directly. They also discovered that one of their family members is covered by Medicaid through an avenue that’s looking like it will be cut. They went through a stage of disbelief, but now they’re in a phase where they’re sure everything will be fine and Trump will get it fixed. It’s only a matter of time until they realize that they were the intended targets of the cuts, not accidental damage.
I suspect that other scapegoats can be found to blame for their problems; as you say, their news sources will offer them all sorts of filters to deflect blame from the obvious source.
Woke, Biden, DEI, Obama, trans, Hillary, Soros, gays, illegals, fluoride. Take your pick.
Now now, there's no need to choose, you can just blame all of them all at once!
My biggest mystery is how these people have the energy to hate so many things so deeply. It sounds exhausting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate
> The political purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is to allow the citizens of Oceania to vent their existential anguish and personal hatred toward politically expedient enemies: Goldstein and the enemy super-state of the moment. In re-directing the members' subconscious feelings away from the Party's governance of Oceania and toward non-existent external enemies, the Party minimises thoughtcrime and the consequent subversive behaviours of thoughtcriminals.
The only thing it gets wrong is the variety of Goldsteins.
It will be far too late. That's why they're going so fast. The damage comes with a huge latency. Perhaps America can be saved and this is nothing but a bump in the ride, I'm no Nostradamus, but this could very well be the end of the Free West.
It honestly hasn't existed for decades.
If I was a governor of a blue state, I’d be strongly encouraging laid off government workers to work for my state. I’d also be working to eliminate the trade deficit (including federal taxes and spending) with rest of the US.
Why subsidize this crap if it’s not going to lead to economic prosperity, security, or even pretending the constitution still exists?
Also, Ontario supplies half the US’s nickel, and is threatening an embargo. That’d shut down a bunch of our factories in short order. They could also cut off electricity supplies to the north, but I get the impression the US grid would mostly absorb that (probably thanks to investment in smart grids for renewables, ironically).
Europe seems to be realising it must get its act together. Europe + Canada + the Americas have a hope in hell of containing America if it goes off the rails internationally. (When Trump & Musk tip the economy into recession it will be tempting to drum up a stupid war. My guess would have been Iran. But who the hell knows.)
I keep hearing stuff like this, but it doesn't seem to be widespread enough to seem to matter, at least in my circle. There's this whole topic of conversation where there's this voter regret thing. I'm in Michigan, so there's been a few of these I've seen proclaiming the Muslim community are having regrets voting for Trump (it was a big thing around the election due to the whole Gaza situation, because voting for Harris was apparently not going to be enough). But I am worried I'm just seeing bullshit propaganda and these types of things aren't actually what's happening because everyone I've talked to seem to be content with the way things are going. It's incredibly weird.
The real interesting voter regret is when the likely Trump voters start realizing that their guy isn’t who they thought. It’s not going to happen quickly because denial and rationalization can go on for a very long time.
I am starting to see it in some of the VCs and crypto people I know personally and follow on Twitter. The launch of the Trump memecoin went through a rationalization cycle where the crypto people tried to spin it as a good thing, but now nearly all of them have given up and agreed it was a bad move for crypto
One of the loudest pro-Trump VCs in my state has gone from being a cheerleader to asking questions about what DOGE is actually doing. The trigger for him was, strangely enough, Musk having public issues with the parents of two of his children. Something about realizing that he’s not a good family man and father finally broke his illusions of Musk as the perfect hero.
I think it’s little things like this that will start making people ask questions about their heroes. The more topics and agencies they get their hands on, the more people will be impacted and be forced to reconcile their reality with their imagined ideals of this administration.
It's not cool anymore when someone else is running the scam
We need to be building a platform that houses the left and right in order to have a chance at standing up to this. This will be a real litmus test for the US: do we favor our tribal affiliations more than the country that enables us to have those affiliations? Or are we willing to put them aside for the greater good?
We're seeing a moment now where the "pro-crypto" team is bifurcating (really this has always been true but it's more obvious now) into good crypto vs bad crypto. Or mission driven vs profit maximalising. Oversimplifications of a nuanced political, tribal landscape with many many sides but you get the idea.
Democrats being anti all crypto was clearly wrong, attacking the more legitimate parts MORE fiercely than the illegitimate parts. But the flip side is Trump's "crime season" as they call it in crypto twitter, which also sucks. Maybe some day we'll get crypto that is useful, profitable, and designed in a beneficial way. That day is not today.
It also hasn't fully hit yet. The layoffs are in progress, already awarded grant money is still paying salaries. 3-6 months is when the pain will really begin. Until then, I think a lot of people are still thinking that it either won't really happen to them, or that Trump will somehow make an exception just for their particular federal money pipeline.
On top of that, I am no expert top of the job market software engineer. If I lose this job I am going to be competing against people significantly better than me because so many others have (or will) be losing their jobs. Basically, this is the potential beginning of the end of my career.
Thankfully, I think I'm okay through this year, and probably next... but after that, completely a mystery. And that's only because we have agreements for funding through 2026. There are no guarantees beyond that.
I’m not sure “they could have known, but didn’t bother to learn, and instead voted based on Fox News and talk radio and podcast and Facebook post bullshit” is enough to say they didn’t vote for this. If it is, that’s… kinda usually the case.
…and that reversing lasts until the next time they turn on their TV and get reset by Fox News. I used to see it all the time with my parents. Now I just don’t talk to them much.
People voted for tariff and massive day 1 changes and federal cuts.
People wanted a loud strong man president who makes deals.
These actions ARE what people (who voted) wanted… people just didn’t think about the outcome
I hear that it is the same people who voted Donald last time who voted Donald again this time. No others voted for him.
The issue seems to be that many people who are not trumpists did not vote at all.
Maybe i'm wrong, but it seems that if everyone who could vote actually did vote, then Donald would have lost.
So ... maybe he won, but i hardly think he represents the majority is US citizens.
The 51% of voters that voted for him… (correction: 49.8%)
> I hear that it is the same people who voted Donald last time who voted Donald again this time. No others voted for him.
This is wrong. There were more republican voters this time around than last time.
> The issue seems to be that many people who are not trumpists did not vote at all. Maybe i'm wrong, but it seems that if everyone who could vote actually did vote, then Donald would have lost.
This is a constant issue in the US. Low voter turnout causes seemingly unpopular candidates to win.
Go out and vote, people. Please.
> So ... maybe he won, but i hardly think he represents the majority is US citizens.
Never said it did. But if you don’t voice your opinion when it matters, then your opinion literally doesn’t count.
So, the American people voted for trump and this administration. Either through their vote or their inaction.
The Democrats offered a really bad alternative (Biden) for most of the campaign season. Even if you liked his politics, there was (IMHO) legitimate reason to question his mental competence.
My guess is that Trump would have lost if the Democrats had fielded a less-bad alternative.
Kamala really ran a campaign like someone trying to lose.
"If only the Tsar knew"
Ah, straight from denial into that other stage, more denial
His "charm" is that he won't do 3/4 of what he says, the difficulty is figuring out which quarter he is going to enact.
Yes! I know apparently smart people who voted for Trump because they thought that his more extreme rhetoric was merely intended to wind up the left. Like the first time he got elected. Except that this time he had a plan.
This time he (illegally) fired a bunch of them right out of the gate. The Heritage Foundation wasn't caught off guard (and a bit out in the cold) by his success this time, and backed him with a plan. They did it out in the open, the recruiting and a whole lot of specifics about what they wanted to do and how they were going to do it. It wasn't even close to a secret, you could literally go download and read documents, watch interviews of key figures in front of friendly audiences, that kind of thing.
With the Vance pick, you could also easily spot the Yarvin influence & connections and make some guesses about some things. When Elon started worming his way in, it was clear that side of it wasn't just going to be in the head of a VP who can't personally do much, but was going to have traction.
His voters who are now like "WTF?" need to sit down and have a serious think about how they got conned by someone who was standing under a neon sign with a flashing arrow pointing down at him that read "I am conning you! Signed: Donald Trump". Like I'm not sure it even counts as a con, it was so transparent.
Everyone else… yeah.
Meanwhile Trump isn't even able to keep phrases like "rare earth minerals" correct in his head (repeatedly calling them "raw earth"). To be honest 90% of the meeting was him waffling on about how this news organisation was brilliant (because they give him a softball question) and this one was going bankrupt because their rating suck (because they asked a difficult question). You could see Zelensky trying to keep himself from rolling his eyes.
voters are very very dumb for believing him, but he did lie.
Again, I don't think people are stupid. I do think they'll say one some things in mixed company to hide their racism.
This continued labeling of all fiscal conservatives as racists is a key reason Democrats keep losing to an obviously crazy person. Nobody’s going to vote for the party which calls them a racist.
A lot of fiscal conservatives are “middle class” undecided voters who have mortgages and kids to worry about. Unsurprisingly they voted for the party who promised lower taxes over the one which did nothing but accuse them of racism.
Somehow Americans have really bought into it, the lies, the disinformation, the destruction. I cannot understand, the moving targets shift (CRT, immigration, DEI, cancel culture, wokeness, whatever is next) so it isn't about them whatsoever, they are just the distractions being fed to gather support, there's something else much deeper and darker broken in American society that became so obfuscated by these distractions to the point where I have absolutely no fucking idea why half of the country seems to hate everything that brought the USA to the position it had on the global stage.
Perhaps it's just hubris after a very long period of quasi-absolute power, seems like power corrupts not only individuals but whole nations.
That's hard to accept, given what HN was once. The difference between ten years ago and last year was noticeable; the difference between last year and this is much starker.
You're in a war, even here.
What they did was see the way 9/11 reset what was allowed in mainstream American discourse, and that as conservatives moved into a tightly-managed bubble they were also willing to give up the idea of verifiable facts in favor of what felt right. That created a big weakness for a patient adversary as they didn’t need to try to get people to trust, say, RT but rather pick which existing voices to quietly support or try seeding ideas to.
I think it’s better to treat them like a catalyst or the accelerant on a fire where they didn’t start it but they both made it worse and might not have much control over it at this point.
It can be Russian disinfo but it's definitely not only that.
That being said, the writing was on the wall in 2016, the first time Trump ran, HN (and the anglosphere internet in general) took a sharp dive down in quality, and Covid made it all worse.
I just try to remember that the printing press caused a lot of wars, but over the longer term it lead to a better world.
Just under 50% of the population voted for President Trump, so it's a given that "already" the popularity is below 50%.
156,302,318 voted (~63.9% of ~244 million eligible voters, extrapolated)
77.3 million voted for Trump (~49.8% of voters).
So that's ~31.6% of eligible voters or ~22.7% of the US population.
- I live in a deeply partisan state where the outcome was predetermined: a disproportionate amount of those who didn't vote would have to vote in the opposite of those who voted (if I lived in a different state the pressure to vote would have been greater)
- I lack an easy means to get to my polling location and my state makes absentee ballots difficult to get
- I would have probably also needed to do some ID stuff (my ID is currently expired, for reasons)
- Registering to vote puts my name/address/registered party/etc onto easily searchable public websites like https://voterrecords.com/
My reasons aren't great but they're reasons. If there was less friction to voting I would have voted, as I recognize it's an important civic duty.
On a related note, I find it interesting that your comment is being downvoted while contributing to the dialogue productively.
Inference is left as an exercise to the reader.
Or is brigading considered a kind of astroturfing?
But, anyone who has ever been through such a rewrite knows they're usually more trouble than they're worth, and no matter what, you will lose A LOT. Doesn't matter how thorough you are or how many requirements you capture. Most are lost to the ether, never again to be seen... until the exact moment you need them.
Why should plebs be entitled to clean water without an 80% margin?
It's anathema if you're competing against someone who doesn't need to make a profit - when you're trying to make an 80% monopolistic margin (0.1%).
While I have some sympathy for them, it diminishes every time their boss opens his mouth.
It seems the general public outside the affected regions were not completely aware on what was going on with concentration camps. This does not mean they were not aware of at some level.
It is quite common for old people to say that they only became aware of many of the atrocities months or years later the war was over. The US was not keen on putting pressure to concentration camps as, well, they had their own full of "japs and n*"
The algebra looks like this:
Privatize FAA = x + y
Where x is any discovery or event related to the FAA, and where y is any red meat justification (dei|immigration|trans).
There are many such equations:
Strategic bitcoin reserve = x + y.
Long two years, just going to leave this here. They will always find x and y to complete their equations:
How will you know at this point? Would he need a sharpie this time, or will he just shout at them over the phone and change the conclusions?
But the goal is not to fix what isn't working, it never was - it's a diversion and an excuse to dismantle the federal government, checks and balances, and move to an unchecked oligarchy/autocracy. Taking the whole country with them, of course.
Basically all will either pretend believing or refuse believing above the mental level of this old infant elected as president, so almost everyone.
A 9/11 scale attack would make it pretty easy for supporters of both parties to turn their sights on whoever they think attacked us.
Unless you go with the "shit rolls down hill" approach and ultimate land blame for everything on the person in charge, it'd be extremely hard to find a clear line between 6 weeks of Trump's presidency and an attack on the scale of 9/11.
Maybe you could tie it back to connections with his first term, but any attack on that scale takes years to plan, not weeks, and has plenty of facets to consider when it comes to what motivated the attackers to actually do it.
If the point was to make the government less efficient to justify political platforms, why have private companies been doing the same thing for the last 3 years when there's no political upside for them?
I'm not saying the RTO policy is good. I'm very skeptical of it myself. But this explanation doesn't seem to hold water - especially when better explanations are out there.
They could be using it to thin out their staff without layoffs. They could be propping up real estate values. They could be dealing with sunk costs on office space and looking to justify them. They could be accomidating poor managers who cannoy evaluate employee productivity without seeing butts in seats every day.
Not to mention some people really actually do work less efficiently from home. I can't say exactly what proportion or what the overall productivity impact is. It's probably very hard to measure. But it isn't hard to imagine leaders (in both the public and private sectors) genuinely believing the RTO movement will improve overall productivity.
It also isn't hard to imagine large organizations doing a poor job when implementing their RTO effort. I saw similar issues with the RTO effort in my private company. The same issues also happened with the WFH effort during the pandemic. Mismanagement is commonplace in large organizations.
Is this percentage based on anything more than vibes? Does it matter to you which eggs get broken and do you agree with the methods being employed to choose/break them? And sorry for all the questions but how do you feel about the conflicts of interests with people like Musk overseeing so much of this?
What has been growing a lot are mostly municipalities, which I guess boils down to more people helping disadvantaged kids in schools, which I guess is nice and more policing, which many are calling to shrink and replace with something less violent.
US government is not bloated. It's corrupt by the revolving door policy, which definitely won't be fixed by letting people go. But even with revolving doors some things have worked for you. Such as predicting weather, fighting diseases, disrupting or bribing competing nations, opening new markets and protecting your fucking imaginary property everybody in the world fucking hates.
[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docu...
Wait, I'm confused. Are you upset that Trump might stop the CIA from disrupting foreign nations? Because that's something I've always been ashamed about as an American so I'm having trouble being upset about the intelligence apparatus that everyone hates worldwide apparently getting fired. The media is telling me that it's the end of the West but I just keep thinking about the Tuskegee experiments and South America and I just don't feel sad for these organizations
> US government is not bloated.
Regardless, it has come to the point where we cannot afford the interest on our debt
> Regardless, it has come to the point where we cannot afford the interest on our debt
I agree that our debt payments are a growing issue. That's one of the many reasons I think that this administration is going to leave behind a vastly weaker country. If you actually believe that Trump/Elon are serious about this take a look what percentage of the federal budget is comprised of salaries, and look out how much money they want to spend on tax cuts, border security, and a myriad of corrupt contracts. You'll find that the latter is much larger than the former.
I'm sure you won't be swayed by anything I say but I hope you will take a look at the current national debt and check it again in a couple years. When you see that it has become vastly worse under this administration perhaps you'll reevaluate whatever has led you to believe their obvious lies about trying to balance the budget.
As long as you don't care about American soft power, or the many lives we save with our humanitarian programs, you may be right. If you do care about these things, then you're already demonstrably wrong.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/health/usaid-contract-ter...
More children are going to die, around the world, in the immediate future. Sorry, eggs, this guy has an omelette to make.
https://homeland.house.gov/2024/10/24/startling-stats-factsh...
> However, the end result is the same—tens of thousands of inadmissible aliens being released into the interior every month. This is evident through the number of appointments scheduled through the CBP One mass-parole program, which skyrocketed to more than 852,000 since January 2023.
Also there is a massive spike in encounters during those years: https://ohss.dhs.gov/khsm/cbp-encounters
[edit] if the stopped-doing-their-job thing had happened, not CBP One, I’m aware of that.
RTO in a nutshell.
As someone who chose my living location based on where my family wants to live first and jobs second, this sudden turn to RTO mandates is infinitely depressing. Most of my work involves talking to people in different offices, states and countries anyway, so RTO means doing the e-mail and video call work but from a different location that requires battling traffic both ways. It’s insane that this is being done in the name of “efficiency”
I saw this a while ago on Mastodon and it's on point (https://toot.yosh.is/@yosh/114027906524929311):
---
In today’s “terminology matters”:
Return To Office policy: middle-management language that assumes “office” is a neutral position, we’re somehow “returning to”. This term has been carefully crafted by corporate strategists to sound as palatable as possible.
Mandatory Commute policy: centers the outcome for workers - spending hours each day on an unpaid commute to and from the office just so we can be on video calls all day.
We don’t just have to accept hostile framing.
---
Reminds me of a NYC startup I was at (while hired living on the west coast). CEO was really big on in-person (well except for all the LATAM devs I had to manage...) so they required me to fly out frequently, and my boss was incredulous I would book the 6 hour flight during week days because it "ate into work time". Like WTF is sitting on JetBlue flights on weekends for me but "work time"... I'm on salary anyways
It's not, and never was.
It's being done a) to drive people to quit, so they don't have to lay them off, and b) to restore the power dynamic to the status quo ante, where your manager could just look over at your cubicle and see you in your seat, and know that whether or not you were working, you were still there to bow to them. (And many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat, and are desperate to avoid having to admit that.)
This is a legitimate problem though. Obviously making people do all their work from a centralized office location is a horribly inefficient solution, but it is a solution, and if there really is widespread slacking happening it might still be more efficient than doing nothing.
I am currently at my desk, in my office. Am I working?
For roughly two years during the pandemic, I was at home using my laptop. Was I working?
Furthermore, for most office work, there is more to working than a binary "are you doing it or not?" Being at your desk working says nothing about the quality of your work, which any competent manager should absolutely be capable of assessing from the work itself.
Finally, you're making a huge assumption:
> if there really is widespread slacking happening
Is there any evidence that this is happening? I guarantee you that the kind of manager who does this will not know, because they have no effective metrics.
It's also precisely the kind of thing that toxic management culture says workers are always doing (or trying to do): It perpetuates the idea that Managers, who are perfect, pure beings with only the Might Company's best interests at heart, are always at odds with Workers, who are lazy good-for-nothings only ever interested in getting the most money possible for the least amount of work possible, and who must always be treated as if they are trying to steal their time from the Mighty Company.
If you really want to know, you have to look at the code, sit in on the meetings, write the code and see the challenges with integrating with the existing system, submit a PR to see the pushback and... oh wait now you're just an engineer.
If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable.
It's not unlike using generative AI for coding. Writing code is the easy part! Making sure it works is another beast. Honestly, I'd much rather write code than read it. If it takes X time to write code and > X time to read it, which in my book it does, why bother with the reading?
But every job has some ways to determine if the person in it is actually, y'know, doing it. And off the top of my head (and it's early, so YMMV), I'd say that remote jobs tend to have more easily-auditable products than many in-person-only jobs (particularly the type where the main purpose is direct interaction with the public).
> If we hire two engineers to act as one then maybe, maybe, we could measure performance. At the cost of the largest inefficiency imaginable.
And why should "efficiency" be our most important criterion?
"Efficiency" is why we have lean staffing that forces the "bus factor"[0] of nearly every position to 1. "Efficiency" is why we have stretched, fragile supply chains that break down the moment any one supplier or middleman experiences a crisis.
Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. The only people it really helps are shareholders.
The problem is when it's being used as a whip to get people to work ever harder with no more pay and no more support than before.
Doubling engineers while keeping the same amount of work is something that can increase resiliency—both in the engineers themselves and in the business. Making sure you have at least, say, 125%-150% coverage of all duties makes a huge difference in everyone's stress levels, and makes sure that if someone gets sick, gets hit by a bus, or just goes on vacation, their duties neither stop getting done, nor get piled onto other people who are already at 100% (or more) capacity.
I don't care what side you fall down on, the only reason someone would rollback Medicare negotiating drug prices is so that they can make more money on their big pharma stocks.
I can't believe a bunch of grown adults voted for this shit.
The thing is almost never true, and even if he were is a horrible self centered justification.
Well, they’re about to expire and their extension hasn’t been passed yet. But yes. I’m getting a tax cut while the farmers who voted for him get tariffed out of their export markets. Sort of wild.
The actual choices are one of: cut medicaid, cut medicare, cut military, cut social security, raise taxes. Tariffs would technically work to if they result in higher prices, but then they seem equivalent to raising taxes (very generally) so not sure if its worth breaking out.
Just so everyone is aware, Vought is the man behind the moron (the Donny). He is the architect of Project 2025.
His goal is to traumatize the civil service to bring about a re-christianization of America, which he believes can only be done by expanding the power of the executive branch.
We are living through the machinations of a religious fanatic.
I don't understand that part, maybe I'm missing something - what happened there? Why would the abandoned workplace not look exactly the same as they left it? Where did the ethernet cords appear from? Someone stole TVs from the walls?
Regardless, there’s no reason for them to hire facilities people to maintain vacant space. Leaving furniture in those places would attract vermin, ruin the furniture, etc.
Then either Musk and Trump are lying about needing to focus on government efficiency, or some of the brightest and most brilliant minds that the American people willingly voted for are wrong.
It's hard to think, I know. But don't worry, I'll give you some ideas.
> Why would the abandoned workplace not look exactly the same as they left it?
There might have been some animals who came along and decided that the TVs were very important. Maybe there was a hurricane or a tornado which decided to fuck this place in particular, but only by taking the desks and TVs.
Or, maybe the workers who used the office weren't the last people in the office.
> Where did the ethernet cords appear from?
They were always there. Some people actually know how to have a reliable, secure, and fast data connection. Protip: it's not wifi. Usually when the TV or computer is installed, all of the extra wire is hidden in the wall. But after the TV or computer has been removed, the extra wire length is often left on the ground ready to be tested or installed with the next device.
It's just very annoying (read: time-expensive for little profit) to pull the wires all the way out of the walls to be taken, and even more expensive to re/install in a new location (it's significantly cheaper to just install new wiring instead).
> Someone stole TVs from the walls?
It's possible, but not likely. Those TVs were most likely g(r)ifted to the managers and/or executives. You know, the same people who actually own the building. That's not the same as stolen. Also, the missing TV can now be written off of taxes as a loss for the business. Everyone likes double-dipping, right?
When employers realized that work was being done despite not being in the office, they started to shutter their offices (ya know, to save money).
I can't believe I have to explain to another adult why offices after Covid don't look the same.
Note that especially in this instance, offense was taken, not given
The comment was demeaning; offense was clearly intended, to belittle the GP's intelligence.
To call a statement that is intended to insult, "insulting", seems to be accurate? It was not intended to indicate offense on my part, but to chastise for unnecessary hostility. Maybe I'm reading your reply wrong, though.
Sometimes I wonder what that life looks like? Maybe just sipping champagne at beach side (or on the couch) all day in ignorance. Watch whatever reality trash is on streaming services. All while the world burns around them.
Certainly since Reagan things have been slowly going downhill but up until then..
What does “good” look like? Perfection?
What metrics would you use to assess the quality of life you think best?
Also, screw breathable air and drinkable water, even more than the internet and microwave. Above all else, ballpoint pens and velcro need to just stop.
Excuse me. It’s rush hour. I need to go yell at a busy bridge until the thing just falls the fuck over.
What have the New Dealer's ever done for us?
This has been the playbook for all of my life at least. Probably longer than that.
America is cooked.
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/01/25/doge-seeks-to-shed-vast-am... “A recent report from Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa who chairs the Senate DOGE caucus, found that not one of the headquarters for any major agency or department in Washington is more than half full. GSA-owned buildings in Washington, D.C., average about a 12% occupancy rate. The government owns more than 7,500 vacant buildings across the country, and more than 2,200 that are partially empty.”
DOGE is hamfisted in its execution but why are we spending massive amounts of money for office buildings while people work from home? I'm a fan of remote work and would prefer that we crash the Commercial Real Estate market by canceling leases rather that stuffing people back into cubicle farms, but I think the context of trying to kill two birds with one stone (improve building utilization and also identify who is actually doing work and not just fucking off) makes some sense.
I don't think if you sum up all the value on all the leases of wasted buildings it would be a drop in the bucket against the psychological damage (e.g. distrust in the system) being caused by this administration. Like unless it's more than 1% of the national budget (i.e. > 67 billion a year) then it isn't worth the chaos.
And a competent administration that wanted to end leases really shouldn't have started RTO, so let's try not to fabricate plausible deniability here.
Ehh, sometimes I'm really not sure how many of the sloppy decisions that are made are malicious, and how many are incompetent.
>Like unless it's more than 1% of the national budget (i.e. > 67 billion a year) then it isn't worth the chaos.
For people like Musk, chaos is a feature not a bug. Shaking a lot of low-value-add employees and processes out of their comfort zones is the point.
>And a competent administration that wanted to end leases really shouldn't have started RTO
I think the Scheme of Maneuver is:
Phase 1: Bring everyone into the otherwise-nearly-empty offices.
Phase 2: Figure out who is dead weight. Fire them.
Phase 3: Figure out what max occupancy should be after the fat has been cut from the workforce, and cut all unneeded office space.
Phase 4: Maybe allow some limited WFH (I'm not holding my breath on this one).
Valid point. But if that's the problem, why don't we get rid of the buildings and save the money, rather than force people back to the office so we have to keep spending money on the buildings?
Do you have even the slightest bit of proof that wasn't already the case? How do you know this wasn't already in progress?
Commercial leases are 5 or 10 years commonly. Many of the leases began before 2020 probably.
Owned real estate increases in value in high demand markets and is difficult to sell in low demand markets.
Completion of work can be and is tracked remotely.
It's likely tax-exempt from property taxes, upkeep is likely minimal, and even empty office space is an appreciating asset. I'd be more surprised if it didn't exist.
This is like asking "Why does my car that I leased for 3 years still exist after 1?" Idk man.
Huh?
And what does my own money have anything to do with this? The leases were bought and then they had to pay. Are you implying people knew Covid was going to hit when they got these leases? It's hard for me to understand why this is such a complex thing to grasp. Particularly since it's been a focal point in our lives for 4 straight years.
You think the effects of a pandemic that literally stopped the world for over an entire year just goes away with the last case? I knew I was arguing with children on this site.
The pandemic pushed everyone home. The office buildings that were leased are no longer needed. And EVEN SO, you could make the argument that prematurely ending a lease when you weren't sure the biggest raging dipshit on this planet wouldn't get elected and force everyone back in (like he is doing right now) despite it being a really really dumb idea isn't that far-fetched.
You idiots will go to the ends of the earth to defend the absolute shitshow that is Doge and have this unbelievable need to believe that the government is chalk full of poeple who couldn't be bothered to make sure they weren't spedning millions on useless shit. GFTO
Read a book for christ's sake.
They hate us, and now that they're in power, they're showing us just how much.
> In one Department of Health and Human Services office, there was no Wi-Fi or full electricity in the first hours when people returned last week.
The broader issue is: what even is the point, if Trump has abandoned any pretence of seeking a balanced budget anyway?
Or may be getting rid of FAA permits at all? Back to the time of great unlimited aviation and rocketry innovation. I personally have a bunch of non-traditional designs i'd like to get airborne/launched which if we lucky would fly and stay airborne on the planned trajectory and for the planned amount of time :)
Permits will be for the little guys.
It’s hard to ignore it now. Our rights and safety nets have been stripped away. 40+ years of trickle down economics and other failed neoclassical/neoliberal economic theory have directly caused the situation we are in.
Feel free to make an argument that we are moving in the wrong direction NOW, but not that we have moved in the wrong direction entirely since the 60s.
Are you implying that you agree things were worse in the 60s, but somehow magically at their prime in 85?
Or are you just being pedantic?
Do you know what a lease is? I can dumb it down a bit if you need.
Spending freezes, blanket firing of tons of provisional workers (fun fact: the recently-promoted are also provisional, this doesn’t just mean brand new workers), and other measures have probably also disrupted the ability of offices to sensibly execute the orders. That is, it’ll take them longer to get the offices ready.
One might begin to think it’s not about waste.
The point you missed in the parent comment was that this is temporary. I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but if the way we discover that government offices were sitting vacant for years (i.e. big waste) is by having people return to them and be unproductive for a few days (i.e. small waste), then the trade will be worth it. I doubt anyone wants employees to be sitting in offices that aren't functional. We have discovered something bad...which would seem to be part of the reason of doing it.
The counterargument is obvious to anyone willing to think about it for a few seconds, but the article doesn't even bother addressing it. They even admit that the headline office without wifi was only without wifi for a few hours:
> In one Department of Health and Human Services office, there was no Wi-Fi or full electricity in the first hours when people returned last week.
...and yet this is in the headline. This all reeks of cherry-picking.
> I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but if the way we discover that government offices were sitting vacant for years (i.e. big waste) is by having people return to them and be unproductive for a few days (i.e. small waste), then the trade will be worth it.
This doesn't save anything. Now utilities and maintenance costs are higher. It's more spending. Leasing out or selling the buildings would have cut waste.
> I doubt anyone wants employees to be sitting in offices that aren't functional.
I don't know how many times and ways people involved in the admin have to say that their goal is to wreck the federal bureaucracy before people believe them.
Sure, by not having the vacant offices in the first place. Different ways to achieve that goal include: not allowing huge numbers of employees to stop coming into the office; or if you do allow that, by then competently following up on the implied reduction in office usage.
There are clearly lots of ways to avoid this kind of waste, but all of them go back for years, and were not done. So here we are. And instead of being critical of that, you're choosing to fixate on the most recent events, where someone is actually discovering and fixing the underlying problem.
What waste? The offices? Filling them doesn't reduce the waste.
No, the waste is lost hours of productivity, and chaos making these offices less efficient. You solve that by rolling this out very differently. The waste I'm talking about is entirely avoidable and 100% DOGE's fault.
[EDIT]
> where someone is actually discovering and fixing the underlying problem.
What underlying problem? This 1) didn't need to be done, and even if that weren't true, 2) was done in a hamfisted way that wasted money.
Small waste: the few hours/days of lost productivity while offices are re-opened.
Big waste: the empty offices that were sitting there while nobody was using them, for years.
Maybe they could have avoided the small waste by being more careful and methodical, or maybe that would have taken 10x longer. I don't know, and it's not worth arguing about.
Occupied offices cost more.
[EDIT]
Let me put it this way:
I have two cars. I don't need two. I need one. I never use one of them.
You're telling me I can make that wasted second car non-waste by towing it everywhere with the first one.
No, that increases costs. Getting rid of the car would reduce waste.
If I was knowledgable about government contracting, I would scoop up a bunch of those folks for a government-certified TaskRabbit service.
After all, private sector is always more efficient.
This is a strange inversion of priorities. Day cares and coffee spots exist to serve their customers. And you have lost sight of many important things if you think parents should be prevented from caring for their own children to support day care businesses.
So then why do you think California - arguably the most liberal state - is also implementing a return to work mandate?
Right sure, everyone is obsessed by money.
Actually solve an actual problem, not wave a machete around cutting the government in half.
"they would just leave the government and seek employment elsewhere" when "There aren't any well paying jobs in the private sector" (because of "immigrants" and "corporations")
What a mental system ... or whatever! It is true then: there are people looking up to the level of Trmup!
Any sources on that?
Interesting. Can you show a few of these studies?
I find it hard to get data on this sort of thing.
[citation needed]
It's worth looking back from time perspective.
As I understand it:
- twitter became less appealing to advertisers so revenue dropped
- you can't really firmly track the valuation over time after it was delisted but Fidelity late last year estimated its value had declined by 80%. There's a bump from people speculating that Musk's political position will somehow enrich it, but I don't think that's evidence that twitter itself was well-managed.
- a bunch of communities that had previously been very active on twitter did just kinda fizzle or go elsewhere as using their product became deeply unpleasant
Twitter had few months runway until it'd run out of money and go bankrupt.
Bloomberg analysis says (despite advertisers and communities leave etc) platform earnings seem to be staying at $1.2 billion a year.
Reports from Feb 2025 say that X doubled its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from $682 million in 2021 (the last full year before the takeover) – so they are on right track increasing profitability and big part of it likely due to workforce cut from 7500 to 1500 (they did more moves than that, all of them have some impact).
It seems argument around layoffs and working from the office leading to doomsday scenario (it'll stop working, it's gone etc. sentiments at the time) have been refuted with time.
Based off of what I've seen on Twitter, I'm not convinced it's very popular. I regularly see the stupidest people who walk this Earth making obvious rage bait. You know, Nazi stuff, women shouldn't vote, that type of thing.
The naive thing to say is that these people are morons because they're Musk supporters and surely that's the only thing left for Twitter. But I don't think so. They're bots. Millions and millions of them. Bots talking to bots talking to other bots.
The reason this bubble hasn't popped is because nobody has told advertisers. They're essentially burning their money but shhh it's a secret teehee!
In Twitter's defense, they're not the only ones doing it. Facebook deleted what, 1.5 billion bots a year ago? But if you log on, you'll see AI Jesus made out of cornflakes with 200,000 thousands comments that all say "God Bless". Hmmm...
The only source I found for this claim was Elon Musk. Do you know a credible source?
https://soax.com/research/twitter-active-users https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-dr...
I think it's interesting that you mention bloomberg as saying that things are going ok. My recent read was that they thought twitter was just messing with numbers.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-20/behind-mu...
Key quotes:
> its improved fortunes owe much to heavily adjusted financials and investors’ fear of missing out
> The 2024 figures weren’t audited, but the 2023 figures were, said one of the people. None of them would qualify for generally accepted accounting principles, also known as the GAAP standard that the US Securities and Exchange Commission requires for publicly traded companies.
... i.e. the recent numbers aren't trustworthy
> Even under those unusual calculations, X’s debt burden was roughly nine times adjusted earnings — far beyond the baseline of six that bank regulators characterize as risky.
> The threat of litigation — and Musk’s advisory role to Trump — has been a topic of conversation among some advertisers as they decide whether to return, according to several ad industry sources. While few believe X’s product or ad offerings have improved in the past year, marketers are weighing the possible downside of ignoring X and what that might mean in terms of retaliation from Musk.
... i.e. to the extent that some advertisers have returned, it's b/c they think they'll be punished if they don't, not because it's a good way of reaching an audience or promoting their brand.
I think the actual revenue story is worse than the usage story. My first searches show that their Q4 revenue was $2.5B, roughly half of where it was in 2021.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
Analogously, I don't think any of the recent sudden moves mean that the federal government at large is _over_ ("doomsday scenario") except for the departments that the administration actually wants to kill, but I think the current administration is setting the government up to do less and less well. Possibly it will be a great financial outcome for Musk.
(edited to add missing bloomberg link)
abeppu's argument was efficiency and health are not the same.
Despite this out migration, so far their health looks exceptionally good. They're running at 20% of original workforce (!).
Just think about it (and I really mean it - taking aside personal dislikes, political views etc) – you have a company, you cut 80% of workforce and it still seems to work very well. This is insane.
It's also not one off example - he is well known for speedrun stunts (ie. e2e completion of colossus supercomputer in memphis in 4 months <<!>>).
The argument is – can you do something similar with government as well? As a body that is notorious for inefficiency it seems plausible the answer is yes.
I think this is basically backwards; aggressive cuts and short-term revenue attempts alienated advertisers, casual users and influencers with large audiences. In particular:
- they abandoned content moderation, including flagging misinformation, hate-speech, and targeted harassment. This obviously saves money, b/c it eliminates systems and ML models that needed to examine tweets/messages and accounts in real time. These are adversarial problems, so you can't just create the model once and leave it alone; you need to pay a team to keep finding the current abusive patterns. But abandoning this means that you have a network where (a) any post you see is more likely to be manipulative misinformation (b) you will see slurs and hatespeech and perhaps receive them and (c) if you're determined to be in some way objectionable to an army of trolls, you may be endlessly harassed. So it's a kinda awful place to engage.
- they tried to sell blue checkmarks. This had multiple bad effects. It let any rando with a few dollars impersonate large companies and brands. This alienated those large companies who felt understandably burned, and it made casual users less trustful of content even that appears to be marked as legitimate by the platform. Further, b/c they were trying to force previously verified accounts from notable people to start paying them, they alienated celebs and influencers with large audiences.
It's not just that people who disagree with Musk politically were moving away from twitter in some slow-rolling boycott -- the choices Musk made have transformed twitter to a place where it's harder to get real information, it's hard to have a conversation with your community without being attacked, it's hard to curate your feed (Musk posts may be injected whether or not you follow him), and far from being a "free speech" paradise, it's one where a bunch of people don't feel safe engaging at all.
The whole point of it is to be miserable. The decision makers literally said that!
Meanwhile traffic around the city has gotten WAY worse too. So it's not just the feds that are affected either.
Also note the article starts with the qualifier "in the first few hours", meaning it's not like they're sitting there all day every day with no lights/wifi. This seems like an exaggerated, politically motivated piece that doesn't belong on HN.
I saw this at Google before I left in 2021. Doesn't surprise me that gov't has the same problem. Desks that could only be reserved/booked, not owned. Insufficient desks if everyone had to come back. They clearly didn't see WFH as temporary, even though RTO was clearly the long term plan.
Other bigcorps are the same from what I hear. Facilities got all messed up.
DOGE is “targeting remote-work arrangements” [1].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/opinion/dont-let-doge-kill-remote-work-h...