Ready for Great Again

From downtown!!!

 

Good time to invest in for-profit prison company stocks.

 

Yeah, a lot of stuff to break down here, I agree with you.

I've worked in and with government agencies for a good part of 25 years. Gaining a position of decision-making authority via politics is nothing new. However, it's usually the internal people who worked their way up and played politics well. And usually the people who put them there knew that their appointees needed to do a good job because it would reflect on them.

The project 2025 plan of gutting agencies and putting completely unqualified sycophants in decision-making positions is going to lead to a lot of issues. Think about when Musk bought Twitter and came in with his flamethrower. He fired half the engineers there...and had to rehire them. That isn't going to work with a lot of government employees. Many of the long-tenured folks are probably just going to retire or find a better job. They won't be there to be rehired. That's a massive loss in knowledge and institutional knowledge. Institutional knowledge is the biggest thing you lose when people who have been around a long time leave the company. It's a massive hidden cost that bean counters never consider. A person's job description is easy to replace, but everything they know about the intricacies of the organization is gone. I personally think onboarding an entirely new person to a moderately sized organization takes at least two years. So the loss of institutional knowledge and the addition of clueless bosses are two factors.

Cutting rules and bureaucracy is a good thing in theory. I can tell you from experience that there are massive bottlenecks in government because there are so many rules and regulations that nobody knows what to do, they always default to 'no' and I've even seen motivated people dig into rulesets and discover that what people thought was 'policy' was just something they had all been doing for some reason for 20 years, and even then it takes a lot of movement and approvals for people to just do things the right way. So the government fat certainly needs trimming, but as you said, it's going to go to far. People are going to die. This is another factor.

I think a huge chunk of government work will be outsourced. Outsourcing specialized skillsets is going to cost much more than hiring them in-house because market forces drive SME pay. But the issue with this is that if the in-house brain trust is gutted, taking over anything that has been ongoing is going to front-load anything with cost significantly to keep it going because these new people will have to figure out why systems x y and z even work together because they've been there for 30 years and are held together with coder Bubba's duct tape. That's another factor.

It's going to be a cluster**** while the new regime figures out that they can't break the bureaucracy....and that they will have to reimplement a lot of it, but with people who don't know what the **** they're doing because they lost so much knowledge forever. They will have to spend more to bring in huge teams of contractors to figure **** out, only to determine that old systems are going to have to be entirely replaced because anyone under 50 doesn't know wtf to do with the old cobbled together ****. On the front lines, paying people minimum wage to deal with the public is going to implode because if you think governmental worker apathy is bad, wait until you put a fry cook in charge of gathering disability information from 90 year old deaf people.

In the end the pros may be a less cumbersome rulesets, slightly less bureaucracy and newer systems, but it's going to take a long time and it's going to hurt the country, badly. This isn't private industry- something Trump should understand from his first time around and that his cronies like Musk and RFKJ are about to get rough, unlubricated indoctrination in.