> so the money to pay people to September is questionable if it exists at best
Incorrect.
The money is budgeted through September (end of federal FY). Things are currently only funded through March 15 (CRs and whatnot). The money is or will be there. Historically, even if there is a furlough, this money is backfilled and folks are paid. Note that there will probably be riots if lengthy furloughed folks don’t get back pay.
> So there's a very real chance at this deal offering something closer to ~1 month of pay before it suddenly gets dropped due to budget negotiations.
Correct.
The speculation is that:
1. The “resign” folks will be put on admin leave in March 1 (or earlier).
2. Budget impasse in mid-March. Furlough ensues.
3. Folks on admin leave just end up getting cut, or not paid, and/or not back paid due to peculiarities of admin leave.
> It would be an incredibly generous and nice buyout package, but obviously if it gets torn up after a month it's not that great of a deal.
I think it’s above average, but not “incredibly generous”. People get $25k VSIP and VERA offers all the time. This may not seem like a lot, but many fed employees live in low COL areas and/or earn relatively low wages.
The best parts of the package, assuming they deliver, would be things like insurance (for non-retirees) and possibly TSP contributions and matching (if those are allowed).
If they want the numbers they say that they want, I think something near this level of package is necessary.
So the fed defunding whatever they like by fiat gives the Republicans nothing to offer the other side to play ball because anything that they offer could easily be taken away. Its like showing up to the auction with monopoly money.
Without the dems they need almost every Republican to agree because their margin is only 5 votes. Historically this is difficult because their ranks now include several morons and extremists most notably the lady who actually believed Jews were responsible for starting wildfires with space based lasers.
If a handful of extremists don't ask for crazy nonsense they will still have every hand out for pork.
Then it goes to the Senate where it needs 60 votes including dems to pass anything. The first round of crazy if it passes anything might easily end up with something too stupid to pass the Senate without also termination of the fillibuster.
Republicans only hold the house by two seats so to pass something they need to have everyone on board. Any single republican member of congress that wants to hold the whole thing hostage for demands pretty much can.
> Is it a given there would be a budget impasse, if all institutions of power are held by Republicans?
No. American political parties are more akin to continuously-branded coalitions than parties in the way they work in parliamentary systems. There is a minority of House Republicans who will vote down any budget bill because they reject the concept of federal government.
Generally a small cadre of extremists within the ruling party holds the entire government hostage for a few days over performative nonsense for future campaign purposes.
> Is it a given there would be a budget impasse, if all institutions of power are held by Republicans?
I’m not an expert on this topic, so please take these comments with a grain of salt:
1. The simplest way a budget impasse could start is with internal feuding within the Republican Party. Some Republicans are very aggressive deficit hawks all the time. Some Republicans are only “deficit hawks” when a Democrat is president, but they spend freely when a Republican is president. Note that almost all of the largest budget deficits since 1990 have been under Republican administrations (Covid years under Trump and Biden were wonky and should probably be asterisked). So the pork-seeking Republicans and the deficit hawk Republicans can get into a stand off about what the budget should be.
2. Even if Congress is on the same page, Trump can choose not to sign the budget if he doesn’t get his pet issues addressed. This may seem like something that they should be able to work out beforehand, but his “priorities” change, sometimes daily, often based on who he happened to have spoken to last.
3. Some republicans want the government to break. The playbook here is to break the system in some way, point out that the system doesn’t work, and then make attempts to privatize that system or massively overhaul that system (likely with massive cuts of workers and largesse to contractors). It may seem odd that an elected official strives to make the government not work, but they are able to make that tack work for them at the polls. I think that this is a deep (and warped) issue that is hard for me to explain well.
Also, the last House was wracked with all sorts of deadlock because the Republican majority was only 5 representatives, and having 5 splinter off was incredibly easy.
The current House has an even smaller majority of 2 currently, so it's now infinitely more possible for a deadlock to happen.
2 are nearly guaranteed to break because we have a couple of republicans that always vote no on budget bills because they want massive cuts to everything.
That means either the bill ends up completely destroying federal funding, which risks losing centrist republicans or republicans in tight district races. Or the bill ends up trying to win over a few democrats in similarly contested districts, which risks losing a fair bit of republicans that reject any bills that have democrat votes.
The counterpoint from what I have been reading is that the Dems will not be helping without concessions, particularly about oversite regarding Elon musk, and doge.
That is what Trump is doing via DOGE so the burn-it-down camp seems pretty well served, more than anytime since the post-war demobilization anyway. The impasse, if it occurs, is more likely to be with those in Congress that don’t want to reduce the size of government.
I think the burn-it-down camp is better described as true believers in free-marketism, and they genuinely expect business to be booming and things to work great when they've cut back on government functionality.
DOGE acts different. It seems to me DOGE is about crashing the US economy and/or world economy to attempt wild and radical Silicon Valley theories about alternate societies. As such, its actions are inclined to ruin the fortunes and the business of the free marketeer camp, because those folks are functioning in the real world and have businesses, employees, and pay those employees in dollars.
So I don't think the 'burn-it-down' camp should favor DOGE. It is in no way their ally and is there to ruin them, in order to rebuild a society upon somebody else and leave 'em ruined. It's pretty plain to see DOGE's opinion of those people based on its attitude to H1B visas, for instance.
> It seems to me DOGE is about crashing the US economy and/or world economy to attempt wild and radical Silicon Valley theories about alternate societies
I see absolutely no evidence that the DOGE crowd wants to crash the economy and while they do have a utopian ideology so does the left.
Additionally, the DOGE crowd would say they’re trying to dismantle an unaccountable deep state conspiracy that threatens the American economy through an accelerating accumulation of government debt and regulations and has been trying to transform society globally for decades through political, social, economic, and military intervention all to serve the progressive elites.
I think both of your views are lacking in charity and perspective, although the DOGE view in so far as I’ve accurately described it has vastly more evidence backing it up.
The quote is “markets will tumble” by which he clarifies that it will be a temporary market overreaction not “crash the economy” like it’s 1929. Those are qualitatively different things.
He intends to make the market crash (or at least is taking actions that will almost certainly crash it), but he thinks it will recover afterwards. The first part is pretty certain with what they're doing. The second part is almost impossible to predict, because no one can really say what the break points are (i.e. how much it can crash and still quickly recover afterwards). See the mortgage crisis of 2008 for what an unexpected runaway effect looks like.
The US is $36 trillion in debt with that debt growing at an accelerating rate. This is happening at the time that our technological (let alone economic) edge over most of the rest of the world is fading to completely gone, and our own growth rate is starting to decline. To many, this does not seem to have the makings of a sustainable state of affairs.
And not only that but a lot of the spending we engage is a mixture of minimally beneficial and/or outright corrupt. For instance at one point the Air Force was paying $10,000 for toilet seats. It's only after that received extensive publicity that they swapped over to simply 3D printing the seats, probably for a few bucks per seat. [1] There's about a 99.999% chance that the supplier for those $10,000 toilet seats had a rather low degree of personal separation from the person signing off on paying $10,000 for them. And now imagine how much you could save if you started wiping this nonsense out of the entire government.
Government spending, however, is accounted as part of GDP and other economic metrics. Each one of those toilet seats sent the GDP up, improved the economics of the company delivering them, and even created some jobs. So getting rid of this nonsense will obviously 'hurt' the economy in the short-run, but in turn you get a sustainable system, dramatically reduce spending, and create a more competitive economy. When it's even possible to sell toilet seats for $10,000 (easily replaceable by 3D printing), who cares about the private market? To say nothing of the fact that merit/competitiveness is obviously completely nonexistent or farcical for many government contracts.
Filibuster is just a procedural rule that can itself be removed by simple majority, and it has already been watered down on a case by case basis when that was politically expedient, so there's no hard line there. It's actually kind of amazing that we still have it.
> The money is budgeted through September (end of federal FY). Things are currently only funded through March 15 (CRs and whatnot).
Since the budget is only funded through March, the budget can be modified in March in order to extend the funding for it (all those "government shutdown avoidance negotiations"). At which point it won't matter whether it was budgeted or not.
If they were not paid because they were on "admin leave", does that look bad for Trump, or does that look bad for Congress? And who in a Republican Congress will want to do that anyway? They're mostly on board for this bullshit aren't they?
I don't think that's ever really been a problem for Trump. Everyone I talk to who supports him expects him to be a hail-mary grenade thrown into DC—a big middle finger to the powers that be. They feel completely disenfranchised and want a shake-up.
Amazingly, so far, it hasn't hurt his approval numbers.
If you believe the unreliable polls. He actually started higher than he did in his first term. His job approval is near the highest it has ever been. It is higher than 7/8 of Bidens term. See
The numbers are irrelevant. It is a second term presidency. What matters are the numbers for those facing reelection in less than a couple years. Even the burn down crowed don't want to remain on a wagon heading for a cliff in four years.
Given the levels of turmoil and also the levels of power grabbing, I think the president's approval ratings are very relevant.
For one, if they dip as low as they might given the expected economic hardship and the other cultural issues, you might start seeing rioting.
For another, I don't think it's a given this is Trump's final term. There already is a congressman trying to get in legislation to change the constitution to allow a third term. Even if that fails, the SCOTUS has already taken some egregious decisions in relation to Trump (full presidential immunity even for political assassinations) - what they might think they can get away with in the next four years is anyone's guess.
FWIW the constitutional amendment to enable a third term for Trump is guaranteed to fail. No matter how it is drafted, even if they do a convention, the ratification still requires 3/4 of state legislatures to vote in favor. And Republicans don't have 38 states. They won't have them even if every single state with split legislature goes full red.
I won't speculate on whether they could pass it. Democrats have been too sure of themselves for the last 7 or 8 months, and where has that gotten them? But whether it passes or not, he won't survive long enough. He's an old geezer, fat, and in poor health. Strong change he doesn't even make it to the halfway mark in this one.
Nothing ever looks bad for Trump. His followers will always make excuses for him. The latest is that Trump campaigned on “America First” and isolationism and now MAGAs are cheering his ideas of using American troops to take over the Gaza Strip and making it a tourist destination.
I guarantee Trump and his sycophants will just turn around and say they were lazy bums who wanted to get paid to do nothing, and the fact that this option was presented in the form of an early retirement offer will make exactly no difference.
You've gotta understand the dynamics of social media information warfare. Loyalty trumps any other considerations like factuality or consistency, people will denounce tomorrow what they championed today if need be. I've seen some pro posters who post contradictory responses to Trump or Musk statements and then just delete whichever one gets less positive engagement.
> If they were not paid because they were on "admin leave", does that look bad for Trump, or does that look bad for Congress?
It would be Trump/Elon.
Someone told me the details of how they could not pay people. It’s administrivia. It will go unnoticed by most just like how the twitter folks not getting paid went unnoticed by most.
> And who in a Republican Congress will want to do that anyway?
They give zero fucks about fucking over feds or former Feds, as they are (allegedly) all lazy and useless.
The end result will be less money spent (trivial, but still) and a lower head count moving forward.
The Republican rhetoric on this largely doesn’t jibe with reality.
Yes, there are underemployed people in the federal government (as exist in any large org). Identifying that slack and cutting it is not something that can be done with laser shots from space. They can only be done from the ground, imho. The current way they are doing things is going to end with a lot of unpleasant unintended consequences.
Unfortunately, a big part of the Republican playbook in the last decades has been to intentionally cripple government institutions so that they can then claim that the institutions are not working well and thus should be entirely dismantled. This is done either to remove institutions that are regulating business (currently happening with the CFPB) or to replace institutions which are helping people so that private companies can step in (one of the main reasons for attacking the ACA aka Obamacare).
The idea in Project 2025 is mostly to take this to a whole new level and apply it to the majority of the federal government.
Correct.
> so the money to pay people to September is questionable if it exists at best
Incorrect.
The money is budgeted through September (end of federal FY). Things are currently only funded through March 15 (CRs and whatnot). The money is or will be there. Historically, even if there is a furlough, this money is backfilled and folks are paid. Note that there will probably be riots if lengthy furloughed folks don’t get back pay.
> So there's a very real chance at this deal offering something closer to ~1 month of pay before it suddenly gets dropped due to budget negotiations.
Correct.
The speculation is that:
1. The “resign” folks will be put on admin leave in March 1 (or earlier).
2. Budget impasse in mid-March. Furlough ensues.
3. Folks on admin leave just end up getting cut, or not paid, and/or not back paid due to peculiarities of admin leave.
> It would be an incredibly generous and nice buyout package, but obviously if it gets torn up after a month it's not that great of a deal.
I think it’s above average, but not “incredibly generous”. People get $25k VSIP and VERA offers all the time. This may not seem like a lot, but many fed employees live in low COL areas and/or earn relatively low wages.
The best parts of the package, assuming they deliver, would be things like insurance (for non-retirees) and possibly TSP contributions and matching (if those are allowed).
If they want the numbers they say that they want, I think something near this level of package is necessary.