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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 14h

Trump spending money without authorization during the shutdown was pretty predictable. Dems should respond with a commitment to claw back stolen taxpayer dollars from the personal fortunes of Trump, Bessent, and other high-level officials. Promise to impoverish everyone remotely responsible.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 14h

Also, Dems need to commit to holding high-level officials who distribute these checks, including Trump, personally liable. The next Dem admin should claw back these taxpayer dollars from Trump's personal fortune and Hegseth's assets.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 1d

He has brilliantly defeated the antifa conspiracy to sap and impurify his precious bodily fluids.

hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 1d

The organization level of RIFees varies depending on the agency that fired them. My impression of the general sentiment is that nobody (including Dem politicians) wants to expend political capital fighting for us, and that's been demoralizing.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 1d

A lot (the majority I think) of federal departures are from DRP and VERA/VSIP takers. The absolute number of RIFees perhaps hasn't reached a critical mass.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 2d

Oh, Mackenzie, why didn't you take the Post in the settlement? Seriously, if the Post were standing up to Trump right now, it would be stealing NYT subscribers, attracting great journalists, breaking epic stories, and just doing the country a lot of good overall.

hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 3d

I would add that the fragmentation of America's educational system adds a lot of stress to parents who want to ensure their kids get a good education. Every school district has a bespoke curriculum. It's wasteful and makes tracking your child's progress unnecessarily complex.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 4d

These guys are part of Texas’s elite Midwest infiltration corps. Give them a plate of Polish sausages and a Bears jersey and they’ll blend right into the Chicago population. They are at the perfect weight to survive a Chicago winter.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 4d

Dems need to pledge loud and clear that they’ll claw back this money from the personal funds of anyone, particularly Trump, involved with illegally distributing tax dollars.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 9d

Congratulations to all the Dems who supported the Laken Riley Act, which is why ICE was able to hold this guy.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 9d

If you‘ve been to the house before, bring a tacky painting or print as a gift and tell him where the perfect spot for it is.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 9d

Right. If Trump declares that spending funds is necessary to protect the national security of the country, Republicans in Congress are not going to stop him. SCOTUS would probably agree. Maybe this is too pessimistic, but it seems like a plausible outcome to the shutdown.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 9d

So, Trump is implementing economic sanctions on blue states as if they are foreign adversaries. He’s sending federal police forces into blue cities to intimidate them. His bigotry targets a large percentage of citizens in blue states. I wonder if he’ll push the country to a literal breaking point.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 10d

Trump could say (and SCOTUS and GOP MoCs would probably agree) that protecting national security justifies him spending funds without congressional approval. He’ll give money to red states and stiff blue states.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 10d

Pretty much none of the recent RIFs have followed the law and regulations. The admin will probably repeat its favorite RIF procedure. Eliminate an office/branch, define it as a competitive area, claim that no retention registers are necessary since it's firing everyone in the area.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 10d

One of the more degrading things about being a federal employee during Trump 1 was having to take annual ethics training, which included a refresher on the Hatch Act. Just an amazing example of the binds/protects dichotomy.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 10d

If SCOTUS or MSPB give the government permission to RIF without real competitive areas and retention registers, like most of the recent RIFs, that creates a pretty big hole in civil service protections. It eliminates preferences for veterans and long-term/high-performing employees.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 11d

It’s just waiting for a direct hit from a Category 5 storm to sweep it out to sea and put it out of its misery.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 11d

Preferences for veterans and other criteria for ranking federal employees in RIFs are now optional, if not dead letter, because the administration is not creating retention registers and not allowing employees to bump and retreat (displace other employees based on their ranking).

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 11d

In practice, this means that veterans in an office that an agency decides to eliminate will lose their jobs while non-veterans with similar job functions in a “safe“ office in that agency will keep theirs.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 11d

But DOGE wanted to make a splash and fire Feds quickly. So, its flunkies identified work units (an office, for example) for elimination and then defined the competitive area as that unit. Agencies then claimed retention registers were unnecessary because RIFs applied to everyone in the area.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 11d

Dems should be attacking the Trump administration for ignoring veteran preferences when firing federal employees. By-the-book RIFs (layoffs) take time because you have to define competitive areas (job functions) and then identify and rank employees in those areas (build a retention register).

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 11d

My assumption is that the majority of the public will blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, since most people associate Republicans with hating the federal government. The legislative technicalities aren’t going to have a significant effect on public opinion.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 11d

I think the administration’s argument is the lapse in funding allows them to RIF employees even if statutes mandate them: the funding lapse essentially negates the statutory mandate.

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hermetician.bsky.social @hermetician.bsky.social · 11d

DOGE did botch the RIFs at NIH. It eliminated organizational units, but failed to eliminate some personnel in those units (the cause was a coding error). So, there are bunch of folks on the rolls at NIH with no official duties.

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