Thursday, February 27, 2025

Putting Federal Layoffs in Perspective

As jobs are cut from our bloated federal bureaucracy the media and the Democrats would have us believe that this is very cruel. Yet tens of thousands of people lose their jobs in the private sector every year. Why should those working for the taxpayers expect to have lifetime job security that workers in the private sector don't enjoy?

Tom Bevan posted on X a partial list of private company layoffs announced in the last two months:
  • Chevron: 8,000
  • Blue Origin: 1,400
  • Estee Lauder: 7,000
  • Workday: 1,750
  • Salesforce: 1,000
  • Dow: 1,500
  • Amazon: 1,700
  • Bridgestone: 700
  • BP: 7,700
  • Meta: 3,600
He could've added Joann and Starbucks to the list. Starbucks announced that they'll soon be laying off 1000 workers and Joann is closing all their stores which employ 19,000 workers.

If opponents of DOGE's work want to cite cruelty, they might look in the political mirror. Joe Biden fired 2% of the Federal Workforce (70K) for refusing a very dubious vaccine; he also deprived at least 10,000 pipeline workers of their livelihoods by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, and his "green energy" boondoggle cost thousands of miners and others their jobs.

The advice given to these folks by the compassionate Democrats was "get green jobs" (Jen Psaki) or "learn to code."

What many of the fired federal workers were doing while collecting a paycheck from you and me ranges from the ridiculous to the disgusting. Many of them were doing next to nothing, including not even showing up to the workplace. Others were seeking to undermine administration policy, and still others were using their office computers for online chat groups involving various forms of sexual perversion.

It's unfortunate that the house-cleaning will probably harm some good employees, but it's hard to get rid of a malignant tumor without harming some healthy tissue. Even so, just as a tumor needs to be purged before it kills the body so, too, does our federal bureaucracy need to be purged before it does irremediable harm our country.