https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/12/the-show-so-far-doge-edition.html

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/11/can-we-expect-large-federal-workforce-cuts.html

@NicoDelon I think there is good chance federal employees go up as they hire thousands of new border patrol agents and immigration agents to manage the mass deportation they keep talking about.

@datachef some numbers will go up, yes, which makes it all the more difficult to reach net minus 250k.

Feels like every time we have a new administration, people forget that the US government has a separation of powers.

Elon might achieve this by leveraging Twitter mobs to scare people into quitting: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/11/27/business/elon-musk-government-employees-targets

@TimothyJohnson5c16 How do you pressure 250,000 people?

@Shai You publicly attack a few people, and scare the rest into quitting for fear they'll be next.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 Just firing them seems easier, but I can't say I would be opposed to this if it ends up working.

@Shai I don't know exactly how it works, but I think it's not so easy to just fire lots of government employees. For example, many (most?) of them are part of a union.

🤡 🤡 🤡

@Predictor we live in the best possible reality

What if the employees are on furlough or some kind of "you're fired", but we'll still keep you on the rolls for 2 years? That's what Elon said somewhere....

Are they still employed?

@VishalDoshi resolution criteria:

Outcome verified from FRED.

What matters is the FRED chart. If you want to adjust your bets based on potential furloughs or other such edge cases, you'll want to make sure you understand FRED's methodology.

The order book on this market is hilarious. Real odds are like 5 percent especially since no matter what they do they won’t be able to stop new hires so they might purge that many but it will be offset. On top of that Trump is going to use the military to deport people supposedly and that is going to require likely requisition of state national guard into federal service. Plus like aren’t they going to hire a shitload if border guards or patrol or whatever??

@datachef Then you should be going all in if you belive that, aye?

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/musk-and-ramaswamy-the-doge-plan-to-reform-government-supreme-court-guidance-end-executive-power-grab-fa51c020?st=d543P9

250k is a lot. but it's also like... only 10%? idk, elon went absolutely ridiculous when he bought twitter. 10% was a light day early on lol. maybe it's possible

Only 250,000? That's like, almost the same thing as making sure the number doesn't go up.

Change in fed govt employees following elections charts I made, data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/204535/number-of-governmental-employees-in-the-us/

@summer_of_bliss sorry axis on second chart should be thousands not millions

@summer_of_bliss hm this is pretty interesting. Thanks for putting together. Wonder where those mostly came from (as in which departments or areas)...

From this source, 70% of federal employees works in natl security / defense (unsurprising)

However, I would have likely expected a spike in 2001 after 9/11, not the largest decline as seen in Brad's chart. However, possibly changes either didn't show up to 2002, showed up according to a different physical year boundry, or did not actually affect things as I expect.

@Dgfold yeah on 9/11, shows change in average number of employees across 2001 versus 2000, so wouldn’t pick up much change

here’s a more comprehensive chart:

@summer_of_bliss The big spikes followed by drops are probably from the census every ten years. It's not as volatile as it might seem.

@summer_of_bliss it would be nice to see a chart that also counted contractors, though that would probably be hard to do, since the move to have more of those is masking the growth rate.