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I saw a few videos on TikTok where the video makers were talking about their experiences working for the Government which amounted to them watching their fellow workers waste time and brag about it.
And Amy Sukwan wrote about working for the census bureau and being told to work slower by her fellow workers because she was making them look bad.
Her experience reminded me of when I worked at the IRS in college. (Don’t hate me, I needed the money and the pay was good.) I was a Math major at the time and the IRS put notices in our building that they needed seasonal temporary workers for Tax Season. ...
Once I got to the PreAudit Department no one wanted to examine Schedule G’s. If you ever had to do one you’d remember why. Very long and complicated and lots of math with big numbers. But a friend and I were really good at them so the other workers gave them all to us and we’d have a contest every night to see who got the most done. He was only 16 and I was only 18 and we were processing these things 5 times faster than the permanent workers.
This was a huge problem for those permanent workers because it made them look bad. They were always telling us to slow down because we were making the average higher and then they had to work harder.
Truthfully, having those contests was the only thing that made a monotonous job fun so we didn’t listen to them. Once again I got promoted and this time it was to the full Audit Department. I think the permanent workers told their bosses to move us. And they split us up. He went to a different section of the PreAudit Department. We’ll handle the Schedule G’s ourselves! “So what if we’re slow? Who cares, it’s taxpayer money anyway.” That was the prevailing attitude.
And once again, me, the lowly college student was outperforming the permanent workers so they started sabotaging me. I could not believe that they were okay with mediocrity…I mean it’s our taxpayer dollars paying these people and they intentionally were working slow and trying to keep me from doing my job since it made them look bad.
We had to lock up all the returns when we left for the day, and somehow mine would be lost and I’d have to spend time locating them. Of course this would lower my productivity numbers. And I had clerks to take care of files for me and they would hide them and put them at the bottom of the pile to slow me down. And take stuff out of my desk so I’d have to spend time finding my stuff.
I remember walking by carts of tax returns waiting to be processed and thinking “I wonder if anyone just throws these away to help their productivity numbers?” Years later I read in the newspaper that a few hundred workers were found to have been routinely throwing tax returns in the trash to make their productivity look better. This was at the Austin, Tx service center but I bet it has happened elsewhere…
The thing is that these workers are almost impossible to fire! Once they get through the probabion period, they have to be guilty of gross negligence to be terminated. Just being slow is not really enough to get you fired. A lot of the workers just want to do as little as possible to get by. ...
My boss told me that I wasn’t finding enough extra overlooked tax. Our job is “revenue,” she told me. “I thought it was to collect the correct tax,” I told her. You can see why I was really popular there.
When I didn’t produce enough revenue, they started auditing me. By this time I was a permanent employee too, so they couldn’t easily fire me. And since I don’t cheat on taxes and they couldn’t find anything wrong, they audited my parents. Who also never cheated on anything in their entire lives, I’m quite sure of that. Lots of wasted audit dollars there. My parents took them to court and won. I actually didn’t start out to write a post about the IRS per se, it’s just that so much is wrong with it!
My boss told me that I wasn’t finding enough extra overlooked tax. Our job is “revenue,” she told me. “I thought it was to collect the correct tax,” I told her. You can see why I was really popular there.
experiences working for the Government which amounted to them watching their fellow workers waste time and brag about it
On January 20th, the day Trump took office, a DOGE team including current and former Musk employees assumed command of the critical Office of Personnel and Management (OPM). DOGE delivered pull-out sofa beds to the fifth floor of OPM headquarters. The fifth floor is OPM’s top-management floor.
The sofa beds were installed so the DOGE team could work around the clock.
Meanwhile, OPM’s staff managers, like its CMO Katie Malague, were quickly and neatly moved out of their offices down to new offices on lower floors. It was a physical and psychological demotion, even if not any change in title or salary.
"It feels like a hostile takeover," one of the leakers complained to Reuters.
Next, OPM employees were unceremoniously cut off from all administrative access to the systems. They can still log in and do their work, but they cannot access any management functions or data. All this change is making their jobs much more exciting than usual.
OPM staff were “surprised,” for example, by the “Fork in the Road” memo last week, since the first time they saw it was at the same time it was sent out to all federal employees.
Amusingly, the article was sourced from leakers, but failed to connect the obvious dot: the DOGE team cut the OPM staff out of the loop because they clearly think the career people will leak like rusty sieves.
I’d hoped DOGE would do some good stuff, but I had no idea it would be like this. ...
The Treasury Department issues all payments on behalf of the United States. In that sense, every social security payment, every grant, tax refund, stimulus payment, Obamacare reimbursement, foreign aid, Fauci’s security detail’s strip club reimbursement, the whole works— if paid by the US, the check comes from Treasury. It issues more than 1.3 billion individual checks totaling over $6 trillion yearly.
In other words, Musk’s database engineers have been dying to dig into that Treasury data, to determine exactly what the US has been buying and who we’ve been paying. For example, does his name end with “-ensky?”
This database is the mother lode leading to the deep state.
But for two hectic, fast-paced weeks, the Treasury Department has stubbornly refused to give DOGE any access to the payments database. The rift leading to the resignation referenced in the headline happened when newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ordered the highest-ranking career bureaucrat at Treasury to turn over the passwords.
Instead of doing, that he resigned. (It could be more accurate to say he was offered a chance to resign. We don’t know. After all, he can still take that 8-month deal.) The bottom line is, he refused to turn over the passwords.
Late in the article, the WaPo got around to admitting that DOGE’s request for access was completely legal. Trump ordered Treasury to do it back on January 20th when the President created DOGE. So if anyone is breaking the law, it’s career Treasury officials:
The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all
agencies to ensure it has "full and prompt access to all unclassified
agency records, software systems, and IT systems," which would appear
to include the Treasury payment systems.
Treasury officials’ resistance looks more like bureaucratic defiance than lawful objection. Bureaucrats cannot just ignore a President’s lawful order. If officials disagreed on the legality, they should have sought a court injunction—rather than deploying rogue bureaucratic resistance.
Trump’s executive order mandated transparency and reform. DOGE’s charter is to expose entrenched waste, inefficiency, or even corruption within the government, including the Treasury payments system. There is no reasonable objection to allowing DOGE its access.
Fauci’s security detail’s strip club reimbursement
database is the mother lode
Wife makes about $80K, but works 12 hours a day between teaching, correcting homework, and preparing lessons. Around here, that's not enough for a middle-class lifestyle.
On the other hand, it's her choice because we don't really need the money. She could quit and we'd still be fine.
The pension is supposed to be good, but I don't know how good. She's been a teacher for only three years.
Musk quoted a slew of threats directed against himself and other DOGE employees on X made under the subreddit "r/whitepeopletwitter," many of them violent in nature. The original post appears to have been taken down on Reddit, but X user "Reddit Lies" posted a screenshot of over a dozen threatening comments.
"I'll say it. This nazi stooge needs to be shot," one user said.
"It's time to do more than dragging names, let's drag their necks up by a large coil of rope," another said.
Several threats demanded other users find and post the addresses of DOGE employees so others could "deal with them." ...
Martin also pledged to look into other figures, including former Minnesota Democratic House candidate Will Stancil, who is known for his X presence. In one quoted post on the social media outlet Bluesky, Stancil said Musk "should get the wall."
Stancil protested the attention, denying he had done anything illegal and deriding Martin as "Musk's pet US attorney."
Acting DC US Attorney Ed Martin Announces Incoming Charges Against Individuals Who Threatened Elon Musk’s DOGE Workers ...
“Our initial review of the evidence presented to us indicates that certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees,” Ed Martin said.
“We are in contact with the FBI and other law-enforcement partners to proceed rapidly. We also have our prosecutors preparing,” Ed Martin added.
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