Mass Firings Aren't Meritocracy

Meritocracy or random firings? Over in DOGEland, things are going just about as you’d expect: more firings, this time at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where some 800 probationary employees (out of 13,000 total employees) are being let go. The Social Security Administration plans to slash its workforce by half. An office within the Department of Labor tasked with enforcing equal employment opportunity laws is cutting staff by 90 percent, per internal documents. Meanwhile, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head honcho Elon Musk is tweeting about how it’s not just cutting that his team aims to do, but also a healthy bit of promoting.

Hundreds of federal workers are being promoted daily every time we encounter excellence. The @DOGE team will be more clear about this.

The goal is to make the federal government a meritocracy as much as possible. https://t.co/ThmWMY28V2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 27, 2025

But the way DOGE has handled these firings probably isn’t the right means of getting to meritocracy, unfortunately. Some of this is because their hands are tied: It is very, very hard to fire long-time federal employees, whereas it is much easier to fire recently hired probationary employees. Part of the problem is that DOGE—or rather, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which has been tasked with carrying out a lot of the employee audits—appears to possibly not have the authority to be doing many of these firings.

“A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind directives that initiated the mass firing of probationary workers across the government, ruling that the terminations were probably illegal, as a group of labor unions argued in court,” reports The Washington Post. “Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” said U.S. District Judge William Alsup from the bench. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”

Meanwhile, “the Justice Department argued that the president has ‘inherent constitutional authority’ to decide ‘how best to manage the Executive Branch, including whom to hire and remove, what conditions to place on continued employment, and what processes to employ in making these determinations.’” Assistant U.S. attorney Kelsey Helland said that the unions objecting to the firings were “conflating a request from OPM with an order from OPM.” It’s all very legally thorny, figuring out who is allowed to do what.

But, though it may be beautiful to see useless parts of the federal bureaucracy absolutely destroyed, it bears repeating that mass firings are not meritocracy: If DOGE wants to fire probationary employees because they have fewer worker protections, so be it, but in many cases, that just means snuffing out the careers of promising younger or newer employees—not necessarily the least productive employees.

The federal civil service could be shifted from union-protected roles, insulated from consequences for bad performance, to at-will employees; Congress has the power to change this at any time. (Bills to do so have been introduced before.) It’s odd that the Trump administration hasn’t pursued more structural change or pressured Congress to make that happen—not only to ensure they have the legal authority to make the workforce changes they seek, but also to guarantee these positive changes stick around for years to come.

More people seeking unemployment benefits: As I was saying yesterday, firing people is costly. Indeed, “the number of Americans filing for jobless benefits rose by 22,000 to 242,000 for the week ending Feb. 22, the Labor Department said Thursday,” per the Associated Press. Now, this is a three-month high, but it’s still within the normal range. It’s a spike, but it’s not an absolutely crazy spike—just yet. But federal employees laid off by DOGE haven’t all filed for their unemployment benefits, so the number is expected to continue its upward climb over the coming weeks and months.

Epstein files released, but also kind of not: New Attorney General Pam Bondi had been hyping the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, specifically information the government has been withholding about the sex-offender financier who died in jail and the powerful people he associated with on his horrifying rape-island. But the actual release contained pretty much nothing new, leaving more questions than answers. “The document dump largely consisted of flight logs for Mr. Epstein’s planes—long ago made public—and contact information for hundreds of associates, along with brief descriptions of items found at his residences,” reports The New York Times. These white binders were released to MAGA-sycophant influencers, who posed for a distasteful photo op with them, and are apparently now pretty pissed off that there’s not much actually there:

The binder-wielding influencers are frustrated with how Pam Bondi handled today, per @RaheemKassam https://t.co/XTlaO86Hpq pic.twitter.com/iCMvdt5S9a

— Jacob Shamsian (@JayShams) February 28, 2025

The government made a big thing about pursuing transparency, but there’s been no such thing. They most likely have far more than 200 pages worth of information on Epstein’s associates; why was such a big deal made of this release, when they’re clearly withholding?

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Scenes from New York: How “Big Window” became a design trend.

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QUICK HITS

• Matt Taibbi on Just Asking Questions: “The Department of Homeland Security…has this concept, you know, they call it building resilience on the one hand, or pre-bunking on the other, which is this idea of introducing a potentially controversial or difficult idea to an audience early so that they’ll be more accepting of it later. So, for instance, if it’s usually it’s done in a way that’s supposed to be prophylactic, like you warn somebody five months ahead of time that there could be, you know, Russians might interfere with the election, and that will make people more receptive to the idea that there is when you do that story later on. But sometimes they also like to introduce an idea. And this is all about how do we protect people against certain kinds of ideas and how do we conditioned them to accept others, like about the vaccine. And either they talk about building resilience, which is we want the the population to and sort of on their own reject psychologically certain ideas before they’re even posed to them. So there’s a lot of signaling that goes on in media…the 60 Minutes [German hate speech] thing felt to me like a classic seeding of a of an idea.” Honestly…my favorite episode yet. Matt Taibbi is a gem. Please, please, please watch our show on YouTube; I guarantee you’ll learn something from this episode.

• DON’T DIE comes to Calabasas:

The Kardashians and @hubermanlab came over for dinner.

We discussed if we may be the first generation to not die. @KimKardashian was down. @khloekardashian wasn’t sold. On @hulu tonight. pic.twitter.com/bAkHFXe1tH

— Bryan Johnson /dd (@bryan_johnson) February 27, 2025

• “China warned it would hit back at Donald Trump’s trade threats after the US president unveiled additional tariffs on Chinese imports, raising the risk of tensions spiraling between the world’s largest economies,” reports Bloomberg. “Beijing’s reaction came hours after Trump announced an additional 10% tariff would take effect March 4, citing drug flows from North American neighbors at ‘very high and unacceptable levels’ and China’s alleged role in its supply. The new levies follow a previous 10% duty implemented earlier this month and represent part of Trump’s broad salvos that span technology and investment.”
• Modernizing this process seems like an obviously good move:

Excited to share I’m bringing my designer brain and start-up spirit into the government. My first project at DOGE is improving the slow and paper-based retirement process.

Since leaving my operating role at Airbnb in 2022, I’ve been looking for the next digital design challenge.… https://t.co/P6GoccLcZJ

— Joe Gebbia (@jgebbia) February 27, 2025

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Source: https://reason.com/2025/02/28/mass-firings-arent-meritocracy/