I doubt you'd have much pushback against a proper evaluation of operational staffing, if it identified jobs which weren't necessary. There probably wouldn't be pushback if there was transparency either.
It's just a bit odd watching people cheering on something that is being badly implemented under secrecy, because "their side" is doing it.
Oh and for all of the jobs and thousands of people now out of work, the actual savings are turning out to be a drop in the ocean.
Agreed. I have many thoughts on the current situation that veer into politics to one degree or another, and I'm trying my best to keep that out of here. I'm also choosing to ignore statements in this thread that are obstinately misinformed and border on the absurd, rather than engaging them pointlessly.
But, while observing reactions to the cuts this week, I've realized there's a widespread temptation to make a false equivalency between private sector layoffs and the current indiscriminate federal firings. My concern is that many people who've worked in the private sector their whole lives are prone to a line of thought that goes something like this: "I've had to deal with job insecurity and layoffs my whole career; about time these folks get a taste of it, too." Here are a couple reasons I'd push back on that:
1. These firings had nothing to do with removing low-value employees, or even high-cost employees. Indeed, most probationary employees are likely younger, hungrier to advance, and have a lower salary than the median non-probationary employee. They were targeted first solely because they're easier to fire due to a fluke of federal law that has no analog in the private sector. If you own a small tech business and decide you need to reduce your payroll expense, I doubt you would target a superstar 25-year-old you hired last year for an $80,000 salary that delivers more value than the mid-career $160,000 co-worker on his team who's in coasting mode. Yet, the young superstar
was fired from NOAA this week.
2. There's a fundamental difference in the nature of government work vs. private enterprise, at least for some areas of government... including many within NOAA. If you're laid off from a Silicon Valley tech startup, or an oil and gas company, it sucks... but it's fairly likely their competitors have similar or even identical roles. This is less true in government, admittedly to different degrees for different roles. The issue I see for the research, development, and infrastructure sides of NOAA is that these employees did critical, high-value work for society as a whole (including providing the foundation for private sector services and products)... but equivalent private sector roles simply don't exist, and it's not practical for the private sector to "compete" in some of these spaces. I implore skeptics to consider, for example, extremely bright scientists and engineers with a stellar performance record who chose a career path working on the WSR-88D radar network, or working at EMC on physics parameterization schemes for our NWP models. Throwing these people out of government capriciously is not only devastating for them personally and professionally, but a net negative for all of us. Sure, they may be able to find
some new role in academia or the private sector that leverages their science/math chops in a broad way... but realistically, they chose a path of specialization earlier in their education/career whose only direct application currently exists in government.
3. This is more of an addendum to #2: the reality is that the federal government is responsible for a large share of jobs and funding in meteorology, either directly through NOAA jobs or indirectly through grant money. A sudden pullback on this funding will very likely be devastating for the job market as a whole. Most of the private weather enterprise is built
atop NOAA services and publicly-funded research; it is not really set up to compete with or supplant it. Arbitrarily plucking some extremely high achievers out of NOAA and dumping them into unemployment, with no realistic prospect of high-value private sector jobs suddenly appearing in their place, does not bode well for anyone... not least new and upcoming graduates, whom I fear for greatly.
