What Elon Musk Didn’t Budget For: Firing Workers Costs Money, Too

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The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.

https://archive.ph/f9UTL

[CHdiver]

After paying once, you safe after year after year. I think that is a good deal. If it would be cheaper to keep people employed indevinitely, nobody would ever lay off employees. Still, companies lay off workforce every day. 

[Tug]

11 minutes ago, CHdiver said:

After paying once, you safe after year after year. I think that is a good deal. If it would be cheaper to keep people employed indevinitely, nobody would ever lay off employees. Still, companies lay off workforce every day. 

I’d be hard pressed to find any American citizen not interested in cutting waste in government.that being said doge is a disaster of epic proportions.If trump had done this carefully with study he would be good even i would be supportive (yes we know how I feel about trump)unfortunately it wasn’t untold Americans have been hurt not to mention the needy that have been denied.its just another epic failure on trump.

[Jim Blue]

Last time this happened it involved Tulips !

[MicroB]

36 minutes ago, CHdiver said:

After paying once, you safe after year after year. I think that is a good deal. If it would be cheaper to keep people employed indevinitely, nobody would ever lay off employees. Still, companies lay off workforce every day. 

 

Generally the reason why companies "lay people off" is improve EBITDA; shore up share price, and meet earnings projections. People are also laid off following M&A; duplicated roles.

 

Not comparable to undustry. The reasons are different.

 

Britain went through this in 2010, with the Bonfire of the Quangos. It didn't work then. Labour is planning to repeat this. It won't work now (by working, achieving more efficient public services). For nstance, Labour is planning to abolish NHS England. NHS England is a Quango. Someone very good at charts presented a convincing reason why NHS England had to be created to deliver better healthcare. And someone with very good charts will present good reasons why it needs to go.

 

Government efficiency drives usually result in the government having pay hefty upfront costs of consultants to tell you how to achieve efficiencies, then they bugger off. What often happens is that the normal functions of government, performed by salaried civil servants on modest salaries, say £40,000 PA, end up getting outsource fo contractors on £120,000 a year. Seen it happen with the MOD, utter disaster. And whats worse, you end up employing the same people you let go on triple the rate, but now they only bother showing up 2 days a week, the rest of the time, taking lovely holidays, or hobbies. Literally, the daily rate of a MOD contractor is £1000-1500 a day.

[Andre0720]

18 minutes ago, MicroB said:

 

Generally the reason why companies "lay people off" is improve EBITDA; shore up share price, and meet earnings projections. People are also laid off following M&A; duplicated roles.

 

Not comparable to undustry. The reasons are different.

 

Britain went through this in 2010, with the Bonfire of the Quangos. It didn't work then. Labour is planning to repeat this. It won't work now (by working, achieving more efficient public services). For nstance, Labour is planning to abolish NHS England. NHS England is a Quango. Someone very good at charts presented a convincing reason why NHS England had to be created to deliver better healthcare. And someone with very good charts will present good reasons why it needs to go.

 

Government efficiency drives usually result in the government having pay hefty upfront costs of consultants to tell you how to achieve efficiencies, then they bugger off. What often happens is that the normal functions of government, performed by salaried civil servants on modest salaries, say £40,000 PA, end up getting outsource fo contractors on £120,000 a year. Seen it happen with the MOD, utter disaster. And whats worse, you end up employing the same people you let go on triple the rate, but now they only bother showing up 2 days a week, the rest of the time, taking lovely holidays, or hobbies. Literally, the daily rate of a MOD contractor is £1000-1500 a day.

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, suggests that roughly 80% of outcomes or consequences are derived from approximately 20% of causes or inputs.

So that 20% of employees do some 80% of the work. In a large governmental organization, this gets catastrophic.

 

As Jordan Peterson explains, tackling this useless percentage of staff will have consequences, many of them unforeseen.

 

I have witnessed some attempts by political leaders to deal with this problem, by trying to reduce the number of employees, but to be met by strong resistance from the bureaucrats, who benefit from having so many next to useless employees,

And many times the 'Bureaucracy' wins over the political attempts to reduce waste.

Musk is dealing with this now...

 

 

[impulse]

I'm pretty sure Musk is keenly aware of what it costs to lay people off, having fired about 80% of the Twitter staff and ending up with a better platform for it. 

 

Last time I looked, X is making about the same $$ profit on half the revenue (because of the predictable lefty advertiser boycott).  So maybe the gub'ment can provide a better level of service with fewer employees if they can shed the ones that are working against their customers... The citizens.

 

Gub'ment was never meant to be a jobs program for the otherwise unemployable.  Anyone who's ever had to deal with getting a new driver's license can tell you a horror story.  Not all DMV employees are lumps of useless skin, but about 20% of the good 'uns have to pick up the slack for the 80% that are.  It's the same across Federal agencies, too.