> The reformed federal workforce will be built around four pillars:
[…]
> 4. Enhanced standards of conduct: The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work. Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward. Employees who engage in unlawful behavior or other misconduct will be prioritized for appropriate investigation and discipline, including termination.
[…]
> Upon review of the below deferred resignation letter, if you wish to resign: 1) Select “Reply” to this email. You must reply from your government account. A reply from an account other than your .gov or .mil account will not be accepted. 2) Type the word “Resign” into the body of this reply email. Hit “Send”.
Kamala was also unelected for her position as the democratic candidate for the 2024 election.
My opinion is that was a really dumb idea that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for the democrats.
And the cray crays (“Elon is a Nazi”) have the nerve to accuse the other side of being the threat to democracy. Compared to the non-election anointing of Kamala, other unelected people are just noise. You know I’m right. All of this is just fallout from the unelected candidate being pushed on unwanting voters.
The Westminster tradition is for the public service to give "frank and fearless advice" [1] in the interests of the nation. It's still democratic, as a minister can choose to ignore this advice, at their own peril, and issue orders. As hinted at by their name, a public servant's first loyalty should to the public/nation rather than their Minister/Master. Maybe the US has a different system?
Of course the above is theoretical. In practise governments demand loyalty to themselves and there is little peril to Ministers as there now seems to be little repercussion for denying responsibility.
> As hinted at by their name, a public servant's first loyalty should to the public/nation rather than their Minister/Master. Maybe the US has a different system?
Both systems rely on the people in charge being told okay with being told "no, this is a bad idea".
The Ministers/Secretaries/Executive may think their plan(s) are a good idea and the civil service are being obstructionist.
(Of course the civil service could be wrong as well.)
That show was more than a little bit of propaganda:
> In a 2004 documentary, Armando Iannucci compared Yes Minister to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in how it has influenced the public's view of the state. Although Lynn comments that the word "spin" has "probably entered the political vocabulary since the series,"[4]
[…]
> Adam Curtis, in his three-part TV documentary The Trap, criticised the series as "ideological propaganda for a political movement",[14] and claimed that Yes Minister is indicative of a larger movement of criticism of government and bureaucracy, centred upon public choice economics. Jay himself supported this:
>> The fallacy that public choice economics took on was the fallacy that government is working entirely for the benefit of the citizen; and this was reflected by showing that in any [episode] in the programme, in Yes Minister, we showed that almost everything that the government has to decide is a conflict between two lots of private interest – that of the politicians and that of the civil servants trying to advance their own careers and improve their own lives. And that's why public choice economics, which explains why all this was going on, was at the root of almost every episode of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.[15]
> Jay, however, has elsewhere emphasized that he and Lynn were interested first and foremost in the comical possibilities present in government and bureaucracy and that they were not seeking to promote any agenda: "Our only firm belief on the subject was that the underlying conflicts between ministers and ministries were better brought out into the open than kept secret".[16]
The US system relies on them informing the public, or in case of say the ATF they make quasi law through opinions and then arrest the public and put them in tiny cages.
The public can decide to elect someone to shit can them. We have voted to liberate many of them from service. Obviously some wont like that, but they are servants to the people not peers.
The American people are tired of cleaning up the messes the bureaucracy has made. They've broken the rules, and it is time for the mess to be cleaned up and ejected from their jobs.
Many who have more HN-like peers and communities may not realize this is the opinion of the people, but the awakening is coming when the paychecks stop.
Yes differing opinion on bureaucracy means you are a Nazi! No matter what I'm looking for is closer to the size of US government pre WW1, not a massive army of servants literally gassing minorities.
Yeah, nothing says “order and rules” like revoking and then reinstating all federal grants over the course of what, a day or two? Less?
The order of things is that the GOP breaks everything, Democrats fix it all and get blamed for the painful process of fixing things and the sub optimality of the result, which the GOP has fought tooth and nail to remain sub-optimal because that helps their narrative and sub-optimal government enables them to win elections.
Then the GOP gets to run things again, breaks things senselessly, and we rinse and repeat.
Turns out electing people to government who think the government is the problem is a bad idea: they work to prove that their position is correct by actively breaking the government, thus can argue that they should remain in power because the government is “broken”.
“We are all trying to find the person who did this” meme. But with real human suffering.
> It's still democratic, as a minister can choose to ignore this advice, at their own peril, and issue orders
Whilst this is true, the civil service has been alleged to leak/ brief against such orders, not to mention be obstructive about their implementation.
The hard part for me at least is telling whether this is because eg "ordering us to make buildings out of compacted sand is hard" or "we are going to drag our feet as much as we can because this is dumb"
I think you mean civil servants. There should be nothing we all want more than to have a professional--and more importantly--apolitical civil service whose members are empowered to do their jobs.
Well, a violent mob attacked the capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a democratic election, egged on by the acting president who lost the election. It wasn't a coup, but in other countries we would call that an attempted coup.
That same politician instead of being barred from running for office again for inciting an attempted coup, was allowed to (by the justices who he had appointed to office, conveniently), and in is first act as president pardoned all those who participated in the attempted coup, sending a message that violent attempts to thwart the democratic process are ok so long as it's support of him.
So while not quite Liberia or Haiti level coup, certainly the most serious anti-democracy attempt in US history (makes Watergate look cute by comparison) and yet half the country just shrugged it off, opening the door to a fascist (self-serving politicians married with self-serving broligarchs) government.
I'm noticing quite a few down votes on this. You should know I based this on Wikipedia, it's pretty much just facts. So if you find yourself reading this and not enjoying the facts, maybe you should reconsider your support for that orange clown.
Blows my mind that anyone would vote for him, any time I see a clip of him I can physically feel my IQ dropping. I can't imagine a more obvious moron, it's so clear from listening to him talk that he has no idea what he's talking about half the time and the other half he's lying.
they were just told to resign en masse as a loyalty test (the memo literally uses the word "loyal"), so yeah, no