After laying people off, paying people to leave, DOGE and the government are posting the same positions to filled. These are vital positions within the USDA. This is the worst kind of bureaucracy, the redundant bureaucracy that DOGE promised us they were going to stop.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Caleb Cunningham: Alright, so this story’s just breaking, after laying people off, paying people to leave, they’re posting the same position to fill that position now. It makes no sense. What is happening here?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is truly just one of those head scratching moments because what we saw, US Department of Agriculture was a big one, USDA, this was when DOGE went around and said, listen, you’re probably going to be fired, but we’ll give you an offer here. Take this leave, we’ll pay you for five months through September, and then you get to basically retire or leave, but you get five months of pay and if you don’t take it, there’s a really good chance we’re gonna fire you. So this was all these workers thinking, okay, my job is not going to exist. But now those same positions, those people who took the deal, DOGE and the government have posted openings, hey, we need people. We need these jobs that we just got rid of, filled. It’s completely backwards and now there’s no good people left.
There’s nobody that really genuinely wants to take these positions because they know we’re dealing with an administration that is almost schizophrenic. You never know what it’s gonna be on any given day. The mood changes in an instant. You could be hired today and fired tomorrow. We actually saw that with the acting commissioner of the Social Security. Worked for two days before he was fired. So people are hesitant to even apply for these positions because is the rug gonna be pulled out from under me? They just fired the person that had this job. Do I even want to waste my time going through this and then being fired a month later? So it’s a horrible position for the government because we need these people. These are not just, oh, it’s a pencil pusher. They don’t do anything. These are vital positions within the USDA.
Caleb Cunningham: And it’s interesting because the trade off for everybody who goes into the federal government is that, I won’t get paid as much, but I get good benefits and there’s stability. This is upsetting the apple cart, that there’s not stability and whether or not there’s good benefits is a question now, because that’s all in flux. But there’s these stories of these people that they see their job being posted online to be filled as they’re being terminated. So you’re losing all that experience. Anybody who’s run a business knows that an experienced worker is worth more than somebody new off the street. It takes you a while. Nobody likes being the new guy. You don’t know anything. And I question the person coming into the government now knowing what all’s happening. Are they the most qualified or are you desperately trying to fill a position that you created by almost laying off people, maybe laying off people, unring and firing?
This has been very schizophrenic. This is what people don’t like about government, is when the bureaucracy is just whiplash back and forth. And there’s packaging, oh, this is government efficiency, but this is the most inefficient thing you could possibly do. You’re hiring people to replace people that you fired who were doing a very good job, who had not been terminated for cause. You were just laying off large swaths. I think this is why other administrations didn’t do this. There’s a reason why in the modern era, we’ve not seen an agency just take hatchets to whole swaths, because there was a reason, whether you agree with the reason or not, that these agencies were created, that these people were hired and they’re filling some function, particularly in the USDA, like the meat inspectors, the milk. We’ve seen headlines about, we’re just not gonna inspect milk anymore.
Farron Cousins: It’s mind blowing and it’s dangerous, obviously for consumers across the country. And it reminds me a lot of, in the 2008 campaign, you had a big debate, one of the three, back when we were still doing three debates, John McCain said, we got to go in there and start slashing all this government spending and Obama much more reserved, says, listen, there’s obviously places that can be cut. And we go in with a scalpel, not with the hatchet. And we analyze everything and we look at specific things and say, okay, here’s a redundancy. We don’t need two people doing this job. This is definitely a one person job. Hey, we’re spending this much on this budget item. We don’t need to do that. Let’s get rid of it. Instead of just saying, when I come into office, which is what many of the cabinet appointees did, they said, I’m gonna fire 30% of the staff.
Just off the top of their heads. They make up that number without any rationale reasoning at all behind it. 30% of you are just gone overnight because that’s the number I came up with. So it doesn’t make any sense. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. There’s not cause, as you mentioned, to fire these people. If there were redundancies, look at it. Watch what’s happening, take a year or two and then say, okay, listen, I don’t need you doing this position. However, maybe you’re better suited over here. But they didn’t do that. They just said slash and burn the whole way and who cares what happens?
Caleb Cunningham: Well, I think they certainly overlooked as their want to do, they relocated one of the agencies to Kansas City, and the Kansas City government has come out and said, you fired all these people and you’ve caused a hardship on our city because disproportionately, we’re seeing houses go for sale in DC on fire sale prices because these agencies are laying off all these people. But then they’re rehiring them, rescinding the resignation, it makes no sense. They accidentally fired the people in charge of the nuclear arsenal a few weeks ago and then they realized what they did, and they hired them again. You know, Farmers rely on USAID, a lot of folks don’t realize this, but when we send the USAID over to Africa or to wherever it’s going, a lot of times they make contracts with farmers in this country for, hey, we need more sorghum next year because that’s what we’re making these patties out of or whatever they’re selling. Those farmers don’t have those contracts anymore. So across rural America, you’re seeing this infusion of cash and nobody wants to admit that they’re on the dole, but farmers get a lot of incentives to grow certain things, to not grow certain things and that’s how we incentivized it in this country. That tool is now gone to us.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And it becomes a situation where when you have incompetence at the top, which let’s be honest, that’s what we have. We have people who should not be involved in government. We have individuals who don’t know anything about the department they are running, running it, and they’re causing havoc. They’re causing havoc for the sake of causing havoc. Linda McMahon said in that weird cabinet meeting they had last week, that she’s working really hard to dismantle the Department of Education and get herself fired. There’s no reason for these things to be happening. It’s either based on conspiracy theories, which we see in some government agencies, or just an outright disdain for the government system, because that’s rooted in this conservatism that we have in the Republican party. So they destroy it all and then when there is this dysfunction, like what we’re talking about, they point to it and say, we’ll see how inefficient the government is. No, you did it. This is almost planned obsolescence at this point. You cratered it, you defunded it to the point where it can’t work. But then you put that up as your poster child for this is how the government doesn’t work.
Caleb Cunningham: Where are the Democrats at? Where is the messaging from the other side as this is happening, as this is burning? These are very concerning stories coming out from across the spectrum. Where’s the messaging from the other side other than he is bad? And the people that believe it, believe it and the people that don’t believe it, they don’t believe it.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Caleb Cunningham: Until he fires them, of course, and then we’ve seen those stories where I voted for him, why did you fire me? And people pleading for their old jobs back on Twitter. This is a weird time to be paying attention to politics, but I’ve not seen a coherent message from the left of this is what we’re gonna do or, he’s bad, and if you’re on the left, you believe that and you have proof of that, right. And if you’re on the right, you don’t believe it. But where’s the messaging, or center messaging or something? And we’ve seen some Republicans peel off and say, hey, maybe don’t fire all these people because traditionally the way you got to be senator for 20 years is you brought back the pork and you put space command in your city and so that hired all these people. This slashing affects all these communities, red and blue, and I think they’re gonna realize how important these are. But where is the left? Where’s the messaging from Schumer or those guys that say, this is what we’re going to do, or this is our efforts to stop this?
Farron Cousins: I think a lot of those guys are just thinking, hey, give him enough rope and let him hang himself, which is not a good strategy right now. We need messaging. We need people out there, more of the Bernie and AOC types doing these massive rallies talking about not how bad Trump is, how bad the policies are, the actual issues and telling people this. But most importantly, something I say constantly, start running ads. Start putting these people that have been laid off in ads in the community where they were laid off. You guys have the money. There is no reason why you only run political ads from August through November in an election year. You could do it all the time. It doesn’t have to be promoting a specific candidate, but you could be informing people about the issues that way. And that’s what I think they should do.
Caleb Cunningham: Well, that’s certainly something the Republicans have done very effectively. Benghazi, for instance, they beat that drum. It was not election time and when it became election time, they had been beating the drum so much that it became this very large issue. There is no messaging from the left on this. There is no coherent. I would love to hear in the comments or somebody tell me, how many people do they know that have been laid off, that have lost their job, that made sacrifices to work for the federal government? I think, as an attorney, a lot of us weigh the pros and cons of public service versus private work. Right. And you want to help, you want to do good, but it’s less money. A lot of people take stability and less money because there shouldn’t be downsizing. You shouldn’t be fired for your political views. But that’s been turned on its head.
Farron Cousins: And again, if the Democrats can step it up and play this intelligently, they can ride this all the way through the midterms and beyond. But they have to get out in front of it right now because eventually, you’ve mentioned these Republicans peeling off, more and more of them are are gonna do it. And if you let them become the one saying, hey, listen, what this guy’s doing is not great and we want to stop it. If you let them get to that point, it’s done. And I think they’re getting close. You’re getting enough of them right now, they almost passed the legislation in the Senate last week to stop the tariffs altogether. So the Republicans are this close. If the Democrats don’t get on it, they’re gonna lose the ground.
Caleb Cunningham: Well, I want to talk about that real quick. It was split. JD Vance had to come in and break the tie. McConnell couldn’t, for his health reasons, couldn’t be in Congress and there was a Democrat missing.
Farron Cousins: Whitehouse.
Caleb Cunningham: Yes. So, we were that close and that’s the closest we’ve seen a rebuke from the right, an actual legislative action to put this in check in a long time. And as these agencies are defunded, and this nonsense continues, as this is the worst kind of bureaucracy, the redundant bureaucracy that DOGE promised us they were gonna stop. That’s what they told the voters. To me, they’ve made it much, much worse. I’ve never heard of a government agency trying to hire somebody to replace somebody because they fired them for no reason. But they’re still working there. And then some of these people are paid six months, and so they’re still being paid. Now you’ve doubled the size of the employment of the federal government for no reason and you’ve brought in a new person who’s empirically worse by every metric and doesn’t know what they’re doing and from leadership that doesn’t know what to tell you to do. The brain drain is real and I think it’s gonna take a long time if we’re able to fix this.
Farron Cousins: And that’s another thing that I’ve worried about this whole time is, obviously if they start destroying these government agencies, if they do fire the a hundred thousand, 200,000 workers like they want. How long does it take to rebuild that? How long does it take to rebuild a Department of Education that has been completely dismantled? This is gonna take more than one administration coming after. This is gonna be two or three that are going to have to essentially rebuild the federal government.
Caleb Cunningham: So much of all of this is trust and branding and the trust has been, the federal government will be around, that I will be safe when I take a job there. If that is lost, then you’re gonna have to pay more money and so it costs you in the long run to get qualified candidates. I want to keep an eye on this space, and I hope folks in the comments tell us about your experiences. Tell us about your loved ones. What have you seen in your local community?
