Unhinged Nazi controls US government
UPDATE (February 6, 2025): U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. has temporarily blocked Fork in the road fraud. However, I have yet to be notified by the Musk youth who illegally infiltrated the computer systems at OPM.
I am a federal employee. And I will not comply with a series of illegal demands and threats, including the Fork in the Road “deferred termination” program. It is a bogus sham, with no money allocated for these payments.
Everything I write is old news by the time I finish the paragraph
An unelected oligarch has taken control of the US federal government. He feels justified in carrying out this hostile and illegal takeover because he bought the presidential election for Donald Trump, who has installed himself as dictator. Trump has no mandate for anything, despite what he says —
he won the popular vote by only a narrow margin (49.8% to 48.3% for Vice President Kamala Harris). So now the Christian nationalists at the Heritage Foundation set policy for the rest of us, as written in their blueprint for oppression (see Project 2025).
Controlling (and culling) the federal workforce through threats and fear
Musk is treating the federal workforce like Twitter employees, which means he wants to fire 80% of us. The “terms” of the deferred termination offer (if you can call them that) are constantly changing:
January 28, 2025 (original Fork)
If you cancel under this program, you will keep all salary and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempt from all applicable requirements for personal work until 30 September 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate the termination for any reason).
However, the FAQ states that employees are not expected to work at all, while some sample contracts state that employees agree to work through February 28 (and payment comes with a caveat: “Subject to the availability of grants…”).
As the deadline approaches, threats to accept the offer have escalated.
“The reality is clear: A large-scale reduction, in response to the president’s workforce order, is already happening. The government is restructuring, and unfortunately, many employees will later realize they missed a valuable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” (an anonymous) official said.
But the response so far has been overwhelming. Recent news reports indicate that only 1% or 2% of 2.3 million federal workers have accepted the offer.1 The deadline is 6 February 2025 at 11:59 AM EST
UPDATE: A federal judge has temporarily blocked the implementation of this fraudulent offer.
DOGE is a clown show (until it wasn’t)
The Department of Government Efficiency is a performance unit. It has no official position in the Executive Branch and yet issues one illegal memo after another. The most outrageous starting trick — to “pause” financial assistance programs — has been blocked by temporary stays and restraining orders. The ignorance and ineptitude of DOGE would be comical if critical programs for farmers, commercial fishermen, meat and poultry inspection, veterans, rural economic development, Medicare prescription drugs, Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, NSF, NIH (and thousands more) were not halted indefinitely.
And the irony is that…
I welcome a genuine Department of Public Efficiency to improve IT capacity and reduce the delays and administrative burdens involved in all aspects of research. It is disheartening. But I’m not going.
Footnote
1 Great comment:
This is not about you – your performance, your value, your contribution to public service. This is about a billionaire who panics because his big idea collapses under the weight of reality. He wants you to be afraid. He wants you to think that staying is a risk, that leaving is the only way to survive. It isn’t.
