The desire to “just follow orders” is strong in lots of humans.
Separately, much of our bureaucracy is not used to receiving crazy orders. So all along the chain of command you have people who aren’t mere robots, but they also aren’t used to looking at every instruction passed down from their boss and critically evaluating “is this insane, or merely unusual?”
One hell of a lot of government workers are going to have to learn quickly that they will now often receive malicious orders or malicious policies. And each of them will need to decide what they’re going to do about that.
It’s the upper few tiers of career civil servants that ought to be the mirror, reflecting the crazy back upwards with a firm “No, and you can’t make me/us.”
Unfortunately, those farmers are going to go to their Congresspersons and probably get a government handout to make up their loss. Just like what the soybean farmers did during Trump1 when a retaliatory tariff by China dried up that market.
They’ll also probably blame the drought on wind turbines or something. We have a lot of stages of denial and insanity to go through before they could blame Trump for anything.
I’ve been trying to think of a good version of DEI, like “Diverse Economic Investments”. You know something clever (annoying) to ask when I hear about DEI hires.
I dunno. In my career, I have received countless orders which impress me as just stupid and unnecessary. Heck, last December we received a policy “Ruling” that had an absolutely unnecessary effective date which just caused considerable extra work while making zero difference. When asked who decided on that date and why, as far up as I was willing to go the answer was, “We don’t know who chose that or why, but our Agency (who wrote the damn thing) had no choice.” Whereas, if they had asked ANYONE who actually has to apply that policy, they woulda said, “Wait a minute. Don’t pick THAT date - pick THIS one.”
Have that occur every couple of years - absolutely unforced errors - and you just get used to following stupid and inexplicable directives. How many workers are willing to give up their livelihood by refusing to follow a stupid decision? How immediate and direct would the likely harm have to be before something rises to a “whistleblower” situation.
The line between routine stupid and actionably insane can be hard to discern.
So the dam operator is sitting there thinking, “This is really stupid, and is going to cause a lot of people a lot of hardship later. But I asked my boss and they insist I have to release the water. Sure, the future hardship will suck, but I need to keep collecting my paycheck. Not a lot of open “dam operator” positions paying what I make…”
Same goes for the dam operator’s boss. And likely their boss…
I’m reminded of the opening scene from the movie WarGames (although that’s a test of compliance with a seemingly real order to launch nukes and not just something stupid pulled out of Trump’s ass). I imagine Musk would like to replace the majority of federal workers with a modern-day version of the WOPR. At least the WOPR could learn in real-time.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing soon that a lot of positions will be replaced by an AI associated with Musk.
Yes. I fully expect a replacement program to be created, even if under a different dept
However, since USAID used those materials to feed hungry people in other countries, I do wonder what they will DO with the surplus ag products they buy.
Maybe give them to a disguised branch of trump org instead and then trump org will sell them to other countries at market price.
I suspect we’ll see a lot of this sort of thing on the government procurement side of things. Either the feds buying stuff at inflated prices from trump-owned middlemen or the feds giving stuff to trump-owned middlemen to sell on.
I would think that Trump would use any surplus food to feed the pardoned J6’ers, and all the US white supremacist/SovCit/Neo-Nazi/paramilitary groups they can identify.
I kind of doubt it. Either USAID gets restored to some semblance of what it was or they’re shit out of luck.
The thing is, the leopards know, better than us apparently, that denial runs strong in the heartland.
Those farmers? They aren’t going to blame Trump to any real degree. It’ll be denial all the way.
Something like “Surely my government handout (err…benefit) was not wasteful. They should be targeting the real waste” and/or “I’m sure this is a mistake. Once he realizes they’re hurting the wrong people, he’ll fix it!”
And even if they get screwed, at no point in the foreseeable future will there be any introspection or remorse over their own choices or actions. They will always say it was other leopards (probably Musk in this case but maybe DEI or something, who can really figure out that level of mental dysfunction?) or that the leopards made some kind of honest mistake.