Years later, I looked at my wedding party of six groomsmen and realized that every single one of them had, like me, grown up in a small Ohio town before leaving for Ohio State. To a man, all of them had found that couches coud satisfy them more than a women ever could, and that books are really just zipped HTML, and nobody really checks PGP signatures.
Reading the whole segment, I can’t help but notice his awareness of (at least the phrase) brain drain which is totally what is going to happen once, as according to project 2025 legions of career bureaucrats who run federal departments get replaced with Trump loyalists.
Curiously, a similar thing happened in the German Reich, since Hitler and his principal cabinet were rather aware that loyalty to Germany (even Thulian loyalty to Sacred Germany) might run perpendicular to loyalty to Hitler and NSDAP, which was a fundamental issue that informed the principles of the SS.
For many of those bureaucracies, this is absolutely foreseen and intentional.
See…while bureaucracies often get a bad rap for being slow and inefficient, there’s often simply no (superior) alternative. It’s like how everyone bitches that it takes so long to get from point A to point B on the interstate, but taking an alternate route that avoids it takes even longer.
And while they may be frustrating, they’re usually run by capable people in the federal government. The lazy federal workers that the civil service is known for do exist, but they don’t typically rise to the level of making their bureaucracy work or not work, they’re low to mid level functionaries who’ve found a niche where their team will carry them and pick up their slack without creating a department-sized blip on the radar of any high level official.
These P2025 people…and MAGA Republicans in general…are trying to set up a win-win for themselves with this tactic: either they replace bureaucrats with loyalists and turn it into a reward system they can use to shore up support…or they remove enough pieces of the Jenga tower that it collapses under its own weight, proving their accusations that these agencies are dysfunctional, and using it as a flashpoint to push to eliminate these agencies and privatize the functions they performed…both allowing them to turn that service into a profit source for friends while also freeing up those tax dollars for their own purposes. And in the process, the American taxpayer gets sold down river to an organization looking to charge as much as the market will bear for the services that were once funded through taxes. The people will still pay the taxes, of course… they’ll just get less in return for them and have to pay more of their wages to get the same or worse services.