> It would actually have made more sense to convert all these positions that wouldn't fall under Policy/Career (that you for some reason believe could) and then to dismiss the individuals without offering this deferred resignation.
They cannot, as I understood it, get the loyalty boost they want from converting a position to an F (Policy/Career) position because of the laws Biden introduced to protect roles from that kind of interference.
In April 2024, the Biden administration put into effect a regulation named "Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles" (89 FR 24982) that allows employees to keep existing job protections even if their positions were reclassified, preventing most of the effects of a reinstatement of Schedule F.
So, again, getting these employees to leave of their own accord allows them to convert as many to Schedule Policy/Career as possible without the employee in the seat. Because Biden and Congress introduced protections that would have stopped them being dismissed.
And did you not read what Miller is quoted as saying? I don't know why you are arguing against the idea that the intent here is about loyalty to Trumpism, when they are saying that with their creepy little outside voices.
Many, many of these jobs going up the seniority scale will reappear but be recreated as Schedule Policy/Career.
(Schedule F no longer exists, I think)
I mean, I might be wrong. But wait and see: I don't think I am going to be wrong. It is abundantly clear that Trump and the people around him are trying to create a civil service that is loyal to the President specifically.
He tried before to do this which is why Biden produced legislation to make it difficult.
Trump's stated aim in this presidency, as well as in his prior presidency, has been to radically expand the range of jobs that fall under Schedule F.
If you don't know that, then you have not been paying attention. It's safe to assume he will use every lever possible to remake roles as political appointments, and this will be one of those levers.
ETA: Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, said the government's two million workers were "overwhelmingly left of centre", adding it was "essential" for Trump to "get control of government".
So it is clear -- from the mouth of Goebbels 2.0 himself -- that Trump intends to use this process to reshape the political slant of federal government.
Any "it's purely about the cost" argument is dead in the water. There will be recasting of roles as political, there will be loyalty pledges, there will be litmus tests.
> this is just a way to reduce headcount by the end of this FY
It's not just a way to reduce headcount, as the next four years will make abundantly clear.
People will be hired back into these jobs under the new Schedule Policy/Career -- the replacement for Trump's Schedule F.
Basically: the people getting the offer now have protections set up by Biden in response to Trump's Schedule F, that Trump would like to buy them out of.
The people hired back into them will not. They will be asked to be loyal to Trump.
It's important to understand that we had "AJAX" before we had AJAX, if you see what I mean.
I was part of a team that deployed an e-commerce site that made international news in 1998, that used AJAX-type techniques in a way that worked in IE3 on Windows 3.11. (Though this was not part of the media fuss at the time; that was more about the fact of being able to pay for things online, still)
The arrival of XMLHTTPRequest made it possible to do everything with core technology, but it was already possible to do asynchronous work in JS by making use of a hidden frame.
You could direct that frame to load a document, the result of which would be only a <script> tag containing a JS variable definition, and the last thing that document would do is call a function in the parent frame to hand over its data. Bingo: asynchronous JS (that looked essentially exactly like JSON).
Since there were also various hacky ways in each browser to force a browser to reload page from cache (that we exhaustively tested), and you could do document.write(), it was possible to trigger a page to regenerate from asynchronous dynamic data in a data store in the parent frame, using a purely static page to contain it.
In this way we really radically cut down the server footprint needed for a national rollout, because our site was almost entirely static, and we were also able to secure with HTTPS all of the functions that actually exchanged customer data, without enduring the then 15-25% CPU overhead of SSL at either end (this is before Intel CPUs routinely had the instruction sets that sped up encryption). We also ended up with a site that was fast over a 33.6 modem.
This was a pretty novel idea at the time -- we were the only people doing it that we knew of -- but over the years I have found we were not the only team in the world effectively inventing this technique in parallel, a year or 18 months before XMLHTTPRequest was added to browsers.
(IE3 on Windows 3.11 was a good experience, by the way. Better behaved and more consistent than Netscape)
At around the same time we were also exploring things like using Java applets to maintain encrypted channels and taking advantage of the very limited ways one had to get data in and out of an applet. For example you couldn't push out from an applet to the page easily, but you could set up something that polled the applet and called the functions it wanted.
I don't like to get all "get off my lawn" but it feels like we actually earned our keep back then, getting technologies to do stuff that no standards working group anywhere was really considering and for which precious little documentation actually existed. There's a generation of us who held our copies of "Webmaster In A Nutshell" and "Java In A Nutshell" very close.
They cannot, as I understood it, get the loyalty boost they want from converting a position to an F (Policy/Career) position because of the laws Biden introduced to protect roles from that kind of interference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy/Career_appointment#Repe...
In April 2024, the Biden administration put into effect a regulation named "Upholding Civil Service Protections and Merit System Principles" (89 FR 24982) that allows employees to keep existing job protections even if their positions were reclassified, preventing most of the effects of a reinstatement of Schedule F.
So, again, getting these employees to leave of their own accord allows them to convert as many to Schedule Policy/Career as possible without the employee in the seat. Because Biden and Congress introduced protections that would have stopped them being dismissed.
And did you not read what Miller is quoted as saying? I don't know why you are arguing against the idea that the intent here is about loyalty to Trumpism, when they are saying that with their creepy little outside voices.