VOA/RFE operations were actually run by a separate non-profit org that got the vast majority of its operating funds from the feds. So, federal worker protections aren't relevant by dint of the org(s) being set up at arm's length.
That said, the current regime has had no problem acting outside of the law and existing federal employee union contracts. Tell people they're dismissed, cut off the email and building access, wait for the lawsuits, and then simply ignore the decisions weeks/months later and/or follow them with as much malicious compliance as they need to achieve their original aims.
tl;dr: No, employment protections fundamentally don't exist in the US, and doubly so for those employed by the federal government within an atmosphere of rampant lawlessness.
Insofar as you're tariff-ing everything that moves, the less you particularly care about internal revenue. The endgame is to eliminate the income tax entirely anyway, so why would one want the IRS at all?
"Effective for what?" is always the key question. Various unhinged "proposals" (invading greenland, invading panama, an iron dome-like system to cover basically all of north america to shoot down...whatever Canada and Cuba will launch at us??) suggest nothing other than full funding++, used in dumb ways (which I suppose is better than circa 2002 WoT defense spending?).
Until last November, Hegseth's "whole thing" was being a frat anchor / defense witness for Fox. Talking about him being anything like a serious figure is absurd.
>> Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending
>
> This is so wildly wrong and easily disproven that I really can't take the rest of what you say seriously.
Defense accounted for $805B out of a total discretionary budget of $1.7T. The next largest category (using the CBO's classifications, not mine) are veteran's benefits @ $131B, and it goes down from there. If you want to quibble with what "overwhelming majority" means, I guess you can do that, but I doubt that's interesting to anyone.
I'll wait for you to 'disprove' the above.
tbc, I am not surprised by any of this (as you say, he was very clear about his intentions), but let's not pretend that there is any policy-specific valence to the outcome of any vote in the current electoral system. People vote as they do for their own (usually terrible, and usually unrelated to policy) reasons, and the people that win get to do what they will with the power bestowed upon them. Insofar as Trump's and Republicans' actions make life for the bottom ~80% harder, don't be surprised as buyers' remorse sets in pretty heavily. And so goes the "debate".
A bag of leveraged real estate and casino holdings, plus a smattering of dollar store swindles is what denotes entrepreneurialism in the modern HN world? Wild times.
> Surely we all agree on medication and life-saving care for children.
That is absolutely not a given. The currently in-power minority earnestly believe that people are only due the level of healthcare they can personally fund and afford, period.
> These are real questions that Americans are trying to answer right now.
Which Americans? There's no grand debate happening right now, just a table-flipping tantrum.
It's a fun exercise to do the chin-stroking thing of asking about efficiency and tax rates and so on, but it's so disconnected from the reality of the federal budget that it's hard to believe it's anything other than a cynical tactic.
Military spending is the overwhelming majority of non-discretionary spending, and there are effectively no limits to it. Meanwhile, extremely high-leverage foreign aid (like the HIV-related treatments that have been mentioned) are always first on the chopping block, along with things like school lunches and early childhood education that have been demonstrated to be effectively free in terms of how much spending on remediating bad outcomes later in peoples' lives.
It's impossible to talk about real numbers in this case of course, and speaking strictly about percentage points or bips doesn't capture the thrust of the change (or situate it accurately vis a vis stripe's continual fee inflation, i.e. see elsewhere others' comments ~"stripe has been nickel and diming us for years"). In an era where stripe has used its cache to capture certain business communities wholesale and then ratcheted up pricing in ways you wouldn't expect outside of a monopoly player IMO, I think it's helpful to be super clear about the relative change rather than absolute change.
Well, they have the organizational maturity to accommodate enterprise customers, and in contrast to much of this subthread, they don't say things like "just use curl".
As long as they're approximately the only "enterprise" option, that's a moat all by itself. No comment on the valuation, but it makes for a very resilient business.
I'm not comparing e.g. burglaries to car thefts, but the category of property crimes to the category of violent crimes. The former range from unfortunate nuisances to unpleasant material losses (depending on how well you've scoped your insurances); the latter can be life-shattering tragedies.
Your "legitimate question" is insulting to me and to those who actually are autistic. Everyone on HN is so nice.
No, I don't think being pickpocketed (or having my car stolen or whatever) is "equally as scary" as if my daughter were assaulted or kidnapped. I'd be ashamed to think they're equivalent, lest my daughter believe I view her as valuable as a hunk of steel or a wad of cash.
> Property crimes lead to a generally dangerous living area and people don't like to live in dangerous areas because it necessarily leads to more violent crime.
This is deeply incorrect. As has been repeated and cited over and over, violent crime in e.g. SF is not particularly high (lower than most other US cities), while its property crime rate is outrageously high.
That's great; in general, people should be, and I'm not looking down on them for doing so.
However, property crime is absolutely irrelevant when presented with the news of someone's murder, yet so many people here are quick to conflate them as somehow equivalent vis a vis personal safety, etc.
(Sidenote: I personally don't understand anyone thinking that property crime is "scary". Your car is not your kid. Your wallet is not your body. Your house is not your family. These things are not in the same class, and a loss in one category is not the same as a loss in the other. I'm not sure how one could argue otherwise, but it's apparently a widely-held worldview.)
You're right, "violent crime" is a term of art that involves the commission of a…crime. "Verbal assault" is not assault. I guess if you don't like the vibes in a place, you can go somewhere else, but trying to use such things to influence how people talk about or perceive actual, no, for real crime is intellectual malpractice.
The only thing I'm "championing" (just pointing out, really) is that certain populations seem to enjoy using anecdotal tragedy to promote their own quasi-apocalyptic worldview re: some American cities, despite all available data contradicting that worldview.
I'm sure everyone here appreciates the update on your locale, and your own stories of property crime and/or non-criminal (yet perhaps unnerving?) personal interactions. Alas, none of that appears to be relevant to either the submitted story, or homicide or any other violent crime.
People see homelessness and open drug use and petty property crime, filter it through their ideological lens, and amplify that into feeling that they are themselves somehow less safe. You can assert that that is rational, but it's as connected to reality as someone feeling afraid when e.g. a black person is walking behind them.
Saying stuff like "a lot of [violent] crime goes unreported" is straight up fanciful thinking, and leads one to make claims that aren't falsifiable. People aren't reporting assaults? Sounds completely absurd.
The story contradicts what so many here took as a given, that Lee was a victim of stochastic violence in SF. The highlighting is in revealing that so many were wrong in applying their biases to the original news, and then using that to leverage into e.g. condemnations of the city in general.
That said, the current regime has had no problem acting outside of the law and existing federal employee union contracts. Tell people they're dismissed, cut off the email and building access, wait for the lawsuits, and then simply ignore the decisions weeks/months later and/or follow them with as much malicious compliance as they need to achieve their original aims.
tl;dr: No, employment protections fundamentally don't exist in the US, and doubly so for those employed by the federal government within an atmosphere of rampant lawlessness.