Kevin Drum

The news is chock full of reports that Social Security may fire as many as half of its workers—all of whom are being pressured to take early retirement in one form or another. It's a huge and seemingly arbitrary layoff.

What makes it especially odd is yesterday's memo from OPM telling agencies to create layoff plans by March 14. It's nowhere near March 14 yet, so why not take the extra time to do a little more planning? Especially since OPM explicitly prohibited Social Security from making layoff plans on its own:

Agencies or components that provide direct services to citizens (such as Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ health care) shall not implement any proposed ARRPs until OMB and OPM certify that the plans will have a positive effect on the delivery of such services.

Very strange. OPM obviously hasn't had time to "certify" anything yet, so what's going on? Who's in charge?

The funny thing about all this is that I can see a case for big layoffs at Social Security. They seem tailor made to implement an expert chat system that would eliminate the need for almost all human support. Of course, this kind of thing doesn't pop into existence quickly. It would take a year or more to implement, and I realize this is too slow for Donald Trump's febrile mind. But if the MAGA crew were willing to act normally once in a while they might truly find a way of saving serious money here.¹

¹Or maybe not. It would take a lot of speccing and prepping and testing to figure out if it could work. But that's real life.

Kash Patel is director of the FBI and director of the ATF. Nevertheless:

He told officials he planned to spend a lot of time in Las Vegas, where he was living last year.

Um, OK. Maybe it's actually better this way.

Another big setback today for Donald Trump. His mass firings so far have been largely focused on probationary employees. However, a federal union argues that it's all a huge scam:

“OPM, the federal agency charged with implementing this nation’s employment laws, in one fell swoop has perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not,” attorneys for the unions said in a court filing.

Judge William Alsup very decidedly agreed:

“Congress has given the authority to hire and fire to the agencies themselves. The Department of Defense, for example, has statutory authority to hire and fire,” Alsup said from the bench as he handed down the ruling Thursday evening in San Francisco federal court. “The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency. They can hire and fire their own employees.”

....“How could so much of the workforce be amputated, suddenly, overnight? It’s so irregular and so widespread and so aberrant in the history of our country.... I don’t believe it.”

Needless to say, this will be appealed, probably on standing grounds. Stay tuned.

NOAA has the unfortunate status of being the government's lead scientific agency for climate change—which no longer exists under the Trump administration. Today it's paying the price:

The Hill confirms this:

The cuts, which are said to affect between 560 and 1,830 workers at the agency, were planned for at least a week, contingent upon the confirmation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agency. NOAA reported a permanent workforce of 11,758 in fiscal 2023, meaning the cuts could affect more than 10 percent of employees.

....Staffers from the Elon Musk-affiliated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly entered NOAA offices earlier this month, before Lutnick’s confirmation. Lutnick denied any plans to dismantle the agency as Commerce secretary, but Project 2025, the sweeping conservative governance blueprint, calls for privatizing and reassigning nearly all of its functions.

It was nice knowin' you, NOAA.

I walked about 15 feet today. Woo hoo!

The doctors are getting eager to kick me out, but I'm a little reluctant. Nor am I excited about moving to a skilled nursing facility for a week. At this point, I think I'm going to bargain for a Sunday or Monday release, at which point I hope to be able to hobble around for 50 feet or so.

It's been nearly a year since California raised its fast food minimum wage to $20, so a couple of days ago the IRLE at Cal Berkeley released its second report on how things are going.

First off, multiple sources make it clear that fast food workers are making more money. Duh. They're making $20 an hour.

The more interesting questions are: (a) has this reduced fast food employment? and (b) how much has it raised burger prices? Here's employment:

After you adjust for seasonality there's no difference between California and the broader US. Employment remained steady.

As for prices, the report concludes that California prices went up 1.5%, or about 6 cents for a $4 hamburger. So that's how much more we're paying.

POSTSCRIPT: I should remind everyone that the average fast food wage in California was $18 before the new law was passed. So there was never any big reason to think it was going to make a huge difference.

Over the past few years the rate of measles vaccine coverage among kindergarteners has dropped nationally from 95% to 92.7% in the latest school year. This decline started during the COVID pandemic but has persisted ever since. The exemption rate for kids increased this year from 3.0% to 3.3%.

But national numbers understate the problem. Only 11 states have measles vaccine rates above 95%, where we'd like them, while 15 are under 90%. Here's a list by state:

It doesn't matter that much if the national vaccine rate is 92.7%. It matters more if you live in a populous state like, say, Ohio, Georgia, or Florida that have vax rates around 88-89%. With numbers like those you're going to have outbreaks.

The national number is a good bellwether, but it's state efforts that get it up to where it should be. It's states we should all be focusing on, not the CDC.

I don't generally pay a lot of attention to weekly unemployment claims, but this week's numbers give me pause for thought:

The latest numbers are for the week ending last Saturday. They're hardly at a record high, but they did jump considerably. Are we already seeing the effects of Elon Musk's mass layoffs? If so, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I don't care about the Washington Post's editorial direction all that much, but yesterday Jeff Bezos announced a big change:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

First question: By "opinion pages" does Bezos mean only the editorial page? That is, the unsigned editorials that officially represent the Post's view and aren't much read these days? Or does he mean all the editorial pages, including op-eds?

Second question: I assume Bezos is talking only about Post editorials. There are not actually very many of these, and writing every day about the same two topics sounds tedious, regardless of how you feel about the subject matter.

But Bezos owns the paper and can do what he wants. In fact, the one place where an owner traditionally has control over things is the newspaper's broad editorial line. So there may be reason to disagree with Bezos but no real reason to be outraged. Especially since he explicitly says opposing views are fine but will be written by others, not the Post editorial board.

Overall, I just wonder if I have this right. Is Bezos merely exercising a common—if contentious—leadership right? Or is there more to it?

Elon Musk has been taking a scattershot approach to firing federal employees, mostly focusing on probationary workers who have limited civil service protection.

But today a memo went out from the Office of Personnel Management that made things more official. It demanded that all agencies submit plans by March 13 for "large scale reductions in force" that would be implemented over the following 30-60 days. A second round of plans is due by April 14.

But it's kind of odd. The memo has a bunch of sound advice—don't break the law, collaborate with DOGE, focus on workers who are typically deemed "non-essential" during government shutdowns—but it leaves out one thing: how big should the layoffs be? 5%? 10%? More? What counts as "substantial"?

There's no guidance whatsoever on this. No suggestion of how many people they want gone. Each agency decides for itself how many people it thinks it can live without. I'm not sure that's a recipe for success. The iron laws of bureaucracy don't go away just because Donald Trump is looking over your shoulder.

By the way, OMB is probably exempt from all this because it's part of the Executive Office of the President. Lucky Russell Vought! But the Office of Personnel Management isn't, and it boasts about 2,500 employees. I wonder how many will get the ax? Gotta set a good example for everyone else, after all.