One of the greatest cons conservatives pulled is somehow convincing many people, including a fair number in the political press corps, that they are the Serious Grownups, when, in fact, their policies are clownish at best. Today’s example is supposed ‘moderate’* Republican presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley who proposed that all federal employees should be forcibly retired after five years. Yes, she proposed that and it’s as fucking stupid as it sounds (boldface mine):
Even Haley, who’s supposed to be the grown-up, “moderate” alternative to these histrionic boys, has offered her own more genteel-sounding version of the proposal. She has pledged to impose a “term limit” on all civil servants, so that every public worker would be fired after a maximum of five years.
Not just elected officials in Congress or the Senate. Everyone in federal government.
This sounds like a clever idea until you think about it for, oh, two seconds. It means we’d have to purge and replace every single air traffic controller every five years. Also all the nuclear physicists working for the Energy Department and rocket scientists at NASA, whose depth of expertise can’t easily be recreated on a five-year deadline.
Add to this list food-safety inspectors, who assess sanitary conditions at slaughterhouses. Statisticians who tabulate labor-market data. Epidemiologists who track outbreaks. Arabic and Farsi speakers throughout our intelligence services.
And everyone else who has some valuable, specialized expertise, and who, because of a sense of duty and belief in their public mission, is willing to tolerate constant denigration from elected officials and lower pay than they could receive in the private sector.
Proposals like Haley’s, in short, are a good way to destroy the basic machinery of government. Not the good “creative destruction” kind of destruction, either. It’s just demolition, involving expulsion of as many subject-matter experts as possible — including those who keep our country safe and our drinking water clean and whose skills are hard to replicate at the price we pay.
I can tell you we would lose at least eighty percent of the people who work on food-borne outbreaks, so if you would prefer to not shit blood for a week after eating that salad, you might want to keep that in mind.
This is not remotely serious, and in a sane political discourse, would be grounds for an utter loss of credibility. Of course, if Trump has a coronary, she might very well be the front runner. As bad as Democrats can be at times, Republicans will be worse–and worse is less preferable.
*Failing to openly endorse insurrection is apparently what passes for moderation in the Republican Party.
mikethemadbiologist
It would wreak havoc on the military. So much for maintaining an officer corps.
Errr… Those who are supposed to keep our drinking water safe haven’t been doing their job for several decades, now. Most big cities have pretty clean water, but most small towns have elevated lead and arsenic levels and their pipes leak a lot. We really need to take some money from the Flag Officers’ Beneficial Society (i.e., the Department of Defense) and build infrastructure. Trump won’t do it, either.
eh, a lot of the real work in food inspection is done by people who aren’t technically civil servants, but contractors.
I think all this would actually do is ensure that the US government spends 5 years training people and paying them low wages, after which time they would go work “for the private sector” to a contractor agency to do the exact same job as before, but for 3-4X the pay.
It would be phenomenally expensive for the public in the short run, perhaps somewhat mitigated in the long run because no new civil servant pension liabilities would be incurred.
Of course, even if it wouldn’t make everything fall apart, it is genuinely stupid. On the other hand, so is the way NASA scientists and FSIS workers and DoE nuclear physicists are currently employed. The instability of NASA funding is brutal, FSIS is underfunded generally and we don’t pay the actual people freezing in meat packing plants anything like enough to prevent us all from eating shit and dying, and DoE has to go through the national labs and their overhead to fund all the nuclear physicists I know (it’s not efficient, though it does have other benefits like insulating me from some of the government shutdown nonsense).