After we spent most of Monday taking stock of the damage so far, wasting time responding to a nonsensical status report, and assessing the immediate impact of all this chaos and wasteful destruction on our ongoing project work with partner agencies, true to form we got an email blast after close of business on the east coast.
This one notified us of the intention to execute a reduction in force (RIF) from our acting administrator, a man who seems to believe that paying lip service to “fairness and dignity” and flashing the occasional namaste is fooling anyone.
What this tells us is that not enough people took the fork, the Merit Systems Protection Board is already finding the mass probationer firings to be an illegal RIF, and waiting to deny worthy people term extensions as their “not to exceed” dates come up isn’t going to put up the numbers being demanded from Central nearly fast enough.
Meanwhile, the latest stupid weekend twitter stunt backfired in a way that humiliated the fool who thought it up, so that’s funny. Apparently he’s out there claiming his “test” was a success and he’s gonna do it again, and this time he really means it, guys!
So, while the odds are as ever not in my favor, I still take it as a good sign that they have to admit they are executing an intentional reduction in force and restructuring of these agencies, and that they will need to at least make a show of doing it by the book now.
Given that they are still using administrative leave as a way of “sort of firing people” despite the rules limiting such leave to ten days maximum, there is no telling what their interpretation of the RIF regulations will look like (or whether OPM is furiously rewriting them even now to accommodate the whims of an addled oligarch drunk on the vapors of his own echo chamber and unable to find a dank enough meme to fill the growing emptiness consuming him from within).
So once again we get back to doing the work of the American people while these bozos think of more ways to distract and demean us.
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