The United States Can’t Afford the Opportunity Cost of Stephen Miller’s Bigotry
HuffPo had a story describing how Trump has hired 50,000 new people while firing a bunch more in the parts of government that make your lives better,
The U.S. government has hired 50,000 employees since President Donald Trump took office, his top personnel official said, with the new staff largely in national security positions reflecting the administration’s policy focus.
The bulk of the new hires, reported first by Reuters, work at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Scott Kupor, the federal government’s human resources director, in an interview on Thursday night.
The staff changes are part of Trump’s campaign to recast the government while sharply cutting other federal jobs.
“It’s about reshaping the workforce to focus on the priorities that we think are most important,” Kupor said.
The administration brought on the new employees while freezing hiring and laying off workers in other parts of the government, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The administration expects to shed about 300,000 workers this year, Kupor said in August.
Meanwhile, the Daily Beast has yet another story about the continued shitshow of the effort to expand Kristi Noem’s goon squad, this time with the price tag associated with getting people to do such morally repugnant work.
DHS insiders said the money on offer has lured back former executive-level leaders from HSI and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)—with some of them taking home north of $250,000 for office-based shiftwork, per multiple sources who spoke to the Beast.
According to those familiar with the packages, the most senior HSI rehires return as GS-13s on the federal pay scale. With locality pay in high-cost areas—such as parts of Texas, California, and New York—adding 35 percent or more to a basic salary, agents can earn up to $137,000 in the majority of the country. This rises to $171,268 in more expensive parts of the country, such as San Jose and San Francisco.
Law Enforcement Availability Pay (LEAP) adds a further 25 percent for being available for substantial unscheduled duty beyond 40 hours. Add in ongoing federal pensions worth around $8,000–$9,000 a month, and some rehires can land well in excess of a quarter of a million annually, sources said.
50,000 ICE goons in, 300,000 people out, including people who cure cancer, help learning disabled kids get through school, protect our National Parks, ensure your Social Security comes on time, and care for veterans.
After I pointed this out, Christopher Ingraham did a handy graphic to show the trade-off.
Stephen Miller’s dragnet is unpopular in the abstract and wildly unpopular in the lived sense, even — if meekly — among local Republican leaders.
But it still retains support of a big chunk of the population, probably because Trump officials routinely blame their own failures to address American problems on migrants, when as often as not, Trump’s response to immigration is the source of the problem.
America can’t have nice things, like cures for cancer and welcoming public schools, because Republicans in Congress took the money used to pay for those things and gave it to Stephen Miller to use to invade America’s neighborhoods.
We need to start making that more obvious.
Maybe Elon Musk should be employed to evaluate and reduce “waste, fraud, and inefficient spending” in these new Trump “enforcement” organizations. (Sorry…just couldn’t help myself.)
Another excellent, very important article, on a topic barely touched on elsewhere. THANK YOU!
If you’re using polls to determine how popular Miller’s policies are those can be fuzzy. Questions can ask about generic toughness and support for “controlling our border” while avoiding details. The base, those people who are the audience for those dramatic videos, no doubt approve from a distance, but they are far from a majority of voters. The more they cater to the fantasies of the base the more they alienate everyone else.
Everything the government is doing falls under what I call Reality bats last and always gets a hit. The climbdown on tariffs is going to be too little too late to affect prices this year. I would expect doubling down on deportations because they believe their own stories. Reality won’t step up to the plate for another year.
Apparently Homeland Security is planning a blitz campaign during church services at churches with predominantly Spanish speaking congregations (esp Catholic) during the holiday season:
https://thisweekinworcester.com/exclusive-trump-ice-raids-churches-holiday/ ?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
(Cited by Diana Butler Bass, “The Cottage,” this morning.)
I guess they’re getting into the Nee Testament story, but they think Herod was the hero …
Rayne, apologies if I cited this incorrectly. I’ve never done this before.
[Moderator note: blank space inserted to block the tracking portion of URL. Substack doesn’t need to know this was referred from your email via comments at emptywheel. Fuck Substack. /~Rayne]
Rule of thumb: Eliminate everything after the question mark (including the mark) because it’s most often tracking. I just did that and the link works fine.
Thanks!
https://thisweekinworcester.com/exclusive-trump-ice-raids-churches-holiday/
That nice chart talks about direct hires, but the second-order effects are even worse.
The PBS News Hour had a story on scientists in the USA looking at moving abroad. For some, the loss of grant funding imperils their job or the complete existence of their lab or institute, and threats of such cuts caused a non-trivial number of folks to look abroad. The gifted foreign students who came to the US in past generations for their doctoral work think that they might have looked elsewhere under the current climate. Organizations and institutions are threatened by Trump over DEI, as are specific lines of scientific inquiry. Etc. etc. etc.
A snippet:
Half a billion Euros is not chickenfeed.
One of the scientists puts it in terms of the “scientific ecosystem” which is under huge stress right now. The ecosystem includes not just the particular lab in which someone works, but the collection of labs in a university department/institute, the various professional organizations that encourage conversation and mutual support, etc. The US scientific ecosystem is under attack, and how Trump’s work will play out is a question with very longterm, very damaging possible answers.
Trump lives for “winning the day” or getting the best quarterly profits or any number of other very short-term measures. Science, and the scientific community writ large, looks at the short-term but also the long term. Folks talk about winning the space race in the 1950s and 60s being the result of huge federal and state funding of lots of STEM programs around the country. That fueled not just building better rockets, but the whole US scientific ecosystem, as this investment played out over decades.
We didn’t get a great science community overnight, but we could lose it a lot faster than it took to build.
DNC and Democratic candidates for office, are you listening and taking notes? Marcy is giving you everything you need to win voters at the next election in November.