Rethuglican mythology holds that "Federal jobs bad! bad! bad!" After all, a dime that can't be diverted from the Federal government to the pockets of their mega-wealthy contributors and corporate America is a dime wasted (that's what their "supply side" scam was always about). It's also one of their favorite lies that civilian Federal employment is growing by leaps and bounds, when in fact the average size of the civilian Federal workforce between 1944 and 2014 was 2.04 million, compared to 2.08 million in 2014, with much of the growth being in civilian Defense Department jobs supporting the uniformed military especially during wartime.
One of the first moves made by unstable demagogue and popular vote loser Donald "Rump" Trump was to freeze Federal hiring, but it appears that his simplistic move is causing real problems in unexpected places (hint: not Washington, D.C.). The hiring freeze is affecting constituencies that Rump may not have considered in his haste: day care for military families stationed here and in Germany, and largely rural / red state areas (minorities, too, but that's fine with Rethugs). Day care services at Ft. Knox and at the military facility in Wiesbaden, Germany were suspended because those facilities couldn't hire the hourly and part-time civilian workers to replace ones that had left or were leaving. Similarly, since roughly 85% of Federal jobs are outside of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Rump's freeze will effect many in his red state base, as workers retire or move on to other jobs and agencies are unable to replace them with local residents. Think a healthcare worker at a Veterans Administration facility, or Federal prison staff, or Federal law enforcement personnel, or staff processing Medicare or Social Security documents, etc. We'll certainly be hearing about more instances of damage caused by this shortsighted, but predictable, Rethuglican scapegoating of Federal employees trying to do their jobs with less and less.
UPDATE: Your taxpayer dollars going to the truly needy --
As taxpayers paid $10m for 3 #Trump weekends in Florida, a Trump hiring freeze ended pre-K, daycare for US military families in Germany pic.twitter.com/C8e317kGAp— David Beard (@dabeard) February 22, 2017
