• averyminya@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    4 months ago

    by Betsy DeVos.

    If there’s one person I loathe more than anyone in the world, it might be her. Even she was given that position, though, so there’s still many more people to loathe. Her actions against education and the betterment of this country are abhorrent, but she was only following through with what other people in her party wanted.

    I’m not an angry or bitter person, quite the opposite, but when I think about the events of 2016 I feel so much contempt against these people. She and they single-handedly destroyed our education system and put it on the path for states to abuse and neglect their duties to get our citizens educated. (Per state education departments can do what they want, so California ignored much of the policy. Other states like Idaho, Ohio, Texas, Florida, Alabama, Arizona, etc are now doing the same, except instead of trying to bolster their education systems like California tried to (tried…), they are actively impeding on the betterment of it.

    We would not be in this situation today had we not gotten the results of 2016. We truly lost so many good things because of that election, for the first time we were actually making progress as a country after 16 godsforsaken years, just for them to send us back over 60 years. The EPA. Corporate Tax. Racial tensions. Gender and sexuality acceptance. Education. The complete collapse of our government by having so many terrible, terribly unqualified people into positions of power they shouldn’t hold.

    Please don’t let history repeat itself.

    • Exaggeration207@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      4 months ago

      The complete collapse of our government by having so many terrible, terribly unqualified people into positions of power they shouldn’t hold.

      So, this is the part of Project 2025 that I don’t think gets enough attention. The Heritage Foundation wants to fire thousands of government employees in the civil service, and replace them with political appointees loyal to Trump. There are lots of reasons why that’s a bad idea, but from a purely practical standpoint, there’s the simple fact that you are never going to get thousands of people qualified enough to replace them.

      It was bad enough when it was just the senior leadership of government agencies who were largely unqualified. They were incompetent, but you had all these experienced people underneath them, keeping things running despite the dysfunction. Not that it wasn’t confusing at times-- by 2020, the turnover in Trump’s cabinet had gotten so bad that no one was quite sure who was serving in what leadership role, and whether or not they were doing so legally.

      Anyway, take the dysfunction of 2020 and multiply it by a factor of however many civil service employees they’re going to fire. Yeah. That equation works out to: absolutely nothing getting done.

      Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Trump Loyalty Committee will be terrible at their job of vetting prospective appointees, and most of these experienced civil service employees could manage to keep their jobs by lying their asses off. It’s not as if Trump is actually going to be paying attention. His handlers are just going to tell him it was a great success no matter what happens, he’ll grunt in approval and go back to throwing hamburgers at the wall.