Adapting to a Shifting World and Government Job Cuts

Things once true, won’t always be. My conjecture is that people on average lack curiosity, once they establish something, they don’t ask many questions about it.

Updating our world views, and modus operandi, in response to new information is a very human-condition type of universal struggle. Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'," first published February 10, 1964, is a kind of ode to change: changes that are happening, have happened, and those that are demanded. The song is a timeless protest anthem, as I hear it—a rallying cry to those who want change, but also a chronicle of people who resist it and those who won't accept change.

Admit It, The Waters Around You Have Grown

I've been talking with a friend whose parents had good government jobs, careers in fact. Until very recently, they pressured him to go out and land a government career. That pressure, so far as I understand it, is rooted in general parental desires for a child to have a stable life, but it is based on an outdated playbook.

40 years ago (1985), one could leave high school, land a job in the government and log decades in civil service before a send off with a goodbye cake into a retirement covered by a decent pension. 20 years ago (2005), a shift was well underway as hybrid systems incorporating elements of defined contribution plans (like 401(k)s) were becoming more common for federal employees. In other words, retirement became far more dependent on individual contributions and market performance.

Now in 2025, as the DOGE initiative under the Trump administration has haphazardly slashed government jobs under the auspices of efficiency, the landscape of government employment and retirement has drastically changed. Rapid policy changes and workforce reductions have made long-term career planning within the government difficult. The red, white and blue retirement plans ain't what they used to be, oh and you may not make it to retirement.

DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, so named to allow Elon Musk to reference a nearly 12 year old meme coin, has been covered to death for gutting large swaths of the US government. To paraphrase United States secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Part of the DOGE plan was to cut 80% of jobs, but restore 20% of those fired, as mistakes would be made. As I’ve written before DOGE used the approach of a bad startup founder and caused pure chaos.

Changing of the Guards

Times they are a-changin’, ye shall be changed, things have changed, pick your classic Dylan song, you get the idea. I personally know several people who recently landed government roles, only to lose them almost immediately. One worked for FEMA. The job is gone now.

In contrast to the last few months, a relative of mine had spent their entire career at FEMA. They used to describe the job as “the slow lottery.” You worked incredibly hard for 20 weeks every year, during disasters, but the rest of the year, it was quiet. On slow days, they said, it was hard to even act like there was enough to do. But when the time came, it was all go, no pause.

Another of my relatives is a geological engineer. He says he works incredibly hard for a few months out of every two years. He’s salaried at a major oil company. Whatever you think of the industry, it’s easy to understand the business logic: when drilling hinges on timely geological assessments, you need someone who can stop everything and fly out to city of nowhere, Texas, to do the work before the work that will generate hundreds of millions in revenue.

Well, the moral of the story, the moral of this song, is if you want trained, competent people around when you need them, sometimes you have to pay them when they aren’t needed. This is true of altruistic or profit driven motives. I think the US as a whole will learn a number of hard lessons from the actions of DOGE, but individually DOGE shows we need to update our priors.

Blowin' In the Wind

Things once true, won’t always be. My conjecture is that people on average lack curiosity, once they establish something, they don’t ask many questions about it. Some entrepreneurs learn one or two tactics that work well at first, but fail them as they scale. Many times I also suspect an approach works maybe one out of ten times, but people have selective memory about things of such a nature as their own screwups.

Trying to convince someone who made their bones doing one thing, that with more revenue and employees, some of the behaviors that made them successful will break them is an uphill, full scale war taking place in the mud. I’ve written many times now about this dynamic and recommend The Founder’s Dilemma by Noam Wasserman for anyone who wants to understand why founders so often become the ceiling for their own companies.

One of the most difficult people I’ve worked with built a vast fortune using a strategy I call “crack the whip.” In the 1970s, he became wealthy—what would now be around $10 million—by running people into the ground with yelling, terror, and frantic deadlines. It worked, at least enough that he got his bag. He made his money in real estate, then diversified with investment in startups, index funds, stocks, foreign currency brokered by various wealth managers and attorneys. He will be wealthy unless he works deliberately to lose everything.

And yet, nearly all of the businesses he tried to run as a wealthy man have failed. His investments work, his portfolio grows, his extracurricular ventures are just for fun, and maybe declaring a loss on his taxes to offset major gains. All of his side quests, fail for the same reason: everything was bottlenecked through him. He returns to his roots, and forces everyone into a state of constant chaos, he cracks the whip, people jump into manic flurries of activity scattering in different directions following shallow and shifting directives.

Working across several tumultuous ventures led by a man so rich all he wanted was to play king, I saw constant backfiring. He fancied himself a great negotiator, so he would try and squeeze a plumber or carpenter to work for less, or do more. The vendor would eventually take a milestone payment and stop work, reasonably expecting it was the only way they would not go unpaid. At the last moment someone else, at least once one of his white-shoe lawyers, would find a new vendor and pay a massive upcharge to get a project finished on short notice. I never saw the barbaric negotiating tactics work in his favor.

His methods worked once, and a few correct choices after set him up for life. I’m not sure his chaos goblin strategy was ever the best option. Less warlordish tactics may have worked too, perhaps even better.

My Back Pages

Seeing the world shift can be hard. I’m in my 30s, and I’ve hit the point where the classic stations play the music of my youth. I’ll say little about that, it’s a universal experience, and you are either living it, have lived it, will live it, or will die too soon.

Introspection is hard. Following a playbook is easy. We must face the bitter pill that maybe our playbooks, or those of our elders, only worked in their time. My career involved a lot of market analysis, things work differently with changes to political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal factors. The amount of conversations I’ve had with people who want to use a modern social media marketing strategy they read about 5 years ago in a book published 5 years prior, and based on case studies from 3 years before that, is too high for my taste.

That playbook may have worked, but it may have stopped working 13 years ago. Facebook is still around, but the opportunity is not the same is it was in 2012. The problem is institutional continuity feels comfortable. Looking at the hollowed shells of institutions can feel destabilizing, whether it’s FEMA or Facebook.

There’s no shame in wanting stability, in hoping the rules you grew up with will still apply. But you have to start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they will keep changing until eventually some idiot in his 30s writes articles using the lyrics of Linkin Park as a throwback to 60 years ago.

Note: Several small edits were made after publishing. These errors, and omissions were the result of copying and pasting the wrong draft of the article.

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