But when asked about which programs they’d like to cut, from education to foreign aid, there wasn’t a plurality of support for reducing spending in any of 13 different policy areas. In half of the areas, in fact, including education, veterans benefits, infrastructure, and health care, more than half of those surveyed wanted to spend even more.
Moreover, underlying the eternal debate about cutting government employees is the disconnect of that debate from the government’s mission. I dug into which federal agencies employ the most people, and it turns out that the 15 largest agencies, by employment, account for nearly 80% of all federal employees. With the exception of the IRS and the FBI, they perform functions that no one wants to cut—support for the military, Customs and Border Protection, Social Security Administration, the FAA and TSA, FEMA, federal prisons.
If you want to screw with a Conservative, ask them what agencies they want to be smaller and watch as they don’t know.
I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the - what’s the third one there? Let’s see… The third agency of government I would - I would do away with, Education, the… Commerce and, let’s see. I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.
– Rick Perry
They’d say the EPA, but if you push them on and ask why they’ll just give a very vague, generic answer.
Then you show them photos of Cleveland and all the air and water pollution.
Every few years, one proposes getting rid of the Department of Energy and someone has to explain that DoE manages the nuclear weapons so maybe bark up a different tree.
Nah they’ll say the FBI, the IRS and if they frequently use airplanes they’ll say the TSA if they don’t they’ll have forgotten what they do.
The most interesting thing about the TSA is the folks you see are usually GS-4 to GS-6. They only serve as security theater and don’t really do anything practical beyond the same security you get at a court house entrance. The real security are behind the scene monitoring the various cameras, scanners, and trackers. That’s where you’ll find the TSA employees that serve a real purpose and are paid well.
Yeah, but think of all the people the bag checkers saved by making my art-student self throw away my drawing compass, because it had a small point on one end! No boo-boos on their watch, my friend!
They’re especially concerned about the Constitution, which a Trump loyalist in Arizona said is “dangling by a thread” and another said is “hijacked.” An evangelical Trumper in Georgia said she thought the Constitution is “under attack.”
But it’s not criticism of federal employees that’s driving their worries. It’s prices that they view as out of control, instability at the border, the cost of the Ukraine war, and “woke” policies that they think are being forced on their kids.
Ah yes, the well-known Constitutional clauses of checks notes the right to low prices, the border wall mandate, the right to only pay for wars you like, and the right to keeping kids unwoke?
Must be somewhere in the back of the document.
Bingo! That’s what you have to understand about Conservatives, they don’t know what they are talking about. They literally repeat what they hear from Trump and his cronies. They don’t understand it and can’t comprehend what it means.
The type of people who look to authorities for an opinion either don’t want or know how to find answers for themselves: by questioning claims, gathering and evaluating evidence and information, adjusting their mental models, and formulating their own conclusions. This is the model for some denominations of Christianity. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them were raised in that kind of setting.
I don’t think all regressives and conservatives are like this, necessarily. The leadership in many cases are simply sociopaths exploiting these incurious people’s authoritarian tendencies.
But anyway, like the AZ guy who thinks the deep state is a bunch of Marxists, I can tell he has never bothered to learn anything about Marxism on his own and so he can’t validate this claim because he doesn’t even know what Marxist policies or rhetoric would even look like. I bet he doesn’t even think to question his view. And maybe he doesn’t even care to do so.
Trump had people attack the FBI. They died like fools. Nothing will change that group’s mind.
