Isn’t it great to finally be living in a blessed era where genius business CEOs run the government? Finally, some real gains in productivity!

Forget your “4-Hour Workweek.” Screw “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Who cares about being “Smarter Faster Better”? The real trick to actuating maximal accelerated successification is to engage in a constant cycle of slashing employee headcounts and divisions, only to then frantically backfill when you realize you’ve ripped out the wrong part of the wiring. Only these days can we see the true miracle of efficiency: trying desperately to hire 450 new people to staff your critical weather-prediction agency after you let the ketamine-addled CEO of a car company and his band of tween groypers fire everyone. 

Earlier this year, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency gutted hundreds of staff members at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the government’s weather monitoring, among other tasks. At the time, everyone not in thrall to the death cult that is the Trump administration pointed out that decimating your weather-prediction apparatus, particularly as hurricane season approached, seemed like a bad idea. But that’s only because they are not privy to the keen workings of the CEO mind. You see, it streamlines the whole process if you eliminate extremely necessary things and then try to fix that on the fly later.

So it’s perfectly good and normal that the NOAA now has to get an exception to the overall federal hiring freeze so it can hire up to 450 people at the National Weather Service. They need that exception because they lack personnel in critical positions, such as meteorologists and hydrologists. Yeah, seems like a weather service probably needs those. 

The administration won’t admit this, but NOAA’s hiring spree would not be happening if not for the deadly Texas floods in early July. While there is plenty of blame to go around, as the rain battered Texas, the San Angelo NWS was short several critical positions, including a senior hydrologist. And the nearby San Antonio office of the NWS was out a warning coordination meteorologist, which normally liaises with state and local public safety officials.

Of course, the administration can’t just admit it screwed up, so instead, it’s deploying military jargon to spin this. Yes, these are “mission-critical field positions” as hurricane season arrives, and there needs to be an exception to the hiring freeze so that NWS can “further stabilize frontline operations.”

Okay, first: You’re the weather people, not the army. Stop with the frontline-operations stuff. You sound ridiculous. Next, to the extent any frontline operations of the NWS needed additional stabilization, it’s not because there is some unexpected, unforeseeable challenge requiring extraordinary new staffing. It’s because the dumbest people in the world fired the people who were doing these things. 

This is not a one-off, either. Heck, it’s not even the first time this agency had to unwind DOGE firings after realizing they’d cut vital people. Seems that cutting the jobs of people who track hurricanes for a living right as you head into hurricane season is bad? Surely, employees love being fired, then told to ignore their firings. They probably really appreciate how efficient it is, right?

By now, multiple agencies have a storied history of trying to get workers they treated poorly to return to work, or enticing new ones to join the government, offering them the opportunity to be treated poorly. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have had the pleasure of having two rounds of this nonsense. In March, the agency begged about 180 probationary workers it had recently fired to pretty please return to work. In June, it rehired over 450 employees and reinstated branches it had eliminated entirely, like the National Center for Environmental Health, which oversees a childhood lead-prevention program.

These aren’t the situations where a court has ordered an agency to reinstate workers, though that is also happening regularly and destabilizes both employees and agencies alike. This is the administration trying to manage the chaotic nature of its own slash-and-burn efforts and failing. 

Unfortunately, it’s the rest of us who will pay the price.