Get while the gettin’s good

Most of you already know this, but I left my job working for the federal government about four years ago. It was a hard decision at the time because government employment is so stable and predictable…until right about now.

Never in my lifetime have I seen a politician actually deliver on their campaign promises, and especially so swiftly. Dude said he was going to deal with stuff and boy that is exactly what he has done. But really, the federal employee workforce is a sacred cow that I didn’t think anyone would slash.

But here we are.

Now, I have zero idea about whether or not my old job is getting the axe. I doubt it because it is considered a safety of flight sensitive position (or something like that; I don’t recall the exact verbiage). But there are a whole lot of positions within the Department of the Army that could go away tomorrow and it wouldn’t hinder the mission of the Army one little bit. It would, in fact, actually make it better and more efficient.

Every single nitnoid position that does nothing in reality beyond trying to justify their existence usually end up just adding to the regulatory burden of the Army. Layer after layer of bureaucracy only serves to dilute the ability and purpose of the warfighter.

That has nothing to do with me, though. I left on my own terms, although the looming vaccine mandate certainly played a roll in my timing. But that was still several months out. My timing was my own and I owned it. Thankfully, I had been writing on the side for some time and was somewhat experienced. Of course, looking back on it now I knew basically nothing and was charging woefully low rates for my work. But the groundwork was still being set, and I only took the plunge because of the effort that had been put into learning a craft for five years.

My suspicions were correct, although the timetable was much faster than I thought it would be: those poor suckers should have taken the buyout and ran before DOGE had a chance to take a swipe at them. My guess is most didn’t because they never bothered to learn a new skill.

That actually really reminds me of my last supervisor in the Air Guard. He spent two decades in an E-8 billet doing nothing but soaking up a check. Never bothered to do college (which is paid for), didn’t bother to learn a trade or any skill at all.

They showed him the door a couple years ago at age 52 and I have no idea where he found work.

So anyway, those folks that didn’t take the buyout probably didn’t do so because they have no fallback plan. I cannot tell you how sweet it would have been to do what I did with that much runway. It would have allowed me to take so many more risks. But instead, thousands of feds are being shown the door and have nothing to show for it. They are barely employable on the outside, and the offers they will get are going to be paltry compared to what they just lost.

It is going to be a very painful lesson for a lot of former feds.

The moral of the story is don’t ever fall into the fallacy of security. There is no such thing. Start building your own future today because that “safe” job might not even make it to tomorrow.