Terry Zink has spent 57 years building a life in Montana’s backcountry. The 57-year-old third-generation houndsman from Marion—a remote town nestled deep within the Flathead National Forest—runs a small archery target business serving outdoor recreation workers and guides who, until recently, had steady employment managing America’s public lands. Contents
Those workers are disappearing. Their jobs are gone. And Zink, who voted for Trump in 2024, is watching his customer base—and his livelihood—vanish before his eyes.
“You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,” Zink told Politico reporters as he surveyed the damage. “You cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, water restoration, and healthy forests” (1).
It’s all actual work. The relentless assault on all federal institutions for the last half century had the initial effect of making the vast majority of them the most efficient systems in existence. Both political parties initially agreed they should not be wasteful, and through several rounds of reform they became more efficient than private organizations doing the same job can even theoretically be. But it’s never actually been about “waste,” and they stated cutting bone by the early 2000s. The only federal jobs left do actual work, and better, more important work than the vast majority of private sector jobs.
The waste is in private contracts that don’t fund public sector jobs. But DOGE didn’t go for those.
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That’s what I meant by “private contacts.” They don’t outsource every single possible federal job, otherwise there would be no executive branch left. So the public sector jobs are highly efficient, and the waste has been outsourced to the private contracts where it’s more obfuscated.
We could do those jobs much more cheaply and efficiently by nationalizing them, but then that would be “big government,” even though it would be saving tax payer dollars when all the accounting was said and done. So 🤷.
Have you thought about getting consultants in to get their institutional knowledge? They hote lots of recent grads who theoretically know what to do…they work them hard and then churn through more, overcharging for their time and underpaying them. Some progress to become senior consultants. Not many.
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Yes. I was making a joke. Consultants often are inexperienced and just make cuts, not improvements. Most of the work is done by cheap grads, who compete for few roles in the hope they make it. Most don’t. The customers get overcharged for poor advice.
Usually, they are just a way for management to have someone to point to for the decisions they make that negatively impact people or the business.