The Pravda Media are going all out to create fear, cause chaos, generate sympathy for fired federal employees, and wrap it all around Trump's political neck. 

The problem for them is that it is all a terrible stretch. Not that there won't be some chaos to be found, or sympathy for individuals to be given, but the sob stories are a bit thin once you take a look a bit deeper into them. 

I think I've come up with a way fix this mess: make some new keys and then give them to more than one employee. https://t.co/iK65evgKH9

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) February 21, 2025

The archetypical story is the "tourists will be trapped in Yosemite bathrooms" for lack of a locksmith story. 

I can't say whether or not the story has a grain of truth to it, but I can definitely say that if it does, then the Park Service needs to be totally cleaned out, shut down, and rebooted. Designing a system where an employee getting sick or going on vacation, no less being let go will bring the whole thing down is malfeasance of the highest order. 

The first thing you need to know is that the employees being summarily let go are "probationary" employees--meaning that they have worked for the federal government for less than a year. If the safety and stability of the entire federal government depends on employees who were just hired, you have to wonder what the rest of the employees have been doing.

These employees are being let go not because they are especially bad, but because firing people who are no longer probationary is nearly impossible. That is a bug, not a feature. In an idea world, you could reduce headcount by separating the wheat from the chaff, but our civil service laws prohibit doing anything rational, so the choice becomes ever-expanding government employment regardless of productivity or suboptimal personnel decisions. That isn't Trump's fault; it is the poor design of our civil service. 

In this particular case, we are supposed to believe that Yosemite Park's tourists are dependent on one employee--1200 square miles of particularly dangerous national park territory, and only one person who has worked there for 48 weeks has a key to open doors or gun safes. 

Uh, yeah, either that is a total lie, or everybody in charge should be summarily dismissed and checked for mental deficiencies. 

Vince’s job as the park’s sole keyholder required him to keep track of the hundreds of keys and locks to the park’s bathrooms, gun safes, administrative buildings and gates, he told the Washington Post. When guests became stuck inside vault toilets or employees got locked out of their overnight accommodations, it was Vince who came to their rescue. 

“We have endless things that need to be secured in various forms, and I’m the sole keeper of those keys, the one that makes the keys, the one that fixes the locks, installs the locks, and has all that knowledge of the security behind the park. And so it’s a critical role. And without it, everyone else in the park is handicapped,” Vince told the Post. 

Vince wrote on Instagram that along with the end of his career, he’s also now required to immediately move out of the park’s employee housing — and he’s not alone. Many laid-off workers now have mere weeks to move from their homes, a recently fired Yosemite park worker told SFGATE. The worker, who feared reprisal from the Trump administration, was interviewed under the condition of anonymity, which was granted in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy. 

The hell of it is, millions of people take this at face value and get outraged at TRUMP for this idiocy. 

You know, it’s funny…

CNN didn’t run a single story about my neighbors in Western North Carolina living in tents for MONTHS under Joe Biden…

…but Trump fires federal workers after offering 8 MONTHS OF VACATION, and they get wall-to-wall coverage?!!

pic.twitter.com/yZTdL3anvx

— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) February 21, 2025

There is a full-court press on generating sympathy for federal workers who have enjoyed near immunity from the realities of living in a market economy. I have been fired multiple times in my life, or let go due to cutbacks, and it is always painful. But it is a fact of life for most people that things change for any number of reasons and we have to adapt. 

That federal employees, many of whom get better pay, better job security, much better benefits, and near immunity from the consequences for failure, feel entitled to lifetime employment is symbolic of the divide between the elite and the hoi polloi. We pay the taxes, they reap the benefits, and the Pravda Media is trying to sell us that this is the way it should always be. 

But if these people have designed systems so fragile that the letting go of a probationary employee is a disaster unparalleled in human history then they need to go much more than that probationary employee, whose only fault is being hired last. 

To this point, malice at least shows ability that can be directed with incentives. If there's no ability at this point there is unlikely to be ability in the future ...

— Gerbil (@surelyagerbil) February 21, 2025

But Pravda will tell you that it is an even worse betrayal to let those people go. What will they do with their gender studies degrees if they don't get full employment for life?

The reason why we are here is not that each of the people being fired is a bad person, unproductive, or a grifter; it is that the system has become so corrupt, so dysfunctional, that the only thing you can do is take a chainsaw to it. 

No doubt Javier Milei cut some good people and programs in Argentina; but if he hadn't done what he did his country would be poorer, everybody worse off, and the only beneficiaries would be the corrupt people who designed the system for their own benefit. 

The same is true for the illegal migrants. No doubt some are good people contributing to society. If we had an immigration system that let in such people legally and kept the violent criminals and the grfiters wanting free food and housing out of the country mass deportations wouldn't be necessary. 

Blame the people who made dysfunctional, horribly harmful systems, not the people trying to fix them. 

Liberals: it's your own fault. If these stories are true (doubtful), it's even more shameful than if the system were merely bloated.