On Thursday, US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced drastic job cuts and the destruction of large sections of public health infrastructure, as part of Trump’s unprecedented assault on federal employees and government services.
(Last post here for today, don’t want to clog feeds)
I hope these assholes catch a preventable disease and die a slow, debilitating, and agonizing death.
And I’m sure they have a “mandate” for this.
They claim 10k jobs, of which most are early retirement buy-outs, will save 1.8 billion dollars? So the average employee costs them 180k. I mean, I know Kennedy didn’t take a biology 101 course, but this is just stupid for a 4th grader with a piece of paper to do long multiplication. Their salaries are public information, and 180k is not even close (80k off) to the average.
I work in the public sector and part of my work sometimes involves budgeting for personnel. When an agency is accounting for the cost of their employees, they include all direct and indirect expenses. So, obviously salary, health coverage, various types of leave, pension - these are all direct costs. We also calculate agency indirects in some proportion - the marginal cost of having more payroll staff, HR staff, IT support, facilities, etc., to cover the additional employee.
I wouldn’t be surprised for the total cost to an agency being about 40-60% higher than salary cost. The rate reported here is high and could be very well padded, but it’s not entirely out there to me.
I also factor that in, but in cushy government, the benefits are usually in the 25k range. It doesn’t scale endlessly with pay. Fed wouldn’t be on the extreme end of that, in my experience, it gets larger the lower the agency. Could just be my state taking care of employees well though.
