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).
If the failure and stupidity of DOGE isn’t hammered into people for generations to come then a gross failure will have taken place.
They claimed to want to cut waste but they have destroyed so much revenue it isn’t funny.
Shithole country strikes again
Dear Terry: you’re starting to come a looooooooooong long way. Seriously!
“what did you vote for then?” name a Trump policy that influenced your vote, please!
“i voted for that abstract thing, that will hurt the people i dont like, but if it hurts me i think trump will come around or say just kidding”-the voter probably.
I also voted against the other guy because harmful stereotypes reinforced by my echo chamber, and without learning any actual facts
The one where we kill all the brown people and that magically makes my gas cheaper.
I bet he loves the burning cities and innocent people getting shot in the face because those things don’t affect him personally
Yes you did.
“You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,” Zink told Politico…
Right. You voted for other people to lose their jobs. In reality you voted for and deserve exactly what you’re getting.
“You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,”
Ha, I grabbed that quote too.
Narrator Voice: But He did. He actually did vote for this.
honestly, what I hear when these nitwits say this is “I spent all my time being told what to think by people on TV (famous celebrities! Ooooo!) in the media that I was easily impressed by…”
It’s the full flower of the Southern Strategy that Lee Atwater leveraged in 1980 to help Reagan take the election. The early 80’s was also when Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater - broke into politics in the biggest way and cemented lying and couched racism as right wing political tools…
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/75/creatures-of-the-swamp/
It’s been all downhill for the US since then.
It’s been all downhill for the US since
then16421492.1642?
Charles the First Attacked Parliament?
Ugh, I was going from memory and was pretty sure I got it wrong.
Oh, Columbus.
Rats!
I was hoping it was some cool hithero unknown historical fact regarding the English Civil War you knew of.
Well yeah. That.
LOL!
Naw he voted to hurt black and brown people. But didn’t realize he was voting for classist as much as a racist.
especially a classists, that has been constantly calling the voters, dumb and stupid, and low class.
Just because you’re too dumb to understand the consequences doesn’t mean you’re shielded from them.
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Hey, everyone. I enjoy the schadenfreude as much as everyone, but don’t blame the conned. Blame the con men
Blame culture isn’t a way forward, both the con and the conned hold partial responsibility. Power doesn’t come from thin air, and those who voted for this regime helped empower it.
Well, not everyone sees it that way. For example, in Germany, there is the criminal offence of Volksverhetzung. It’s a bit hard to translate but it roughly means “incitement of the people” or “instigation to hatred”. Why Germany has that criminal code is probably obvious. The point is, the one doing the inciting is criminalised, not those falling for it.
If someone is incited to commit political violence, then the person who committed the violence is held responsible.
What if 35% of the population of a country participated?
like comfy replied: how do you get conned twice by the same man?
Three times, really
How the con worked is worthy of a sociological study. To massively simplify: they play into the hopes and fears of the uneducated.
Some even want a third con!
“You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,”
You consistently voted for this. Every time conservatives are in power they cut services and environmental protections. You voted for it over and over again but this time it actually hurt you and you’re sad.
this time it hurt you in a way that you noticed
also cut TAXES for actual rich people, not for poors whom seem to think they will benefit from such tax cuts for the rich somehow.
According to the american exceptionalism, you are not poor, you are a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire.
So his business is built around serving federal government employees and federal spending, he voted to reduce federal spending and is upset that it negatively affected his business.
Whhhhhaaattt???
doge pretty much eliminated most if not all the federal employees and spending.
Of course not. He voted for other people to lose their jobs.
Maybe he should reflect on what it’s like to be “other people”.
If they had empathy, they wouldn’t be conservative.
His situation is a mistake that needs to be rectified, everyone else deserved it.
“Dog ate my homework” ass motherfuckers
trump ate your home and job.
Thanks obama
Awww is someone having a hard time finding his bootstraps? 😁
You did vote for this & you were also warned.
You’re just a sucker.
'I didn’t vote this." Yes. Yes you did. You didn’t want to hear others tell you what you were voting for. You wanted to believe your own fantasy version. Even now, most MEGA voters want to believe their own fantasy of what Trump will do for America over the truth of what he is actively doing.
thats why they fall for scams quite easily, they trump is just kidding or he suddenly reverses what he does, nope he doesnt. only the 1st term he had people preventing him from doing too much damage, this time no one is going to stop trump and his cronies, conservatives also want to blame democrats, but dems arnt in power anymore.
"I believed we were cutting waste in Washington,” Mitchell said in an interview with local news. “I didn’t think they’d fire the people actually fighting fires and maintaining trails. That’s not waste—that’s the actual work.”
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.
I would argue they didn’t become more efficient. They just outsourced everything to private contractors. And private contractors have an overhead of needing to compete for contracts, so they’re all spending money on staff that writes up the bids. Additionally, they only hire the workers when they win the contract and those contracts usually expire after 5-10 years. This means there is no long term, institutional capacity building. It might be fine for small projects, but for large complex projects, tearing down an organization only to reassemble it under another contractor every 5-10 years is in fact terribly inefficient and produces worse outcomes. Organizations cannot become good at the work. I’ve seen it first hand. There are many contractors that specialize only in federal procurement regulations, but have almost no in house technical knowledge of how to run the projects they’re bidding on beyond what is they need to say to win. And, most importantly, knowing what to say to win is different than having a mature organization in place to do the work.
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.
It’s more than just “getting consultants.” Organizations need to have systems in place to manage their work. Consultants might know some things, but they are not systems. Systems usually are born out of experience and become more mature over time. They are complex and interlinked and adapt to nuances in the understanding of their work.
The prevailing metaphor for organizational capacity is that they are comprised of interchangeable parts that can be rebuilt or replaced any time. However, the actual reality is they are more like plants that grow. Privatizing the public sector is akin to planting a tree with the aim of having it give you shade, except every 5-10 years you cut it down and replant a new one. In the end, you never really get what you’re supposed to, but a bunch of people are making money off it.
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.
