After yesterday’s New York Times piece on USAID workers who lost their jobs in the DOGE cuts and have struggled to find comparable work, a wave of reporters and commentators has rushed to condemn anyone mocking or celebrating those layoffs. I get it. Dancing on anyone’s professional grave is ugly, even when the people in question were funded by taxpayers. But it’s also perfectly understandable why public sympathy is in such short supply.
People are exhausted by years of watching a sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracy spend trillions with little measurable results, protected by layers of process, mission creep, and institutional self-interest. When efficiency reforms finally hit and some of those roles disappear, a large chunk of the public feels more relief than sorrow—especially after watching those same institutions lecture, regulate, and extract from them for decades.Empathy isn’t infinite. When trust has been repeatedly abused, it’s natural for it to run dry.
I didn’t like USAID. But watching people gleefully mock a woman for having to start over at ~60 is bleak. You can disagree with someone’s politics without losing basic empathy. The internet has broken a lot of brains. https://t.co/On5aj00bL8
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) April 24, 2026
What has actually 'broken brains' is the pure waste of taxpayer dollars.
I do not think it's right to mock her, but she shouldn't be 'starting over' at 60 barring exceptional circumstances. She was earning a salary that's far above the median, most recently in the top 5% of the country, for many years. I know DC is expensive but come on, it can't be…
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) April 24, 2026
Obviously, there is a human tendency to spend as much as you make if you're not disciplined, so maybe she didn't save and lived lavishly. Again, that's not something that will inspire empathy in those scraping to get by.
Bubby the salary for her do-nothing job was paid by confiscating money from guys who go to work in hard hats and steel toes for a quarter of the pay https://t.co/MemP4LEKJT
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) April 24, 2026
Reminder that every dollar you earn was devalued so the woman being mocked could make 270,000 a year.
— bumbadum (@bumbadum14) April 24, 2026
Her career, financed through defrauding your taxes, made you poorer.
But you should have compassion for the boomer who was too dumb to save for retirement.
I hope I see her… https://t.co/X5Vc6sKwyb
One of the biggest blind spots is that many white-collar professionals simply don’t understand how physically demanding blue-collar work actually is. They’ve never felt the slow, grinding toll these jobs take on the body—worn joints, chronic pain, and muscles that never fully recover. They don’t know what it’s like to come home so completely drained that you practically collapse, too exhausted to even eat or talk, only to do it all over again the next day.
Speaking as a woman who had to start over at ~60 and is only occasionally mocked, I'd say the #1 difference is I didn't go to the NYT and suggest that American taxpayers owed me $272,000 per year to save me from my plight. https://t.co/zW7UGjT5ZT
— Ann Bauer (@annbauerwriter) April 24, 2026
She probably should have 'suffered' in silence.
