I really wish I made that much. As a current federal employee that works for the department of the Navy I don't see how this will help us. We in the department of defense have seen these cuts for many years now due to sequestration. That's OK we'll l just turn everything over from ships and aircraft to the military for maintenance .
What this does is it ultimately frees up more money that in the end should be coming your way, since his plan is to add a bunch of ships.
What Trump is doing here is stopping the bleeding on paper. This revolves around the idiotic DC budgetary process, which says that jobs that aren't filled today, and may well have been vacant for years, still sit on future budgets, sucking up money in the budget that may well never get spent because those positions may never get filled at all, but they still have to include that salary, benefits, etc. for that "employee" for years in advance.
Another way to look at it: you run the Crazy Horse Widget Company. At one point early on in the company, you think that you need another guy to operate one of your widget presses. So, you put it in your budget for next year to hire and pay employee X $50K per year, plus $10K in benefits. Next year comes around, and you find that you don't actually need that employee because the one you already have can run the press just fine. So you're not actually going to spend that sixty grand per year going forward. Now, out here in Normal Land, outside of the Beltway, you would just take that potential employee out of the budget going forward. Not so inside the Beltway: they
keep that employee who was never actually hired in the budget for years and years going forward. Multiply that by the thousands of federal jobs that sit vacant today and over ten years going forward, and you're talking about huge sums of money that is sucking up space in the budget for employees who often are never actually going to be hired. That $60K employee turns into $600K because of a ten-year budget, and then if there are 10,000 of those positions, you're talking about a $6,000,000,000 hit to the budget.
By declaring a hiring freeze, Trump is able to go into the budget and say "OK, we're not hiring these people on paper, so there's all these billions of dollars that are freed up in the budget and we can now re-allocate that money from the Department of Thumb Up Your Ass to something actually useful, like building ships or roads or bridges." Without the hiring freeze, though, he can't do that with the budget.
It
sounds crazy and stupid, and that's mostly because it actually
IS crazy and stupid, but this is the stupid way shit gets done inside the
Twilight Zone of Accounting Beltway.
