re: I don’t feel sorry for Fed employees losing their jobs

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The way Trump/Musk has gone about this, leaving the workforce in the dark and making drastic changes before it can be properly handed down through the chain of command feels like at best political posturing and at worst psychological warfare.

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I agree.

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So why not start with something that'll actually make a dent?

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There are numerous other sundry costs associated with the employment end. Health insurance, training certs, retirement funding, etc.

Correlated costs can be significantly greater. They include ebb and flow to NGO's, lobbying, etc. related to government, creating "government friendly networks" sucking in funds. The larger and more complex the organization, the more difficult those interfaces are to track, much less quantify. You also get into task overlap, aka too many cooks in the kitchen, with all parties often from different sections and/or agencies in a job justification mode.

That is not just apropos to government BTW. Here is something similar Jamie Dimon addressed at a recent JPMorgan townhall meeting:

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Dimon recounted a story about a wealth management matter that required 14 committee approvals.

"I feel like firing 14 chairmen of committees, I can't stand it anymore," he said. "I'm sorry. It's my fault. I'm the boss."

He also cited performance reviews for the bank's operating committee that could stretch to six pages.

"Because of legal and risk, they have to look at it, the regulators might say, there could be litigation around it, so you have to be careful," Dimon said. "I get the thing, I throw it in the goddamned garbage can."

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B. Everyone else in the private sector worries about getting fired all the time. It’s nothing new to us. My arse hole clinches every year during our budget review

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Eh, it is just about as hard to get fired from a big corporate job as a government job. Any place that has an HR department will have managers struggling to fire people for performance unless they compromise their own performance to document the poor performer out of a job. The quickest way to get fired anywhere are things that have little to do with work but a lot to do with potential lawsuits for the employer. The only difference between the two is private sector has to worry that their leadership went full retard and they get laid off to save the bottom line.

This happened at Sonos recently. Employees told the leadership to not release an app update because it wasn't ready but their premium wireless over-ear headphones depended on new app. Headphones were a big part of the CEOs pitch to the board for growth, so they released the app anyway. It caused Sonos to eat shite for the last year because the new app did not have feature parity with the previous version. They have fired much of the C-level and laid off hundreds of employees (likely the ones telling the C-level to pull their heads out of their arse).

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There is usually another difference ... competitors. When companies have a virtual monopoly things may well rate as you describe. But inefficiency kills companies in competition.

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Typically a competitor in domestic governments means a civil war, so I'd prefer the monopoly.

And let us be real: many of the largest employers in the US essentially exist in markets with some sort of oligopoly.

I think people lionize the business world a bit too much on here. They have their own ills and we all have to deal with them but often don't perceive it because they're second/third order problems (knock-on effects so to speak).

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Typically a competitor in domestic governments means a civil war, so I'd prefer the monopoly.

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Might be a good time to examine and reassess our multiple layers of government.