There are many arguments — both legal and policywise –to be had about President Trump’s efforts to rein in the federal workforce by mandating in-person work and offering modified buyouts to those willing to resign. Noah wrote about some of them yesterday. But in terms of the politics, this fight strikes me as a shrewd, and in terms of how it is likely to play out demographically, is the opposite of the politics of Joe Biden’s student loan bailout efforts.

Biden bypassed Congress to attempt to wipe away the student loan debts of tens of millions of people. He knew that it was likely to be struck down as illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court, which it ultimately was, but he felt that it was a fight worth having because it was supported by core Democratic constituencies of young voters as well as those with significant student loan debt. Even after his most sweeping student loan plan was nixed by the Court, he moved on to make a series of efforts to wipe out the debt that targeted specific groups and that were less vulnerable to legal challenge.

At the same time, Biden’s efforts alienated a lot of people given that college graduates still make up a relatively privileged minority in the United States. The bailout did nothing for working class Americans who couldn’t afford to attend college or to those who did go and toiled to work through college or who made sacrifices to pay off loans.

It strikes me that Trump’s move will play out in the opposite manner. Federal workers represent just a bit more than 1 percent of the workforce and are viewed by most as a group lucky enough to hold cushy jobs with lavish benefits. The average pay of a federal worker is $106,000, which is far more than the typical private sector job. While it’s true that federal workers tend to be older and more educated, a 2017 CBO analysis found that at the time, at most education levels — but for those with professional or doctorate degrees — federal workers earned more than private sector counterparts in salary and benefits (government workers with no more than a high-school degree earned 34 percent more, on average).

The media will do their best to fill out the features of the faceless bureaucrats, but I don’t think the majority of American workers, who have to be in-person every day, will be particularly sympathetic to their sob stories. Dominic highlighted one such effort by an NPR reporter, who spoke to one federal worker with a long commute who described herself as “brain dead” from having to travel to an office two days a week. “I cannot imagine trying to get in the car and go in a third day,” she said. Hard to imagine a factory worker, a person who cleans toilets, somebody who regularly hauls drywall, or anybody who just plain works in an office five days a week feeling particularly broken up about Trump’s actions. There is a reason why he is so eager to have this fight.