Daily Archives: 27 January 2025

Bureaucratic Passive-Aggressive Resistance

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It’s in progress, as Federal agency personnel pretend they don’t know how to do their jobs in light of President Donald Trump’s (R) directives to them.

The Transportation Department temporarily shut down a computer system for road projects. Health agencies stopped virtually all external communications in a directive that risked silencing timely updates on infectious diseases. A hiring freeze left agencies wondering how parts of the government could adapt to new demands. Confusion loomed over how agencies should disburse funds allocated by the previous administration.

Computers are confused about how to deal with existing and proposed road projects. Sure.

Health agencies personnel are holding their breath until they turn blue in the face—or get their way. These personnel are self-selecting for the coming RIF.

Managers who can’t figure out how to use the personnel they have—and have had all along, less retirements and resignations—to continue their statutory mission are demonstrating their unfitness to be managers.

Funds allocated by the Biden administration—allocated, mind you, not spent—should not be spent. It’s not that hard.

Then there’s this bit of resistance:

[S]ome longtime federal employees said the chaos seemed more extreme this week due in part to wide-spanning differences between the agendas of the previous administration and the incoming one.

This is an example of the failure of the current civil service system and why it needs to be replaced. There’s no reason for the chaos: the so-called wide-spanning differences don’t exist. The previous administration’s agenda no longer exists, so there’s nothing from which to differ.

To be sure, there is a new agenda and a new corporate culture in place; if those long-time Federal employees can’t adapt, and do so quickly, they need to be retired or RIFed. They’re just in the way, wasting us taxpayers’ payroll.

Folks, mostly on the Left and in the Progressive-Democratic Party, wonder why there’s so little confidence, much less trust, in Federal bureaucrats and the Bureaucratic State. We average Americans, who aren’t as dumb as the Left tries to make us out to be, understand full well why.

DOGE’s Mission

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And the mission of the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress has cutting spending at the top of their lists. Fraud, waste, and abuse has been the empty word chants of politicians from both parties for far too many years.

Now there’s a concrete example of waste, and of waste of a magnitude that it could easily obscure double potsful of outright fraud and abuse.

The federal government reported net costs of $7.4 trillion in fiscal year 2024, but it couldn’t fully account for its spending. The US Government Accountability Office, which is Congress’s research arm, said that the federal government must address “serious deficiencies” in federal financial management and correct course on its “unsustainable” long-term fiscal path.

Absolutely. One way to light a fire under the behinds of the bureaucrats who manage these departments and agencies—from the political appointees nominally in charge on down through middle management—along with those entities and personnel required to report to the former is to cut those department and agency budgets by the amount of unaccounted for spending by each department and agency. In parallel with that, identify by name the personnel responsible for the tracking, and identify by name and entity those responsible for reporting to these trackers, and deal with them, publicly shaming where useful, firing for cause where necessary, and terminating contracts of those responsible for reporting and not doing so or not doing so accurately.

Yes, that includes DoD, which hasn’t bothered to track its own spending well enough to pass an audit in the last too many years. We’re not plussing up our military, we’re not building a combat force, when DoD is losing track of its money and so isn’t spending its money on training, equipment, and logistics.

The incompetence, laziness, and criminality of those responsible for actually spending—and tracking their spending—the monies allocated to them are threats to our national security regardless of the specific spender. So are those not bothering to report accurately and completely up the chain to those trackers. That alone should make the laziness and incompetence involved as felonious as the fraud itself.