Author Archives: eehines

Mission Addendum

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I posted a bit ago about the missions of DOGE and Congress. Here are some data that lend concreteness to that post’s claims; these data concern some $162 billion in misspent monies.

That figure is likely an undercount because not all federal agencies follow reporting guidelines.
Under the Payment Integrity Information Act, agencies are required to manage payments by identifying risks, taking corrective measures, and reporting on their efforts. However, the GAO found that some agencies are not fully following the required guidelines for reporting data annually.

GAO’s 2023 report on the matter had this, summarized at the JtN link above (the second one):

10 federal agencies under the Chief Financial Officers Act were noncompliant in fiscal 2022. Additionally, nine of these agencies failed to meet standards for the same programs in 2021 and 2022.
Agencies that remain noncompliant with payment integrity standards for two or more consecutive years must submit additional proposals to the Office of Management and Budget. OMB is key in dealing with improper payments and outlining improvement plans.
The plans must be included in the agency’s annual budget submission….

GAO identified those agencies that are noncompliant for two consecutive years as

  • DoA
  • DoD
  • DoEd
  • HHS
  • HUD
  • DoL
  • DoT(!)
  • VA
  • SBA

GAO then asked for this:

GAO recommended that OMB ensure that noncompliant agencies explicitly include plans of improvement and plans to achieve compliance in their annual financial statements, post the plans on PaymentAccuracy.gov, or communicate them directly to the relevant congressional committees. OMB agreed with the recommendations.

That’s much too soft. Years of such Pretty Pleases are how we got to these billions of misspent—and willfully unreported—dollars. The management personnel below President Donald Trump’s (R) replacing appointees who remain after those appointees are installed need to be terminated for cause and reallocated to the private sector. Those agencies’ budgets also need to have portions of their budgets equal to the un- or misreported expenditures withheld until reporting and actual spending is brought into compliance.

Given DoD’s blatant disregard for spending requirements, it’s necessary to be especially draconian with that bunch—their refusals to comply cost lives and endanger our national freedom. It’s true enough that DoD’s contractors contribute to the money failures, and they need to be dealt with including contract cancelation, but the overarching failure here is DoD’s decision to not bother with enforcing the financial reporting requirements of those contractors.

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.

There’s Clemency, and There’s Clemency

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On his way, almost literally, out the door, now-ex-President Joe Biden (D) issued preemptive pardons to Congressional members of the J6 Committee and the committee’s staffers. Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R, GA), running the follow-on committee for the last two years, has the right of it:

You don’t forgive somebody of something unless they have potentially done something[.]
I mean, to me, this is basically, if not an actual admission, it’s truly the perception of admitting that there was wrongdoing done[.]

And, as Just the News put it at the link:

It was a stunning act…that begged a provocative question: what did an official panel of Congress do that was so bad it needed to be absolved by an act of presidential clemency?

It’s instructive that none of those preemptively pardoned—Congressmen and staffers alike—have rejected Biden’s pardon, not even on the grounds that they don’t need it and don’t want it, being innocent of wrong-doing in the first place. Not even Senator Adam Schiff (D, CA) who as Congressman was a member of that committee, declined the pardon, going no farther than to protest the lack of necessity for it.

Winning in court is a high financial price to pay for one’s innocence, to be sure, but those haled in have avenues for being made whole: malicious prosecution, for instance, and in civil cases, collecting costs from those who sued and lost. They’re not even settling in order to avoid costs; they’re ducking down behind their pardons.

How would they get their reputations back after going through trial? On the other hand, how will they get their reputations back after having been pardoned? At least with court outcomes, they’d have official declarations of no wrong-doing. Their acceptance of these pardons deny them even of that much, even as those acceptances do nothing to lend credibility to claims of having done nothing wrong.

I echo JtN’s question: what have they done that’s so bad they fear exposure in court?

Gore Both Oxes

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In Matthew Mimnaugh’s (ex-Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chief Counsel, among other such positions) Wall Street Journal op-ed, he decried the Republican Party’s lack of success, apparently due to lack of effort, in gerrymandering Red States compared to the Progressive-Democratic Party’s success at gerrymandering Blue States to gain Federal House of Representatives seats. After all, he noted,

In 2000, the House GOP earned its thin majority of 221 while outpolling Dick Gephardt’s Democrats nationwide by less than 0.05 percentage point. In 2024, despite a nearly 4-point popular-vote advantage, Speaker Mike Johnson has a majority of only 220.

Mimnaugh’s solution is for Republicans to become better gerrymanderers. Gerrymandering, he noted, is a tradition almost as old as our republic. It’s also, it seems to this average American denizen of flyover country, unconstitutional, for all its long-standing nature. Here’s Art I, Sect 2, of our Constitution on the matter of Congressional representation:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

There’s nothing in there about divvying up that sectioning in order to favor this or that party—or this or that race, come to that. It’s certainly the case that standing on ceremony and insisting on a maximum constituency of 30,000 per Representative, which with a national population of 340 million would result in a House of some 11,333 Representatives, would be politically and practically…impractical.

The gerrymandering bit, however, is easily corrected, and the correction better done than by competing gerrymander schemes every 10 years. The obvious solution is to divide each State by the number of Representatives to which it is apportioned every 10 years, thereby arriving at the number of Congressional districts into which the State would be divided. This is the current procedure. However, instead of drawing district boundaries explicitly to favor this or that party and this or that race, divide each State into substantially equally populated districts, and starting at the State’s geographic center, draw the districts as squares with the first four districts having one corner each anchored on that center. Then work in concentric “circles” around those four until the requisite numbers of districts are drawn.

For States with three Representatives, divide them into three substantially equally populated triangles anchored on that center with straight lines marking their mutual boundaries. For States with two representatives, divide each into two substantially equally populated districts with a straight line marking their mutual boundary. The reductionist case of one Representative is obvious.

In all cases, the only deviation from straight line district boundaries allowed would be at a State’s boundary with a neighboring State or neighboring nation, or in Hawaii’s case, the ocean shore line.

We are, after all, all Americans, all equal under law, and all voters, each with an equally valid and valued vote, without regard to party or race. Americans under law and as voters are as well party-blind and color-blind.