Category Archives: ethics

A Bureaucrat with an MD…

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…chimes in. Robert Califf, MD, two-term US FDA Commissioner, and long-time government bureaucrat wants the government’s bureaucracy left alone.

As the world’s largest bureaucracy, the US government has ample room for improvement.

Awfully decent of the old boy to acknowledge some minor issues. Then he writes this in his Letter:

…a broad call for support from the workforce would be much more likely to succeed than castigating the workers who have chosen to serve the American public. Instead of suggesting “large-scale firings” and asserting that “if federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” Messrs Musk and Ramaswamy would be well-served to inspire the workforce to work with them to become more efficient.

This is an example of why bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees must have their words taken only skeptically.

No one is castigating the workers; Musk and Ramaswamy instead are insisting that those let go not be stigmatized by that while insisting they be given generous severance packages and plenty of notice to find other work before their government jobs end.

Government isn’t the only place employees need to resume working from workplace offices or cubicles—corporate America also is waking up to the need for in-place, face-to-face interactions and collaborations. It’s entirely appropriate to require government employees work full time in the offices and cubicles alongside their colleagues. Those who resist are those resisting the teaming and collaboration that is so necessary to work and so much more effectively done when done in person, and those persons are reducing the efficiency and limiting the potential of their teams. They should be let go.

On that matter of efficiency, this is best achieved with a smaller workforce operating under narrower scoped of responsibilities, tasks, and goals.

Califf is a senior bureaucrat in a government “medical” bureaucracy looking to preserve bureaucrats’ job. Nothing more.

Chopping Blocks for DOGE

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There are several such in the form of overlapping and shared responsibilities across a variety Executive Branch Departments and Agencies.

Three that come to mind are anti-trust enforcement, which is shared between DoJ and FTC, among others; environmental concerns, which are shared among EPA, Interior, Energy, and DoJ among others; and energy development/production, which is shared among Interior, Energy, and EPA, among others.

There are many more.

What DOGE needs to recommend and what President Donald Trump (R) and Congress (because much of this must be done statutorily) need to do is designate one Department/Agency in each of those areas as the Responsible Department/Agency, remove all responsibility, including the Civil Service positions and authority to consult “outside experts” from the other entities, and return the associated personnel to the private sector (no reallocating them to other areas of the Federal government). This both streamlines government and reduces its size by eliminating the jobs altogether.

With regard to DoJ in particular, that Department’s role in any of this should be limited to bringing cases to court; those personnel are enforcers of existing law, not definers of what the law is or should be (though, in the latter case, they certainly can recommend to Congress).

Another target rich environment for DOGE is entirely within the Pentagon. Defense systems development and acquisition is entirely too byzantine, and that labyrinth contributes in large part to the excessive amount of time—years—it takes the Pentagon to develop a system from an initial idea and to the excessive amount of time—more years—to acquire the systems in operationally useful numbers, once a decision to acquire is made. Those interminable delays also vastly increase the costs of both development and acquisition. Here, too, the Responsible Office needs to be designated, and the number of bureaucrats required to sign off (and the number permitted to sign off) need to be reduced, with the others (particularly the erstwhile required signers) returned to the private sector.

The Pentagon moves need especially to be centered on reducing the civilian workforce and on increasing the role and the responsibility of the Combatant, Transportation, and Materiel Commands, with the Combatant commanders being the sole definers of their requirements and numbers, Transportation and Materiel being the definers of the requirements and numbers needed to satisfy the Combatants’ requirements.

The moves and cuts need to be draconian, too; half measures will only perpetuate the current waste and opportunities for waste.

A Misapprehension

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The headline suggests it.

How Science Lost America’s Trust and Surrendered Health Policy to Skeptics

Science hasn’t lost our trust, not by a long shot. What—who, really—has lost our trust is government bureaucrats who happen to have science degrees. The misapprehensions begin early in the article.

The rise of Robert F Kennedy, Jr, from fringe figure to the prospective head of US health policy was fueled by skepticism and distrust of the medical establishment—views that went viral in the Covid-19 pandemic.

No, it wasn’t. It was fueled by distrust of the government’s bureaucrats who held medical degrees.

People once dismissed for their disbelief in conventional medicine are now celebrating a new champion in Washington. Scientists, meanwhile, are trying to figure how they could have managed the pandemic without setting off a populist movement they say threatens longstanding public-health measures.

Some did have a disbelief in conventional medicine. However, what most of us began to disbelieve was not conventional medicine but the non-conventional positions of those medical degree-holding bureaucrats in our medicine-centered agencies and their naked power grabs via their diktats of how us average Americans must during—and after—the Wuhan Virus situation, with their credibility further damaged by their manufactured hysteria about the severity of a virus whose lethality was a small fraction of one percent except for the slice of our population already afflicted with severe comorbidities or who were very old.

Those bureaucrats’ contemptuous dismissal of us and their equally contemptuous dismissal of a range of paliatives and alternative cures—many of which actually did, and do, work, and many more of which, if not effective, also did no harm. We insisted on following actual science, while those bureaucrats pursued their personal power, and in some cases, their pocketbooks.

Those bureaucrats also too often dismissed research that supported those alternative treatments and with equal disdain research that called into question the risks of the Wuhan Virus vaccines on offer. Many (most?) of those researches were, in fact, highly questionable. Some were quite sound, though, and the bureaucrats’ shotgun dismissal of all of them—generally without explanation, holding us average Americans as too grindingly stupid or ignorant to understand—further damaged their credibility.

Nor did those degreed bureaucrats care a farthing about our children—the portion of our population uniquely immune to the virus. Lock them out of school these Know Betters demanded, then required, isolate them from their peers, friends, adults other than their parents—even from their grandparents, uncles, and aunts. We’re seeing now the damaging outcomes of that isolation in lost education and especially in their inability to get along with each other.

No, we trust science. We insist that government bureaucrats trust science, as well, and until they demonstrate that they do, those bureaucrats are demonstrating that they cannot be trusted by us.

Legal Protection for Whistleblowers

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Jay Solomon, writing for The Free Press, wants legal protection for whistleblowers, and under the color of that, he also wants protection for journalists who are harboring “confidential,” or some such, sources.

One of the things that makes America exceptional is that journalists here have freedoms that exist nowhere else. … That also requires the freedom to rely on confidential sources to get that information.

The problem with this is that actual whistleblowers already have lots of legal protection for what they run up their chains of command, to Congress, and ultimately to the public. Beyond that, the freedom that that exists nowhere else apparently includes freedom from the laws that ordinary Americans must obey: laws barring receiving and profiting from goods that were illegally obtained by the transferor.

What Solomon wants, what he’s conflating with whistleblower disclosures, even though he should know better, is protection for journalists who publish leaks, those illegally obtained goods (which might—might—be OK), and for leakers who are doing the leaking.

Some sources who talk to journalists are, in fact, whistleblowers. Most, though, are simply acting, on the face of it, illegally, by transferring those goods—which maybe they obtained illegally or maybe they obtained in the legitimate course of their duties—in violation of the terms of their employment or their oaths of office. These leakers also are hiding behind anonymity, supposedly out of fear for their jobs—but that just shows either their recognition of the illegality of their actions or their own lack of moral principles as they put their jobs ahead of their moral obligation to do a right thing, or both. Leakers are entitled to no protection whatsoever.

Moreover, journalistic claims that a source is a whistleblower doesn’t make it so. The journalist must provide evidence that the claimed source is, in fact, a whistleblower, vis., evidence that the source has exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues. Having shown that, the journalist must—at the very least for credibility’s sake—identify the whistleblower. A whistleblower source no longer needs anonymity; he has the legal protections of whistleblowing. The whistleblower work environment might still be uncomfortable, but in that case, refer to “job ahead of doing a right thing” above.

In the particular case at Solomon’s hand, in which a reporter is being held in legal jeopardy over her refusal to reveal the source(s) she used in her reporting in 2017, the reporter throughout her reporting and at all opportunities since, declined to provide any evidence at all that her source(s), which she claims were whistleblowers, were in fact whistleblowers and that those sources had exhausted all of their whistleblowing avenues within the organizations that employed them, before the source(s) talked to the reporter. As a result of the reporter’s refusal to reveal her source(s),

In February, US District Court judge Christopher Cooper held her in contempt of court—and fined her $800 a day—until she turned over her confidential sources. Although he said he “recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society and the critical role that confidential sources play in the work of investigative journalists like Herridge,” he added that he was required to strike a balance between press freedom and that Yanping Chen’s “need for the requested evidence overcomes Herridge’s qualified First Amendment privilege in this case.”

Solomon, like the judge (despite his on the whole correct ruling) is conflating whistleblower with confidential source, even though the two are distinctly separate from each other, similar only in their willingness to talk to reporters, but radically different in the legal protections they have.

Press freedom advocates, however, fear that [the judge’s] ruling against Herridge could cripple the ability of journalists to protect whistleblowers and confidential sources to provide critical information to the public.

Solomon, and his press freedom advocates, are making a specious argument with this claim. Whistleblowers need no journalistic protection. Leakers deserve none.

Overarching that, in years past, editors required reporters to have in their articles at least two on-the-record sources that corroborate the claims of their “confidential” sources. The press industry has long since walked away from that requirement, and no one in the industry has been willing since to say what publicly available and concretely measurable standard of journalistic integrity is in use today in place of that erstwhile standard.

Those on-the-record sources are all the protection journalists would need, too, were today’s journalists not too lazy to find and use them.

Audit Failure and a Target for Reduction in Force

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The Pentagon has failed, again, the audit of its finances. This makes seven in a row, and it calls into question how hard the relevant officers and civilians are trying, along with their level of competence.

A total of 1,700 auditors worked on the 2024 audit, which cost about $178 million.
A breakdown of the audit found that 15 of the 28 standalone financial audits received a failing grade….

Pentagon Comptroller Michael McCord:

…the Department has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges[.]

After seven years.

As Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy look around the Federal government for places to cut, and as SecDef nominee Pete Hegseth (assuming he’s confirmed, even as the Left and their Progressive-Democrats ramp up their smear campaigns) looks into the Pentagon establishment he’d be overseeing, here is a lucrative, target-rich environment to enter.

A RIF is a Reduction in Force, a move whereby the military branches occasionally winnow down their ranks of officers and enlisted that each branch deems excess to its needs. The financial types—both military and civilian—in the Pentagon’s budgeting and acquisition sections, from supervisors on down, have by their successive and apparently determined failure to perform have self-selected for RIF. Start with McCord and his disingenuosity.

The RIF shouldn’t be limited to these folks, though. To the extent they’re getting bad, or merely slow, data with which to work, Pentagon training staff (and training is at the center of the Pentagon’s mission), branch Secretaries and Chiefs of Staff, and their financial staffs should be similarly targeted, over and above the Secretaries and Chiefs themselves being fireable by the incoming President for reasons suitable to the President.

Nor should it stop there. The Combatant Commands and the supporting commands—supply, transport, personnel, and so on—need to be closely scrutinized with a view to assessing the quality and timeliness of the data they’re sending to the Pentagon. Those personnel, again both military and civilian and again regardless of rank or position in the hierarchy, need to be RIFed also.

No doubt, this will lead, if carried out with sufficient breadth and depth, to a large reduction in the personnel complement of the Pentagon and of those additional establishments.

That opens up a twofer. Many of the critics of Hegseth’s nomination stew openly about his lack of experience in leading so large an organization as Defense. One approach for dealing with that is to shrink Defense. These RIFs would go a long way in that direction.