Category Archives: ethics

Waste of Time

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HHS Secretary nominee RFK, Jr, has a clear supporter in his running mate from when he was running for President.

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s former presidential running mate Nicole Shanahan called out various senators by name, warning that she will fund primary challenges against them if they oppose confirming RFK Jr to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services.

And [two minutes at the link]:

Dear U.S. Senators,
Bobby may play nice; I won’t.

I agree with the sentiment, and it’s often useful to implement (though not always).

Don’t waste time talking about it, though, even if you plan to act or are acting in parallel with the talk. Just act, and let the actions do the talking. The targets already know they’re targets, and in the particular case, they aren’t going to correct their behavior. Warning them is counterproductive.

The rest of us will understand when we see the actions in progress.

Don’t Accept His Credentials

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The British government has nominated Lord Peter Mandelson to be their ambassador to the United States. I write “nominated” because he’s not it until we accept his credentials as British ambassador.

This is what Mandelson has said about Trump in the recent past.

What Donald Trump represents and believes is an anathema to mainstream British opinion.

More:

Even those who have a sneaking admiration for Donald Trump because of his personality, nonetheless regard him as reckless, and a danger to the world.

Especially this:

little short of a white nationalist and a racist.

Now he says,

Frankly, I think President Trump could become one of the most consequential American presidents I have known in my adult life.

Mandelson already has shown what he means by this circumlocution.

And this:

I made those remarks six years ago in 2019, led rather along this by an Italian journalist….
I consider my remarks about President Trump as ill-judged and wrong.

Of course those prior remarks weren’t his fault. Never mind that he’s an experienced politician (even though he pretends otherwise) in which profession words are the stock in trade, and he has years of experience dealing with the press. Aside from that, of course he’s claiming to have changed his mind: he wants the prestige and wealthy perks of an ambassadorship.

This is a “diplomat” who’s already demonstrated a level of integrity and bias that shows he can’t be trusted to report to his government objectively about our government’s doings or to treat with our government honestly in his government’s name.

He’s not worth the trouble of dealing with. Don’t accept his credentials.

Gaslighting

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In a Wall Street Journal article—and this news outlet is not at all alone in this—centered on ICE arrests of those in our nation illegally who have criminal histories, the newswriter, Michelle Hackman, insists on calling them “immigrants,” even as she acknowledges in her lede that they’re here illegally.

…targeting immigrants in the country illegally with criminal backgrounds, including minor offenses.

And

…the agency [ICE] is still conducting arrests by pursuing immigrants on so-called “target lists” of criminals developed by the agency….

No. These folks are not “immigrants,” nor are they, as they are often referred to, “migrants,” illegal or otherwise. They are illegal aliens. On the matter of criminal history, that includes their crime of entering our nation illegally.

They cannot be immigrants under any circumstance unless and until they enter our nation legally. They ceased to be migrants when they entered Mexico (or Canada) illegally by those nations’ laws. Even those who entered Mexico or Canada legally, and so might be migrants there, ceased to be migrants and became illegal aliens when they entered our nation illegally.

Nor does the gaslighting stop there. Abeer Ayyoub, Jared Malsin, and Anat Peled have a piece centered on the return of Gazans to northern Gaza and the destruction wreaked there by Hamas in its war of extermination against Israel. These newswriters—and they’re not alone on this, either—determinedly refer to Hamas as Palestinian militant group Hamas. Again, no. These thugs are not militants; they are terrorists.

As long as newswriters insist on gaslighting us about these, neither they nor their journalism guild in general, will have any credibility at all on these subjects, and by extension, on any other—they might be gaslighting on those subjects, too.

Aside: by entering our nation illegally, illegal aliens have placed themselves outside the boundaries set by our law. By doing that, they have denied our nation’s jurisdiction over them. That has serious implications regarding birthright citizenship and our 14th Amendment, with its requirement of subject to the jurisdiction thereof [the United States] in order to become citizens.

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.