Promises, Promises

President-elect Donald Trump (R) has nominated a number of folks for various Cabinet and Agency positions. Three, in particular, already are (potentially) having a salutary effect: Matt Gaetz for AG, Robert F Kennedy Jr for HHS, and Pete Hegseth for SecDef.

Folks in those departments now are threatening mass resignations should they be confirmed.

That’s a built-in promise to shrink government employment, and by itself it’s reason enough to confirm Gaetz, Kennedy, and Hegseth. Then hold those bureaucrats to their word.

Chopping Blocks for DOGE

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

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.

Audit Failure and a Target for Reduction in Force

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.

It’s Not So Much That

The Wall Street Journal is puzzled by President-elect Donald Trump’s (R) move to persuade the Republican-majority Senate to go into recess so he can install his several Executive Branch nominees as recess-appointments.

…it was strange the other day when President-elect Trump issued a pre-emptive demand that his own party let him make recess appointments, “without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner.”

The editors go so far as to try to lay Trump’s move off on trying to ram through his nominee for AG, Matt Gaetz (R), the ex-Congressman from Florida. There is much about Gaetz over which to be dismayed by his nomination, but getting the Senate to blanket allow a plethora of recess appointments to mask this appointment really isn’t the reason for the recess appointment push. Or certainly not the only one.

Going through the confirmation process is interminably slow even in the best of times. It can take months to work through the list of nominees, years even, with a determined and skillful opposition. For a variety of reasons, most of them entirely sound, the Committee vetting process takes days—for each nominee—a time frame that can be dragged into weeks when the minority party wants to. It was the Progressive-Democratic Party Senators’ practice throughout Trump’s first term to hem and haw and delay and stall each of then-President Trump’s nominee confirmations.

Then, once out of committee, Senate rules mandate a minimum 30 hours per nominee of floor debate, absent unanimous consent.

Party already is gearing up to block as much of Trump’s announced agenda as it can; blocking as many of his nominees as it can will be an extension of that.

It’s not at all surprising that Trump would ask Republicans to go along this time.