Tag Archives: government

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.

A Good Move in the Offing

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President Donald Trump (R) and some of his new appointees are looking at downsizing the Federal government’s office holdings and at downsizing the General Services Administration, the agency specifically tasked with being the landlord of those office facilities.

The Trump administration is considering selling two-thirds of the federal government’s office stock to the private sector, according to people familiar with the transition operations.
About three-quarters of the 70 million square feet of office space the GSA leases from private landlords in DC is also likely to be canceled, according to Don Peebles, a longtime Washington, DC-based developer.

The Federal government doesn’t need all that office space and uses very little of what it has.

GSA-owned buildings in Washington, DC, average about a 12% occupancy rate. The government owns more than 7,500 vacant buildings across the country, and more than 2,200 that are partially empty.

Reducing GSA holdings of government office space will become even more important to the extent Trump’s plan proceeds to move many Executive Branch Departments and Agencies out into Left- and Progressive-Democratic Party-disdained flyover country. On top of that, the upcoming reduction in civil service employment will further reduce the need for government office space wherever located.

Nor is there any reason why two or more Departments can’t occupy the same building, two or more Agencies can’t occupy the same building, or Departments and Agencies can’t occupy the same building. That’s teamwork and collaboration facilitated by colocation—work in the office rather than remotely—extended to entire government functions. What a concept.

A Thought

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Ex-President Joe Biden (D) thinks he can enact an Amendment to our Constitution by tweeting it into existence: his announcement that the ERA Amendment is now the law of the land, he says.

With that precedent, President Donald Trump (R), who has some tweeting experience, can tweet out of existence other Amendments, or parts thereof: vis., part of the 14th Amendment.

All persons, born to parents at least one of whom is a citizen of the United States, or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

That ought to saucer and blow the matter.

Update: Oh, wait….

Time to Go

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Here’s yet another Federal agency that needs to be eliminated, its budget returned to the Treasury, and its personnel—all of them—returned to the private sector rather than reallocated within the Federal Leviathan.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [emphasis added]:

  • its role in organizing the Election Integrity Partnership—the private group that worked with social media companies to censor content during the 2020 election
  • did not implement effective controls for the selected High Value Asset (HVA) system per Federal and departmental requirements
    • DHS OIG found inactive user accounts were not consistently disabled or removed, according to established rules—40% of nearly 2,800 “users”
    • 15% of sampled users missed initial or annual cybersecurity training
  • did not follow its own recommendations when conducting its own review of the system, failing to detect the access control deficiencies identified by the watchdog

When the agency personnel aren’t being overtly corrupt, they’re being patently incompetent. The organization is far beyond redeemability, and it’s new enough (created out of whole cloth in 2018) that there are much fewer entrenched interests in preserving its corruption or its incompetence.

A Singularly Bad Idea

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Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R) has introduced a resolution that would propose a Constitutional Amendment that would apply term limits to Congressmen. Congressman Ralph Norman (R, SC) has introduced a companion resolution in the House.

The amendment would limit US senators to two six-year terms and US House members to three two-year terms. The two-page resolution states that after the amendment is passed by Congress and ratified by the states, the amendment would go into effect “within seven years after the date of its submission by the Congress.”
The resolution proposes that after a member of the US House has served three terms, they aren’t eligible to be reelected to the House. After a US senator has served two terms, they are no longer eligible to be elected or appointed to the US Senate.

This is a bad idea. It’s not suboptimal, it’s bad. There is no legitimate reason for our government to dictate to its sovereign—us citizens—who we will choose to represent us in our government, not even via Constitutional Amendment. Beyond that, there is no legitimate reason for a current generation of citizens to limit who future generations might choose to represent them in future governments, not even via Constitutional Amendment.

The concern about longevity, built-up seniority, and the perks and power of incumbency is very legitimate and amply justified by the abuses of so many current and immediately past Congressmen.

However, our Articles of Confederation, which got many things wrong—it was, after all, a first draft of a self-governing, non-monarchist, form of government—did get the matter of term limits and the power of incumbency and seniority absolutely correct. Here’s what Article V of those Articles had to say on this matter:

[N]o person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years[]

Congress under the Articles was unicameral, and a Congressional session and a delegate’s term of office were for one year only. Thus, a delegate could serve in Congress for no more than three years of a six-year period.

That is easily adaptable to our current bicameral Congress with its Congressional sessions lasting two years (so a Senator’s term spans three sessions). One adaptation would be to limit a Representative to three terms of any six and a Senator to two terms of any four, with a Senator wishing to stand for the House being limited just one term in the House until six Congressional sessions had transpired, and a Representative wishing to stand for the Senate being ineligible to do so also until those six Congressional sessions had transpired. I’d also bar the Congressmen of either house from serving in any other Federal government capacity or work for any lobbyist, whether for pay or pro bono, except that such alternative work bars the six sessions from counting until he’s left those positions.

That Amendment, based on the Articles’ limits, would satisfy the problem of incumbency and seniority without presuming to dictate our choices of whom to select to represent us.