Tag Archives: government

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.

Is She Confused?

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Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, opined in his Res ipsa loquitur blog that US Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D) is mistaken about our Constitution. She did, after all, have a few things to say during the just concluded vote for a House of Representatives Speaker concerning the status of the USVI (and other territories) in our nation. She demanded, in those remarks, the “right” of territorial delegates to vote on matters before the House.

This body and this nation has [sic] a territories and a colonies problem.

And

I note that the names of representatives from American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia were not called, representing, collectively, 4 million Americans. Mr Speaker, collectively, the largest per capita of veterans in this country.

As Turley noted in the body of his essay,

The language of the Constitution is clear and unambiguous. Absent an amendment to the Constitution, only states may vote on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

He also cited the relevant clause of our Constitution, Art I, Sect 2:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch in the States Legislature.

Plaskett, a duly qualified and certified lawyer, isn’t at all mistaken; she’s acting quite deliberately. She’s all too typical, too, of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s contempt for and disregard of our Constitution, canonically illustrated by ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) announcement that if Congress would not do as he told it, he would exercise his pen and telephone to bypass or overrule it, and by soon-to-be ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) lack of concern for the unconstitutionality of his student loan “forgiveness” scheme with his serial cancelations of those loans. Party’s attitude is one that reaches back at least as far as the then-Democratic Party’s head, Woodrow Wilson, who insisted that our Constitution was obsolete, in the way, and needed to be put aside in favor of his party’s Technocrat-centered “leadership.”