[ April 18, 2024 ]
I hope so, too. The Democrats are holding the country hostage for illegal immigration. More specifically, they are holding our military hostage to give amnesty to illegal immigrants. The President is right to hold his ground; I hope he continues to do so. The Democrats are being increasingly exposed as the party that is opposed to the protection of American citizens and opposed to everything that is in the best interests of the United States.
“I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance,” Daily Caller, January 14, 2019 (thanks to Pat):
The Daily Caller is taking the rare step of publishing this anonymous op-ed at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose career would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.
Story continues below advertisementAs one of the senior officials working without a paycheck, a few words of advice for the president’s next move at shuttered government agencies: lock the doors, sell the furniture, and cut them down.
Federal employees are starting to feel the strain of the shutdown. I am one of them. But for the sake of our nation, I hope it lasts a very long time, till the government is changed and can never return to its previous form.
The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.
On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. I wish I could give competitive salaries to them and no one else. But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.
Why would they? We can’t fire them. They avoid attention, plan their weekend, schedule vacation, their second job, their next position — some do this in the same position for more than a decade.
They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. “Process is your friend” is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores.
Process is what we serve, process keeps us safe, process is our core value. It takes a lot of people to maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts and certified process managers who protect the process. Then there are the 5 percent with moxie (career managers). At any given time they can change, clarify or add to the process — even to distort or block policy counsel for the president.
Saboteurs peddling opinion as research, tasking their staff on pet projects or pitching wasteful grants to their friends. Most of my career colleagues actively work against the president’s agenda. This means I typically spend about 15 percent of my time on the president’s agenda and 85 percent of my time trying to stop sabotage, and we have no power to get rid of them. Until the shutdown.
Due to the lack of funding, many federal agencies are now operating more effectively from the top down on a fraction of their workforce, with only select essential personnel serving national security tasks. One might think this is how government should function, but bureaucracies operate from the bottom up — a collective of self-generated ideas. Ideas become initiatives, formalize into offices, they seek funds from Congress and become bureaus or sub-agencies, and maybe one day grow to be their own independent agency, like ours. The nature of a big administrative bureaucracy is to grow to serve itself. I watch it and fight it daily.
When the agency is full, employees held liable for poor performance respond with threats, lawsuits, complaints and process in at least a dozen offices, taking years of mounting paperwork with no fear of accountability, extending their careers, while no real work is done. Do we succumb to such extortion? Yes. We pay them settlements, we waive bad reviews, and we promote them.
Many government agencies have adopted the position that more complaints are good because it shows inclusion in, you guessed it, the process. When complaints come, it is cheaper to pay them off than to hold public servants accountable. The result: People accused of serious offenses are not charged, and self-proclaimed victims are paid by you, the American taxpayer.
The message to federal supervisors is clear. Maintain the status quo, or face allegations. Many federal employees truly believe that doing tasks more efficiently and cutting out waste, by closing troubled programs instead of expanding them, “is morally wrong,” as one cried to me.
I get it. These are their pets. It is tough to put them down and let go, and many resist. This phenomenon was best summed up by a colleague who said, “The goal in government is to do nothing. If you try to get things done, that’s when you will run into trouble.”
But President Trump can end this abuse. Senior officials can reprioritize during an extended shutdown, focus on valuable results and weed out the saboteurs. We do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them. Sure, we empathize with families making tough financial decisions, like mine, and just like private citizens who have to find other work and bring competitive value every day, while paying more than a third of their salary in federal taxes.
President Trump has created more jobs in the private sector than the furloughed federal workforce. Now that we are shut down, not only are we identifying and eliminating much of the sabotage and waste, but we are finally working on the president’s agenda.
President Trump does not need Congress to address the border emergency, and yes, it is an emergency. Billions upon billions of hard-earned tax dollars are still being dumped into foreign aid programs every year that do nothing for America’s interest or national security. The president does not need congressional funding to deconstruct abusive agencies who work against his agenda. This is a chance to effect real change, and his leverage grows stronger every day the shutdown lasts.
The president should add to his demands, including a vote on all of his political nominees in the Senate. Send the career appointees back. Many are in the 5 percent of saboteurs and resistance leaders.
A word of caution: To be a victory, this shutdown must be different than those of the past and should achieve lasting disruption with two major changes, or it will hurt the president….
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23 Comments
5 years ago
We need consistency.
Trump says he wants a border-wall & a ban on immigration from some Muhammadist tyrannies, while he says of news-pioneer Pamela Geller :”Why is she insulting everybody?”, while he sells weapons to Saudi Arabia & allows the spread of Mosques & loudspeakers, while he allows the 15 year jail sentencing of an Anti-mosque protester in Florida & the sentencing of the ban on the forcible lifelong torture of clitodirectomy of girls as unconstitutional, while he promotes Twitter whose greatest stake is owned by Saudi Arabia, while he allows Muhammadists like Saudi Arabia, Hamas-CAIR, Pakistan, Qatar & so on to censor Facebook, Wikipedia, universities & schools worldwide.
Then there is the Antifa, BLM, Nation of Islam who claim to work against racism, oppression, Nazis or white supremacism while falsifying history & actual facts.
Hitler was a Muhammadist & Africans are today enslaved in Saudi Arabia to Mauritania since unjust Muhammad started that.
Hitler viewed the unjust Muhammadism as ultimate Nazi religion that as he told his architect & minister of war Albert Speer matches the German temperament better & many Nazi criminals openly converted to the unjust Muhammadism after the war & worked for the Egyptian Muhammadist tyranny under Nasser or in Syria.
Africans are enslaved, castrated, divorced, beaten & killed today in Saudi Arabia & enslaved in the UAE, Oman, Yemen, Kuwait, Lebanon, Bahrain, North-Sudan, Libya (surge), Algeria (surge), Mauritania (20 percent), Niger, Mali, Somalia, Nigeria in emulation of unjust Muhammad who started the global African slave-trade by saying his unproven deity had turned Africans black so Africans’ descendants would be slaves to Arabs & Turks (see Wikiislam).
5 years ago
Draining the swamp directly. The party’s over bureaucrats…
5 years ago
Reply to
MAS
Agree. And the first Muslim democrat/socialist president imported 200,000 yearly legal and illegal muslims and deported christians back to ISIS to be slaughtered after they tried to make it to America http://tinyurl.com/mtc3xch
And those who dared to help were threatened to shut up and MSM would not cover it !
5 years ago
It is an excellent opportunity to CONSOLIDATE the endless over lap with departments.
Why do we need Homeland Security? Yes, I know, GWB grew government and wanted to look like he took 9/11 seriously but is it necessary? Frankly, I’d rather see the FBI gone and Homeland Security replacing them. The FBI is hopelessly corrupt. Imagine the $avings and efficiency that could be had by doing this.
Government Shutdown: Pampered Federal Workers Don’t Deserve Anyone’s Pity
1/16/19
…
An analysis of federal pay by the Congressional Budget Office found that when you combine pay and benefits, federal workers make as much as 52% more than their private sector counterparts, depending on their education level. It also found that this gap has widened in recent years, because even when the economy was in a recession, federal workers kept getting annual pay hikes.
…
A more recent analysis by the Cato Institute found that federal employees make 76% more than private sector workers. Using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Cato report found that the average federal employee pulls down $123,160 a year in pay and benefits, compared with $69,901 in the private sector. It also found that this gap had increased since the 1990s, when it was 39%.
They also get generous amounts of paid time off, including nearly two weeks of paid sick leave, 10 federal holidays and at least two weeks paid vacation.
…
Not only do federal workers make more, they work less than those in the private sector.
A Heritage Foundation analysis found that federal employees put in an average 38.7 hours a week, compared with 41.4 in the private sector.
Other reports show that government workers are 38% more likely to take time off work for illness or personal reasons, and miss 50% more hours than private sector workers.
Here’s one case in point. After the Obama administration eliminated the International Labor Comparisons office, which employed 16 economists, the private sector Conference Board took on the work. But instead of 16 workers, the Conference Board needed only three to do the work.
Project Veritas recently produced a series of undercover videos, in which federal workers bragged about how little they work, or how much time they spend at work on outside projects.
…
What’s more, it is almost impossible to fire a federal worker. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the rate of layoffs and discharges among federal workers is one sixth the rate of the private sector.
A Government Accountability audit found that it can take between five months to more than a year to fire a poor performing worker.
…
It just gets worse….more here:
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/federal-workers-government-shutdown/
5 years ago
Reply to
felix1999
Plus civil servants get a nice pension for life. It used to be civil service orovided a nice paycheck and job security. However, private sector paid much more with no security. Now civil servants get bigger salaries, job protection and nice pensions compared to the private sector. Also civil servants are not worried about down sizing, firings or forced retirement.
5 years ago
Reply to
Glen Benjamin
Do you want to know just how bad it is?
They are over paid, under worked, lots of holidays off, no Obamacare for them, many are unionized and PENSIONS that most people don’t get in the private sector that we pay for too!
Take McCabe. He was demoted, they are hard to fire and where did he go?
To personnel to screen out GOOD PEOPLE and he kept his higher level salary!
McCabe’s pension –
But what really got us was that, after working at the FBI for just 22 years, McCabe’s pension package was valued at a whopping $1.8 million. And even if he loses that, as someone who is covered by the Federal Employees Retirement System, he’ll still get a pension. It’ll just be smaller than his FBI pension, and he’ll have to wait until 60 to collect it, but it will be generous nonetheless.
Please remember, McCabe was fired on recommendation of the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility. It wasn’t vindictiveness.
The real scandal is that government bureaucrats like McCabe have gamed the system for years to get platinum retirement and benefits packages, all paid for by the hardworking, taxpaying “deplorables” these same bureaucrats despise.
As one of the federal government’s 2.2 million employees, McCabe’s pension is subsidized, insured and mostly guaranteed by taxpayers, part of a generous benefits package — covering health insurance, paid leave and, of course, retirement — available to all federal workers.
Along with having 401(k)-type pensions with a generous “employer” match, federal workers also get a defined-benefit pension, to which they contribute less than 1% of their pay. Oh, and they also receive health coverage when they retire. And Social Security.
Private sector workers get nothing comparable.
A Congressional Budget Office study last year noted that “Average benefits were 52% higher for federal employees whose highest level of education was a bachelor’s degree than for similar private-sector employees.”
As for those federal employees with just a high school diploma, benefits are 93% higher — no, that’s not a misprint — than for those with equivalent education in the private sector.
According to data the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is part of the federal government, in 2016 the average federal employee earned $127,259 in total compensation, compared to $70,764 for the private sector. Meanwhile, federal workers enjoyed average annual benefits of $38,450, compared to average benefits in the private sector of just $11,306.
…
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/fbi-scandal-over-andrew-mccabes-lost-pension-isnt-what-you-think/
5 years ago
Reply to
felix1999
The reason they can’t be fired is because they have a union to protect them! THAT needs to be shut down as well!
5 years ago
Reply to
Glen Benjamin
How else you expect May to pay for all her Muslim parasite friends and all the illegal immigrants that have infested the country, formerly known as Great Britain and paying 350 million pounds a week to an unelected bunch of dictators. The British taxpayer pays these enormous taxes and gets nothing in return plus being treated as second class citizens in their own country.
5 years ago
amen. until FDR, we lived just fine without much help from DC. i say let’s keep DC shut down for 2 years to keep the democrat-owned house from doing any more damage, and let america decide in the next election whether to keep it shut down
5 years ago
Why don’t you just arrest them? THEY ARE NOT royalty. They are COMMUNIST/socialist/pagans and have NO BUSINESS being up there in the first place!
PLUS they have committed many crimes and broken many laws. WTF???
5 years ago
Reply to
Alleged-Comment
Don’t hold your breath!!
Also I read where he is out driving again already – oh, the arrogance of the unaccountables.
5 years ago
I hope so too!
5 years ago
Wow, awesome!
5 years ago
I read federal the courts run out of money at the end of January. Does that mean Trump can reissue all of his executive orders that have been sabotaged by Commiecrat judges and hey cannot be heard? If so, that is great news! The country is doing great without these million federal workers. Let them find jobs in the private sector and learn for once how to work productively. I agree with the writer here that Trump should increase his demands to include approval of all of his appointees. That should be a key requirement. Pile it on, Mr.President. We are “lovin it!”
5 years ago
As a person that is and has worked in the private sector my entire professional life, this is
unacceptable. Government employees are NOT doing any work, just passing time, damaging
and wasting taxpayers money. All of us hardworking, taxpaying American’s are paying
for this waste. It must stop NOW!!!
Fire them all and start over. Hire back the “producers” like “Anonymous” in the article. The
rest must look for work in the private sector and learn how responsibility works.
(and what WORK means).
This will help paying off the national debt in no time. Let’s do this for our children and
grand-children.
5 years ago
I just read Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Minute all about McConnell having just introduced a bill that Specifically Prohibits the wall! That snake!! Smoking them out, indeed.
5 years ago
TL;DR
5 years ago
I do wish the shutdown can end soon, it is affecting more ordinary Americans than people realize.
5 years ago
This is the same way that the NHS is run and just about every government agency. They love throwing away taxpayers money especially to countries that either do not need it or hate us. Hard to believe that those in government and the councils are public servants. The country needs a big clean up with most of the elite serving serious jail time. and bring back the death sentence for traitors and murderers.
5 years ago
Shut the F****r down long enough to RIF the deadwood. Use the billions of saved money to build the wall.
.
