Tag Archives: Civil service

Even If We Lose, We Are Going To Control Things

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The realists in the Democrat party realize that President Biden is a weak candidate. It will take a massive amount of cheating to push him over the finish line. There have rumors of a candidate switch at the convention, but as of now those are simply rumors. So how can the Democrat party continue to control the government if they lose the presidency? They already have a plan.

On April 5th, Legal Insurrection posted an article explaining how the Biden administration plans to limit the power of President Trump if he takes office. I am not sure this is legal, but they are going to try it.

The article reports:

One of the things that frustrated me about Trump’s (first?) term was his seeming complete indifference to #TheResistance that manifested before he even took office. Unelected bureaucrats working in the ridiculously invasive executive branch’s many agencies, publicly declared war on him, and he . . . well, he did nothing.

Until the final year of his presidency when he seemed to finally take aim at the problem in his own branch of government–we can call it the deep state, the resistance, the entrenched bureaucrats who oversee far too much policy in America and who are, apparently, answerable to no one. Not the voter, not the president.

So then-president Trump launched Schedule F in late October 2020, a new rule that would allow the sitting and duly-elected president to have a say in who ran and worked in his own (overly large, sprawling, and ridiculously intrusive) branch of the federal government.

…And now we have Biden (or whomever is animating him) issue new rules to ensure that Democrats remain in their deep state positions, no matter who is actually elected by the people to run the executive branch as he sees fit.

…President Joe Biden’s administration announced its plan on Thursday to protect bureaucrats from being fired by a potential second Trump administration.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) finalized a rule that protects employees in the civil service by preventing the removal of their status and protections involuntarily, according to a press release. Under the new rule, an administration wishing to shift federal employees to a new category making them easier to fire would have to go through an elongated process, a move meant to be more time-consuming for a future president, Politico reported.

Hopefully this rule can be overturned either by a functioning Congress or an Executive Order. The Federal Government needs to shrink, regardless of who is in charge!

Bringing Efficiency Into Federal Employment

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Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article about President Trump’s recent executive orders to change civil service regulations.

The article reports:

“These executive orders will make it easier for agencies to remove poor-performing employees and make sure taxpayer dollars are more efficiently used,” Mr. Bremberg said.

The move will promote efficiency, save taxpayer dollars and create better work environments for “thousands of employees who come to work each day and do a great job,” said another official.

as expected, unions objected loudly. The article reports some of the reasons for the reforms:

Office of Personnel Management data shows federal employees are 44 times less likely to be fired than a private sector worker once they’ve completed a probationary period.

A recent Government Accountability Office report showed that it takes between six months and a year to remove a federal employee for poor performance, followed by an eight-month appeals process.

The National Affairs blog posted the following this spring:

Even President Franklin Roosevelt, a friend of private-sector unionism, drew a line when it came to government workers: “Meticulous attention,” the president insisted in 1937, “should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government….The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” The reason? F.D.R. believed that “[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.” Roosevelt was hardly alone in holding these views, even among the champions of organized labor. Indeed, the first president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, believed it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”

Many of our current civil service policies are the result of the unionization of government workers. It is time for that practice to end. Government workers are paid very well and should be subject to the same rules as the rest of the workforce. Unions should not be able to collective bargain with people whose political campaigns they help finance.

Be Careful What You Ask For

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PJ Media posted an article yesterday that highlights one of the major problems of the Trump administration–civil servants who are working against President Trump’s policies. The amazing thing about spotlighting this problem is that the Congressional Democrats accidentally illustrated the problem without meaning to.

House Democrats Elijah Cummings and Eliot Engel have written an open letter to the White House and State Department expressing concern that Obama holdovers who do not support President Trump’s policies were being removed.

The letter deals with Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, an Obama-era pro-Iran-deal State Dept staffer.  Ms. Nowrouzzadeh reportedly expressed “willingness to support the policy priorities of the Trump Administration” in good faith, but her actions tell another story. Ms. Nowrouzzadeh co-authored an article entitled “Trump’s Dangerous Shift on Iran,” which severely criticizes the President’s stance on the Iranian nuclear deal.

 

The article at PJ Media reports:

The Democratic Party and Politico just went to bat for a rubber-roomed “whistleblower.”

They really did just try to make hay with: “Trump Demotes — But Can’t Fire — Employee Who Calls Him ‘Dangerous.'”

If the Republican Party has a smidge of the media instincts of Schachtel and Ceren, then this coming Monday should open with a House Oversight Committee hearing on civil service employment law reform.

They don’t, of course.

But Trump does. And winning over America with civil service reform is a six-inch putt for him.

Politico, Cummings, and Engel just demystified the Deep State for American voters. It’s not about paranoiac white men bumbling about like Inspector Clouseau. It’s about an irrational set of laws that allow thousands upon thousands of unelected Executive Branch employees to work against the elected boss.

Some of them are even the precise cause of the constant “chaos” that the mainstream media loves to ascribe to this White House. Some of them routinely commit felonies by leaking confidential information to those media outlets.

And, unbelievably, one was a JCPOA architect so blinded by a lifetime in government that she actually thought America embraces her “right” to be an un-fireable bureaucrat.

Any employee in the business world who does not support the policies of her corporation or company would be shown the door. Why should civil service be any different?

Today In Wisconsin

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Today is the day that Wisconsin voters finally get to go to the polls and put an end to the seemingly endless debate about whether Scott Walker is an angel or a devil. Today’s Chicago Sun Times posted a story about today’s election. The story reminds us that the original issue that caused the recall of Governor Walker— reform of public employee unions–hasn’t been talked about much during the campaign. There is a reason for that–the reforms have been highly successful. One of the things that Governor Walker changed was the health insurance for teachers in the state. Previously teachers’ health insurance and retirement were handled exclusively by the the WEA Trust, a creation of the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), As reported in rightwinggranny.com in February 2011, the WEA Trust has come under investigation for tax violations and unreported political donations. Governor Walker moved the teachers to the same health insurance program that covers other state employees.

The article at the Sun Times reports:

Public service employees are finally making reasonable contributions to their pension and health benefits. Government employee unions no longer dictate work rules. Local school districts and governments with new latitude to renegotiate contracts have saved Wisconsin taxpayers $1 billion, according to the governor’s office.

The article concludes:

Walker never trailed in the polls but some surveys showed a tightening of the race in the final days. The voters have the final say Tuesday. They will decide whether Wisconsin will lead the nation in rescuing taxpayers from grasping government employee unions and the self-serving politicians who have appeased them by caving to their demands or return to policies that risk bankruptcy for government budgets, endangering vital government services and leaving taxpayers with the staggering bill.

What Governor Walker has done in Wisconsin is needed in almost all states. Unfunded liabilities in state budgets caused by unfunded public pensions are bankrupting the states. In some cases, towns and cities are spending more money on pensions for police and firefighters than they are for active police and firefighters. I don’t have a problem with pensions for police and firefighters, but money for those pensions needs to be set aside during the time those people are working–it should not be an unfunded liability.

Wisconsin will be an interesting bellwether.

 

 

 

 

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