Tag Archives: federal employees

When Politics Is More Important Than What Is Good For Americans

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On Friday, The Daily Caller posted an article about a recent vote taken in the Senate.

The article reports:

Almost all Senate Democrats rejected a bipartisan bill Friday evening to pay active-duty troops and federal employees reporting to work, including Capitol Police officers, during the 38-day government shutdown.

Lawmakers voted 53 to 43 to advance the federal worker pay bill, falling seven votes short of the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. The failed vote marks the second time a majority of Democrats have blocked legislation to pay some federal workers during the funding lapse.

I guess they really care about the well being of working Americans.

The article notes:

“Let me be clear about what a ‘no’ vote means,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, the second-highest-ranking Senate Republican, said during floor remarks Friday. “A NO vote is a vote to refuse to pay air traffic controllers who are working. Refuse to pay TSA agents who are working. Refuse to pay military members who are serving around the world. Refuse to pay Capitol Police officers who are here in this building working.”

The article concludes:

GOP lawmakers have been adamant throughout the 38-day shutdown that they will not negotiate on health care policy until Democrats vote to fund the government.

“Democrats want to give $35 billion next year to insurance companies for subsidies with no fraud controls and to benefit the wealthy. Hard no, Chuck,” Senate Republicans’ X account wrote, referring to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

President Donald Trump called on the Senate to stay in session over the weekend to hammer out a deal. If lawmakers do not come to an agreement, Trump called on Republicans to invoke the nuclear option and kill the Senate’s legislative filibuster to pass a funding measure on their own.

Thune told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that Republicans lack the votes to nuke the longstanding procedural rule.

“Not even close,” the majority leader said of the whip count.

As the shutdown continues, I suspect there may be more senators willing to end the filibuster. This is ridiculous!

Sore Losers Can Be Dangerous

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On Tuesday, David Strom at Hot Air posted an article detailing some of the plans of the deep state. We are now at the point where the deep state is not only admitting that it is real, it is telling us its plans.

The article reports:

The irony is thick, but these federal employees–some former, some current–have told NOTUS (News of the United States) that they are turning their color revolution skills to taking down the President of the United States.

The following is from NOTUS:

“Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one,” said a currently employed federal official, who spoke to NOTUS on condition of anonymity. “They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.”

The former officials tell NOTUS they’re holding workshops on a tactic called “noncooperation.” They’re building a network of government workers willing to engage in even minor acts of rebellion in the office. And they’re planting the seeds of what they hope could become a nationwide general strike.

Some in the informal network of Trump opponents are sharing an old CIA pamphlet with allies who still work in the government: It’s called “Simple Sabotage.”

They wanted to simply have their offices continue even if they sat there and played solitaire all day. They doesn’t sound like any respect for sound fiscal policy in America.

If they truly believe that we have become an authoritarian country, why are they choosing to ignore the results of the last election? It seems to me that honest elections (which I believe we had) would be the actual antidote to authoritarianism and that refusing to cooperate with the results of that election would be moving toward authoritarianism. Evidently these people think that regardless of the election, they should be in charge, and they are willing to make trouble to bring that about. I think they belong in jail.

Another Day, Another Lawsuit

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On Tuesday, The Epoch Times posted an article about a lawsuit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union filed to prevent President Trump from being able to fire federal employees.

The article reports:

President Donald Trump’s order removing job protections from federal officials violates federal law, according to a Jan. 20 lawsuit.

Trump’s order, signed earlier on Monday, reclassifies certain employees into the same category as political appointees, thereby removing some job protections.

“The President’s Executive Order is unlawful and ultra vires because it exceeds statutory authority and is contrary to congressional intent,” the lawsuit, filed by the National Treasury Employees Union in federal court in Washington, states.

There is no way that government waste can be cut without having the right to fire people!

The article notes:

“The President’s Executive Order is unlawful and ultra vires because it exceeds statutory authority and is contrary to congressional intent,” the lawsuit, filed by the National Treasury Employees Union in federal court in Washington, states.

In the order, Trump said that “accountability is sorely lacking today” because removing federal employees has been too difficult. He said it is important to ensure that officials in “policy-influencing positions” are accountable to the president.

He noted that in recent years, there have been some federal officials who have resisted executive leadership.

The order states in part: “Employees in or applicants for Schedule Policy/Career positions are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration. They are required to faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability, consistent with their constitutional oath and the vesting of executive authority solely in the President. Failure to do so is grounds for dismissal.”

If you work in a private company and are working against the agenda of management, you will be fired. There is no reason the government should have a different standard of behavior.

The article concludes:

The suit is one of several launched within hours of Trump taking office.

Multiple suits targeted the Department of Government Efficiency, which is tasked with examining ways to make the government more efficient. Another lawsuit challenged Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship for some future babies born on U.S. soil.

Rewarding The Hand That Feeds You

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There are people in America who will vote for Kamala Harris for many reasons–the idea of a woman President, the idea of a mixed-race President, and the idea that a Harris presidency will provide free money for a lot of people.

On Thursday, mrctv reported the following:

The union that represents the nation’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents announced Wednesday that it is endorsing Democrat Kamala Harris for president in this year’s election.

Vice President Harris has played a role in “one of the most pro-labor administrations in history,” the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) explained in a press release announcing its decision:

“The administration also delivered agency budgets that provide federal employees with additional staffing and resources, including significant new investments to rebuild the IRS under the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Indeed, the Inflation Reduction Act, for which Harris cast the deciding vote to break a Senate deadlock, boosts the IRS budget by $80 billion, enabling the agency to hire an additional 87,000 employees – while increasing the union’s membership in the process.

However, the IRS expansion won’t just increase union membership, it’ll also help the agency to collect an additional $5 trillion of tax increases Harris wants, analysis by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) finds:

“Harris-proposed tax increases will kill jobs in the private sector but create jobs for IRS agents.

“Agents certainly appreciate her call to make the IRS even larger and more powerful if she wins the presidency. Agents will be hired and deployed to implement the $5 trillion of tax increases Harris wishes to impose over the next decade.”

ATR research also found that 97% of political contributions by the IRS agents’ union went to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle. In all, the union gave $635,170 to Democrats during that election cycle.

Nothing like supporting your local IRS agent.

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!

Your Tax Dollars At Work

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On Thursday, The Daily Wire posted an article about the amount of taxpayer money that goes to federal employees that actually work for the unions that represent federal employees rather than the government but are paid by the federal government.

The article reports:

The federal government pays more than $100 million a year to employees who aren’t doing their actual government jobs, but rather working for unions representing government employees against management — with taxpayers essentially funding both sides of the bargaining table. 

For decades, the government has tracked and reported those figures, but the Biden administration has removed the reports.

Under the policy known as “official time,” hundreds of nominal government employees haven’t done anything but full-time union work in years, yet remain on the federal payroll. Not only is the policy expensive to taxpayers, but it also props up the power of unions by subsidizing their activities, giving them resources even if employees don’t support them enough to pay dues. Those unions fight against the firing of employees accused of misconduct, and advocate for policies that sometimes pit the interests of employees over the interests of taxpayers, such as resisting a return to in-person work.

The Office of Personnel Management has historically kept track of and published how the program is being used, including during the Obama administration. But the data has not been updated since 2019 — when the government shelled out for 2.6 million hours, or nearly 300 years’ worth, of employee time that was actually spent on union business.

The Biden administration has even been secretive about its secrecy. In December, The Daily Wire asked OPM why the page listing the reports was missing, along with all historical reports except 2019, which can only be located via the search function. A spokesperson said, “Previous reports on official time are not currently available because OPM is reorganizing our website to improve navigation and customer experience.”

The article concludes:

In 2014, the Washington Examiner found more than 500 employees who did no or almost no work for their actual government jobs, despite drawing a full-time salary from taxpayers, because of official time. That includes 271 employees on full-time union release with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and 201 from the IRS.

Then-Sen. Tom Coburn said “I just don’t think the federal taxpayers ought to be paying for that… That’s what union dues are for. What’s irksome to me is that we are paying someone to be a pharmacist or a nurse, but they’re not doing that. They’re doing union work.”

Washington is due for a really good cleaning out!

The Government’s Misplace Priorities

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On Friday, The Epoch Times posted an article about some changes being made to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The article reports:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intends to raise its enforcement personnel by 40 percent by the end of this fiscal year, with revenue agents seeing the largest workforce increase.

For fiscal year 2024, the IRS plans to boost enforcement staff by a net 5,462 employees, according to a Jan. 29 report by IRS watchdog Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). This would take the total number of enforcement personnel at the tax agency to 18,960 by the end of fiscal 2024, which is 40 percent higher than the staffing at the beginning of October 2023.

Out of the 5,462 net additions, 4,704 will be revenue agents who are tasked with conducting “face-to-face audits of more complex returns.”

The tax agency intends to add a net 493 special agents for the year, who are armed officials investigating “potential criminal activities.” Staffing of revenue officers will rise by 265 employees. Revenue officers are tasked with collecting delinquent taxes and securing delinquent returns.

First of all, I do not believe that IRS agents should be armed. Secondly, the idea of an apolitical IRS went out the window when Lois Lerner decided to target conservative groups to delay their 501c3 tax status requests.

The article notes:

By fiscal 2024-end, revenue agents will comprise close to 70 percent of the enforcement personnel. Armed special agents will make up 13.5 percent and revenue officers will account for 16.4 percent.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided the IRS with $79.4 billion in supplemental funding that is available for the agency until September 2031. By the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2023, the agency had used $3.5 billion of the funds.

As long as we are arming federal employees, let’s send them to our southern border to enforce our immigration laws.

Vaccine Mandates Hit The Courts

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NewsMax reported on Friday that U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown has issued a nationwide ruling Friday that President Joe Biden could not require federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

The article reports:

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown said in his Friday order that at issue was whether the president “can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment.”

He added, “That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”

Brown, based in Galveston and appointed by President Donald Trump, said the government could protect public health with less invasive measures, such as masking and social distancing.

The Justice Department said it would appeal the ruling.

Where in the Constitution does it give the government the right to tell Americans that they have to inject something in their bodies that they may not think is helpful to their health? We are supposed to be a nation of laws governed by our Constitution. It’s time we actually followed those laws.