Category: Bureaucracy
Firing The Deadwood
This isn’t about campfires, oh no. This is so much more satisfying than a roaring fire on a cold winter’s night:
Approximately 50,000 federal workers in “policy-influencing” positions will lose specific protections against firings and become more at-will employees in the next month, per a new Trump administration rule announced Thursday.
The new rule, published by the Office of Personnel Management, will move senior career civil servants in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” positions into the Schedule Policy/Career category, formerly known as Schedule F.
Going forward, federal workers in those roles will lose their ability to appeal firings, suspensions or disciplinary action to an independent board.
Administration officials can dismiss those employees if they engage in “misconduct, poor performance or obstruct the democratic process by intentionally subverting Presidential directives.”
I think I speak for all my Readers when I say that while 50,000 is a nice round number, I’m thinking that 200,000 is a much nicer, rounder number. But I’m open to other, more ambitious suggestions.
Of course, the response has been predictable:
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing non-postal federal workers, said in a statement that the rule would “chill protected speech” and “weaken enforceable protections against retaliation.”
“This rule is a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service and the government services the American people rely on every day,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said.
Two issues jump off the page.
Firstly, let’s just suggest that right off the bat, the very idea of a government-employee union is an abomination. It’s time the AFGE was abolished.
Secondly, if the current crop of bureaucrats had actually behaved like a “professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service” over the past, oh, eighty years then this action wouldn’t have been necessary. But they haven’t, so here we are.
The bitter joke is that the civil service has always been the structure whereby Democrat policy has been implemented regardless of which party is in the White House. This new Executive Order from DJT is simply rectifying that attitude, and it’s about damn time, too.
Missed It By THISmuch
…that would be the end of the Schumer Schuttdown. I predicted that it would end two days after last Tuesday’s elections (Thursday), and it actually ended yesterday (Sunday).
How nice. Now the Gummint so-called “workers” head back to their offices (except when “working from home”, what a boondogggle) and go back to wasting taxpayer money while doing so little to justify their existence.
Forgive me for sounding blasé about the whole thing, but at least the Republican Party Reptiles managed to maintain their soft spines and refuse (for once) to capitulate to the Socialists. I suppose that’s something to celebrate.
So now it’s back to normal, and on we go with the never-ending story.
Bah.
Now it’s time to end ObamaCare, lower income taxes, keep up with the deportations of illegal immigrants and keep reducing the size and impact of the government on our lives. To mention just a few.
Later, we can discuss the hangings.
Failed State
Every time I get into any kind of discussion with Brits and Euros (no longer a single entity, of course) about the relative state of our nations, I get hit with the “at least we have free health care” jibe.
Well, sometimes “free” is better than nothing; and sometimes, it’s a lot, lot worse:
Our 15 hours of hospital hell after my mother’s stroke. We saw patients urinating in the corridor, nurses being slapped and ambulances queuing for hours… the NHS is truly broken.
I had called my mother for a quick catch-up when it became clear that there was a serious problem.
It was about 10.30am, an average Wednesday two and a bit weeks ago, when my usually sparky, chatty, bright and switched-on mum answered the phone in a way that suggested something was terribly wrong.
With a befuddled voice, she told me she wasn’t feeling well. She was confused and couldn’t work out how to open the back door to let the dog out. ‘I’m supposed to be at work,’ she told me, ‘they keep calling. But I can’t understand how to do anything.’
Because I’m paranoid, and because her mother – my grandmother – had died of one 20 years ago, I immediately suspected she was having a stroke.
I remembered the famous F.A.S.T test to recognise the signs – F for facial drooping, A for arm weakness, S for speech problems, T for time being of the essence if you recognise any of these symptoms.
My mum couldn’t tell me about her face, or her arms, but her speech was confused in a way I hadn’t encountered in all my 45 years on the planet, so I immediately told her to stay where she was while I called 999.
The emergency operator told me the call was marked as high priority and that an ambulance would arrive as a matter of urgency. I would soon discover that my definition of terms such as ‘urgency’ and ‘high priority’ were very different to the definitions used by the NHS in 2025.
Read the whole thing, for the full horror.
Our Real Enemy
This article suggests that the real enemy of America is not called the Chinese Communist Party, or the Russian Menace, or the Muslim Invasion. Who is, then?
There are two irrefutable and intertwined realities that the citizens of any constitutional republic must recognize and understand. First, any group or entity that espouses ever greater power for the central government, socialist-centric economic policies, and continual erosion of individual freedom is an existential threat to that nation as founded.
Second, the leaders of these factions and their disciples will lie incessantly, and under no circumstances will they alter their policies or tactics, as they can never be wrong in their pursuit of unbridled political power. They must be soundly defeated at the ballot box, or civil strife will inevitably ensue.
Steve McCann lays out the most egregious scenario in recent memory where the Powers That Be did just that. Here it is:
Nothing better defines this mindset of infallibility, arrogance, and pathological lying to achieve political power than the most malicious exploitation of the citizenry in American history: The deliberate manipulation and mismanagement of the Chinese Coronavirus “pandemic.”
Beginning in March 2020, the ruling class/Democrat party and their accomplices in the medical establishment knowingly regurgitated innumerable falsehoods and were responsible for a variety of catastrophic actions that caused not only massive economic and societal dislocation but also countless deaths. The Democrats still have not acknowledged the errors that they made and, of course, will not admit that those errors were compounded by abject refusals to change course.
I have a simple take on all this. As time passes and memory fades, we run the danger of forgetting not just the consequences of this bastardy, but the suffocating effect of what was essentially mass house arrest, as well as the fear of shortages — from frigging toilet paper to essential drugs like insulin — and the massive overreach of the police state to enforce all those restrictions on our liberty.
And just remember that the enforcement of the restrictions was selectively enforced: churches were closed, but the Antifa/BLM riots went ahead without a strong response from the police.
Read the whole article above, be reminded, remain angry, and let’s not let it happen again — ever.
Unnamed Drivers (And Voters)
Exhibit #1:
Additional note: 3 years is a “limited term”.
I’m not often in favor of yet more laws to be passed, but I think that if someone is injured or killed in an accident caused by one of these no-name drivers (or an illegal alien driver), the state in which the accident happened should have a prima facie legal cause for suing the issuing state, for millions of dollars.
That, and the affected state should impose a mandatory life sentence without parole on the no-name (or illegal alien) driver — public executions no longer being fashionable.
I am getting so sick of this bullshit.