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A Modest Suggestion on Dealing with Civil Servants
Everyone is calling on Trump to drain the swamp. I want him to do so. But while he can replace those who serve at the pleasure of the president, I am sure many of those with civil service protection will be able to retain their jobs due to the difficulty of firing civil servants (an oxymoronic term, in my opinion, as few are civil and many believe they are our masters, not our servants).
So how to deal with them? Especially those in regulatory agencies that will try to block Trump’s agenda.
Well, if you cannot fire them, reassign them. Strip them of their responsibilities, put them in offices with no windows, no phones, no electronic equipment, and with walls that block cell phone transmission. Require them to be on-site with no work-from-home. Give them plenty of pens and papers and paper copies of the Federal Regulations for their agency. Also instructions on how to hand-edit text. (STET anyone?) Have them red-line assigned sections of those regulations by hand, to simplify them, both in terms of readability and intent.
Monitor their arrivals and departures — maybe put in old-fashioned time clocks and have them punch in and out like 20th-century factory workers. Monitor their daily output. (Set a quota of 50 to 100 pages a day.) If they fail to deliver, build up a file on them – dock their pay.
With luck, most will quit within 90 days. If not? At least they are no longer doing any harm. Yes, we have to continue to pay their salaries, but that is cheap compared to the damage they do to the US economy in their current positions.
Meanwhile, backfill their old jobs with people picked by Musk and Ramaswamy.
Published in Domestic Policy
Going to need strategies to deal with their unions. The unions will sue if we do a tenth of that, especially to any members of protected classes.
I don’t think the class of workers that make policy are in unions. I don’t see it at NASA, for instance. We are talking the higher GS levels – GS 9 to GS 15 – the ones where promotion is supposed to be on “merit.”
Candle, quill, and inkwell: that’s all the monks needed to copy masterworks, so it’s good enough for admin code.
I love your ideas, @seawriter. And the sooner, the better!
If we end the existence of every damn agency, it might be an end run around the matter of the perpetual secret government employees.
At the CDC, NIH, NIAID, and FDA these newly unemployed can go back to working for their real employers: Big Ag, Big Pesticide, Big Pharma and various other industries like the food processing industry that are involved in inflicting Americans with toxins.
At a minimum, Congress should pass a law saying they can have civil service protection or be a union member, but not both. I can’t remember where I saw this idea, but I like it.
There’s a cesspool of Vindman’s everywhere you look in DC.
And they would best serve the country by either leaving the Federal government or working in a bare room furnished with a large steel desk, an uncomfortable chair, pens, pads of paper, and printed copies of the Federal Regulations.
All this turns on whether they are coming to the office or “working from home.”
Any agencies with fewer than 10% of their employees coming in to work on a daily basis should be combined in the same federal building.
There is no “working from home” for these civil servants. They have to come in every day to a room with no electronic connectivity or access.
One good torture is to require them to come in one day a week. Then provide just enough guest cubicles to accommodate one fifth of them and no more.
There is eight inches of new snow outside and I have to go bring in the garbage can. Unless somebody can send Chubby Vendman over to do it.
President Trump needs to take care of a major source of power in the bureaucracy first. VP Vance might be the one to do it. Get the right people in charge of OPM (Human Resources), OMB (Budgets), and GSA (Contracts). Every part of the federal bureaucracy has civil servants responsible for these functions and they exercise enormous influence over the operational functions.
No remote work. Move the headquarters buildings to:
St. Louis, Cleveland,Kansas City, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Midland-Odessa. A different city for each cabinet agency.
Self removal will occur.
Then they will hire locally, and get much better people.
I wonder what other jobs those people think they would be able to get, in DC?
Telephone Sanitizer.
And a bell. You need a bell, book, and candle to write admin code.
And the K Street lobbyists would have to move, too. It would have cascading effects. DC and surrounding VA property values would plummet.
In fact, send DOJ to Minneapolis to occupy all the vacant space downtown.
Moving agencies was done in Mr. Trump’s first term. USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture moved from the Beltway to Kansas City. The transition was a little rocky, one of the problems identified by the GAO was the cost of transition, that is, too much turnover. Probably more a feature than a bug. I worked with a team to put together a bid to bring them to the mid-heartland. As part of that effort, I was looking at the numbers of federal employees who would be theoretically coming with the move. I knew a few of them personally, and was not disappointed when we lost that bid, and they weren’t moving here. I believe they retired rather than move to KC. On the plus side, I know a couple of young economists who took jobs in KC, people who would not have taken the same job in the Swamp.
These methods were used on George Costanza in a Seinfeld episode. Eventually it worked.
I imagine a lot of Costanza types are in these departments.
Slash agency budgets. They’ll be forced to cut employees.
I suppose we’re taking a pass on the whole gladiatorial arena idea then. That’s a pity. We could have made some coin on the streaming rights.
“I wager 500 Quatloos on the DOJ!”
Actually, the National Labor Relations law, passed in 1936 iirc, specifically banned gov’t workers from unionizing. JFK issued an executive order legalizing them after he won a close election. Trump could rescind it, but I think he’ll have to pick his battles.
Vivek has a way he says he can use to legally fire federal workers. I think it starts by decertifying the union.
Here is Vivek’s position paper. He explains how to do it.
Reorganization is the key. And hardball with SEIU.
Harris could provide play by play. But nobody will want to watch.
I like Vivek’s plan, but it is not nearly as much fun as locking them in an empty room eight hours a day doing tedious hand editing until they quit.