Posts Tagged → bureaucrats
US Army Corps of Engineers: America’s Black Hole in Need of Cosmic Level Fixing
Because it is a relatively small part of our big military and kept in a dusty back room far from the shiny B-2 bombers, the US Army Corps of Engineers has been off the radar of legislators and commanders-in-chief alike since George Washington ended his presidency. But in the intervening 250 years since its founding, the USACE has gone from building bridges for troops and cannons, to aggressively stealing private property rights and forcing a Marxist environmentalist agenda on domestic citizens under the guise of “civil works.” Of all the federal agencies I have dealt with professionally and personally, including USEPA where I worked for seven years, the USACE has had the biggest mission creep in the worst directions of all. So, for USACE’s 250th birthday this year, can we please give Americans a gift of freedom, and see this most hidebound, insular, destructive, over-reaching, and unaccountable agency finally get the keelhaul overhaul that Americans deserve?
Not that I am rooting for Navy here, but our sacred Army has no business getting its good hands dirty with the USACE’s lawlessness. Big change must happen there, and with fresh new appointees from the Trump Administration, hope should be on the horizon. I hope these appointees are tough as nails, because they are facing a deeply entrenched bureaucracy as jealous of its ill-gotten power as any other federal agency has been, and they have the arrogant, dismissive staff culture to show for it.
USACE “manages” 12.5 million acres of formerly private land, much of it associated with water projects for hydropower, flood control, and public recreation. Sounds useful and wholesome enough: Waterskiing, fishing, hiking, families picnicking, with downstream communities protected from heavy rains up in the watersheds. Problem is, most of USACE’s flood control lakes are heavily silted in and barely functioning as advertised or designed. And probably 95% of this enormous land collection was obtained at gunpoint, through eminent domain against private American landowners, including the Seneca Nation, who still have a formal land treaty with the US government that was reached with George Washington himself, and which the USACE violated.
Absolutely nothing and no one is sacred to the USACE; not the US Constitution, not us citizens, not our property rights.
Anyone familiar with federal eminent domain knows it is rife with abuse and below-market values forced on private landowners for the most frivolous purposes. And while some federal agencies will attempt to reach willing-seller-willing-buyer agreements before going nuclear, the USACE just used legal sledgehammers against American landowners right from the get-go, because screwdrivers have never been in their toolbox.
But the situation is worse than just USACE’s rampant takings of privately owned lands that could have easily served the USACE’s goals while remaining in private ownership. Back in the 1950s-1970s good ol’ days of “Big Government Knows Best,” when the agency was most active, the USACE also stripped many of its condemned properties of their valuable subsurface oil, gas and or mineral rights, too, without paying for them. Not content with taking the surface rights for managing surface water, the agency simply took what it wanted and dared the beaten-down landowners to try to beat them in government courts. Today, millions of Americans are deprived of substantial and highly valuable subsurface private property rights at nearly every single USACE water resource project. These oil, gas, and mineral rights should be in their families’ private ownership, but are wasting away under USACE theft and neglect.
A group of military engineers and their civilian hangers-on have no business running public recreation facilities on American soil. The USACE’s job started as support of military combat troops in 1775, and it is incredible that we are having this discussion in 2025. The marrying of USACE hydroelectric dams and flood control facilities to public service recreation has not worked, because the agency’s staff developed a culture of untouchable bullies. The US military is not supposed to operate on American soil, for damned good reasons, but the USACE does so, with predictably bad results.
USACE is over-ripe for huge change. At the very least USACE needs the deep cleaning treatment of staff and structure that chief administrator Lee Zeldin is doing over at USEPA. USACE’s “civil works” must be spun off to actual civilian oversight and management in the agencies that have historically done this kind of public service and natural resource management. Nearly all of USACE’s physical assets should be moved to the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the US Forest Service, all of which have much better track records dealing with public service than the USACE. Which is saying a lot, because all of these federal agencies have had real rough patches in their public land management history and public service interface cultures, too.
Josh First wrote his 1991 master’s thesis on the USACE’s nationwide water resource projects, and, ironically, has randomly ended up owning substantial acreages adjoining two USACE water resource projects in Pennsylvania as an entrepreneur. He will write about his own related experiences with USACE in future essays.
This essay originally appeared at American Thinker.
Forgive Me for Asking, But I Must
Forgive me, it is not my intention to cast cold water on our collective rejoicing at having President Donald Trump re-elected, again, and thus at having dodged the Democrat Party’s communist anti-democracy bullet aimed at America’s heart. It is true that Trump’s election gives us hope that our constitutional republic is not over. However, I feel like I am watching a repeat of 2016-2017, where highly qualified conservatives and Republicans were mysteriously bypassed, overlooked, left untouched by the then-new Trump Administration.
Well do I recall someone of real stature writing publicly then (2017-2018) about how mystified he was that no one from Team Trump had contacted him about any of the unique policy strengths he had, and how the new Trump Administration seemed disinterested or lost on whatever that policy subject was. Well, here we go again, from where I sit.
Trump supporters have learned to forgive the 2016-2017 lapses, missteps, failures, and missed opportunities as due to Trump’s unfamiliarity with government, his natural reliance upon long established and unreliable DC Beltway insiders, his understandably misplaced trust in deep staters and other bad actors, his misplaced faith in the weight of federal employees’ oaths of office.
We watched as Trump’s first term slowly, painfully, peeled away the mask from the hostile administrative state, generously bankrolled by American taxpayers and yet also so openly at war with us. We grudgingly learned to accept the stolen 2020 election as the cost of doing business within the parameters set for us by the establishment media, the administrative state, and its constellation of hostile non-government organizations, who then worked furiously from outside to undermine the very rules they set.
And so we miraculously prevailed in 2024, and America as founded yet lives again. And now we have earned the right to say openly, can we please not make the same and very avoidable mistakes again, this time around?
While President Trump is indeed appointing strong leaders who are willing to assertively implement his bold vision for a better government that is closely attuned to America’s founding documents and principles, one question has not been addressed: Who exactly is going to carry out these deep reforms?
With few exceptions (the US Dept. of Commerce being one), nearly the entire federal workforce was already openly insubordinate to President Trump the last time around. And there is no reason to believe that these public employees are going to honor their oaths of office this time. And if Trump follows through on the DOGE promise to eliminate entire federal agencies, and greatly streamline those that remain, then which law-abiding civil servants will there be to carry forward in those same agencies the Trump Administration’s policies?
Put another way, if President Trump installs leaders who, for example, change the name of the radicalized US Environmental Protection Agency, then which of the old USEPA staff will there be to then follow through with the systemic change through every artery and vein inside the old institutional body? If the federal government is going to aggressively do compliance checks or reel back in billions of dollars in Biden grants to far-left NGOs, then who exactly is prepared to hit that ground running? The current federal workforce is almost entirely unreliable, and if left in place, each and every federal employee will become a road block of one. The DOGE people had better be collecting lots and lots of names of prospective civil servants who are prepared to take the place of existing staff, who should end up fired from federal service for any number of good reasons.
House cleaning is promised, but who then moves into the house to give it new life?
Ending where this essay began, it is my turn to publicly complain: No one from Team Trump contacted me, way back in 2016-2020, or now, about my unique area of expertise. I am one of a very small handful of truly conservative Republicans nationwide with extensive hands-on experience with public land issues and wildlife habitat/ land conservation policy. No Trump staffer has called to ask my experienced opinion on federal appraisal standards, especially related to eminent domain, or on rights-of-way issues surrounding federal properties. To my knowledge, none of my few colleagues have been contacted, either. I am not looking for a job. I already run a small business that I really enjoy. But I am willing to volunteer my precious time to help shape sound federal policy that is a significant deviation from the longstanding horrible status quo.
President Trump has the loyalty of so many talented and experienced conservatives, any and all of whom will jump at the opportunity to simply help this one man (and his administration) who can save America. This is the big chance to get America back on track.
So why then do I feel like America via President Trump is once again missing easy opportunities to make lasting, good policy? If the right people do not identify and help fix these longstanding horrible policies, the civil servants will keep them in place, and we will miss a once in a lifetime opportunity for good government.
January 6th 2021, USA’s modern civil rights march
On January 6th, 2021, I stood near the Washington Monument and listened to President Donald J. Trump speak about election integrity. He was right on the facts and also a bit long winded, but who in his position wouldn’t be. America had just witnessed a stolen election, and a presidency illegally ripped from Trump’s hands by a band of lawless bureaucrats and anti-America activists.
To say that America was shocked at the blatant theft of the 2020 election was an understatement. Most people expected the US Supreme Court to step in and hear arguments about the overwhelming details of rampant election fraud across the country. But no help was coming from the spineless weasels on the Supreme Court. And with very few exceptions, no help was forthcoming from anyone in elected office, either, as state attorney generals sat on their hands and looked the other way, and state legislatures refused to take impeachment and removal actions against rogue bureaucrats and lawless state supreme courts that helped implement the Steal of 2020, the theft an entire nation.
I will never forget marching down Constitution Avenue in the early afternoon of January 6th, arm-in-arm with people who were strangers on the one hand, and yet recognizable to me on the other hand. On my left arm was a black guy, probably mid thirties, visibly upset and shouting about our rights being trampled. On my right arm was a Hispanic guy, who was animated but who also seemed especially positive. We were bound together as Brothers in America. Regardless of our different skin colors, we shared then and still share now a common interest in the rule of law and honest elections.
I think we all expected our participation that day in that 100% peaceful march for our most important civil right, the right to vote, to bear fruit. We justifiably expected the representatives of The People to suspend the artificially forced electoral vote counting, and that all the obviously fraudulent actions in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, would get a public airing.
Alas, the lawlessly violent police response to our peaceful civil rights march in front of the US Capitol matched the lawless behavior of the elected official class: Both groups ignored We, The People, and both police and members of congress went on unimaginable rampages against us. The DOJ’s shameful hunt for political dissidents continues to this very day.
As I wrote here on the day after January 6th, I was illegally gassed three times and repeatedly shot with rubber bullets by a police officer who was keyed in on me, and yet my face, which he seemed so intent to hit with his many rubber bullets, was just a few feet out of range of his gun. His projectiles kept hitting my chest, my shoulders, but never my face. I don’t recall there being much room behind me to step back from the officer’s assault, and like others around me, I stood shocked by what I was witnessing and experiencing. The police were supposed to be our protectors, not assault troops acting as an arm of the lawless political class.
January 6th, 2021, was the civil rights march of our time, and I am proud that I was there as an active participant. Unlike the police there that day, I did not hurt anyone, I did not break anything, and I did not act lawlessly. My heart and my mind are clear. The police, however, must be investigated and legally held accountable for their civil rights violations against us peaceful protestors.
Nothing is more important than voting, having the right to vote, and have your vote be honestly counted and not be diluted by fake ballots and hacked voting machines that deliberately change votes in favor of the lawless political class. Without one person-one vote, there is no republic, there is no democracy, there is no representative government of, by and for The People, and no America.
In 1964, elected Republicans overcame Democrat Party opposition and got America to pass the Civil Rights Act aimed at letting Black Americans live free and equal lives with everyone else. A year later, in 1965, elected Republicans again overcame Democrat Party opposition and got the Voting Rights Act passed, which allowed Blacks to vote freely and not be subject to the myriad barriers the Democrat Party was placing in their way.
On Januray 6th, 2021, a new civil rights movement was begun, one for clean voting in America. For elections free of violence, free of interfering police, free of hacked voting machines, free of endless fake ballots, free of endless vote counting so that one political party eventually gets enough fake votes to declare a fake triumph, and free of papered-over windows of vote counting rooms where Republican watchers have been ejected, which happened in many venues, including here in Pennsylvania in 2020 and 2021.
In 2025, America needs a new Voting Rights Act, that protects all American citizens: a) One paper ballot per legal voter, b) personal official ID by all voters that matches their voting roll information, c) in-person voting for all but military personnel and those with extenuating circumstances, d) no voting machines, and e) just one Election Day, with all results counted and announced immediately after counting that evening.
America will not continue as a free nation without this one essential civil right being achieved.
Two Steps to Political Heaven
Much talk going on now about how President Trump is supposed to get a stranglehold on the lawless and insubordinate federal bureaucracy if he is elected to a third term this November. As a former seven-year federal policy bureaucrat who fled the belly-of-the-beast US EPA in Washington, DC, in 1998, here are my suggestions. These are based especially on my witnessing the changing of the Senior Executive Service (SES) guard from the Bush I administration to the Clinton administration, and all of the cascading management changes that followed.
Step One: Enter the White House with a clear and specific staffing plan and the prospective personnel to implement it. Ground Zero is the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which processes all federal personnel hiring and firing. From 2017 through 2020, OPM infamously held up a high percentage of Trump’s selected future staff to be seeded across the bureaucratic horizon, where they were supposed to implement Trump’s agenda. But many of Trump’s prospective picks had their paperwork deep-sixed and “lost” in obscure file drawers throughout OPM, their hiring process dragging on so long that they had to find other jobs after having put their current employers on notice of their imminent departure for the Trump Administration. When you control OPM, you can get all of your staff quickly seated and working throughout the bureaucracy. If you don’t control OPM, well, your hard-won third term won’t add up to much.
Step Two: Take no prisoners. Treat every at-will federal position as the at-will position it really is, and work hard from there to drill as deeply as possible. Treat all management positions as targets for immediate change. On Day One be prepared to immediately terminate every single SES and political position and have in hand their loyal replacements, with OPM processing them at record speed. The marching orders for all new loyal SES employees is to replace as many senior staff as they each can, as quickly as they can, with extreme prejudice. Which goes something like this:
New SES manager: “Hi Mary. Good morning. You have been a division chief in this agency for, gosh, twelve years. And yet here I find you late to our meeting this morning and dressed unprofessionally. I am issuing you two written warnings right now, one for each infraction…”
Division Chief Mary: “What are you talking about? I was only one minute late! And I have had a casual dress policy here since…”
New SES manager: “Mary, being unprofessional and insubordinate to your boss is a third violation of the OPM standards of conduct. I am writing you up right now with a third warning, which means that I am now beginning your termination and separation process from the agency as soon as we are finished here. You have three minutes to pack up your personal items and then Officer Jones here will see you out of the building.”
This “direct action” between new senior executive and entrenched senior managers must happen at every level throughout every federal agency, every day, until every senior manager has been replaced with a loyalist (loyal to the new administration and thus loyal to the Constitution). And each new, loyal senior manager will have the same directive for dealing with DC Swamp subordinates down to the bottom of the civil service staff barrel.
Anything less than this admittedly tough hands-on style means that the enormous communist rat warren continues to host a zillion rats, each one quietly gnawing away and illegally stopping the implementation of your presidential agenda and the will of the American People.
How well do I recall an EPA biologist sitting on a huge stack of biological tests done to study the effects of Chlorothalonil, a highly useful insecticide. He personally disliked and opposed the company that owned Chlorothalonil, and so he just sat on their studies. He was unwilling to meet the statutory deadline for agency review and approval or rejection. And his superiors did nothing to compel him to act. And so the company’s expensive research went nowhere, floated in purgatory, and their expensive chemical unnecessarily languished outside of the market. This story times a million is the lawless ball and chain wrapped around America’s throat right now. This must end, and if it doesn’t end by 2028 or sooner, then American government is no longer of, by, and for the American People; it will have become something utterly of by and for itself.
An autonomous, unaccountable federal bureaucracy is the end of representative government. The bureaucracy itself is not democracy, as so many DC Swamp Rats proclaim. Rather, the bureaucracy is now a stale and outdated exercise in representative government that must be dramatically changed. Democracy is the process in which We, The People hold our representative government accountable. And as the American Declaration of Independence states, The People not only get their rights from God, and not government, but The People have the right to abolish government and create a new one whenever they so choose.
Where America is at right now, with its out of control, lawless, unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucracy (i.e. heavily armed IRS SWAT teams like feudal tax collectors of olde), is the myriad federal bureaucrats have come to really enjoy their centralized power and artificially high pay. And they also don’t want to be told what to do by anyone who is not one of them. For America to adhere to democratic norms, this federal bureaucracy must be greatly reduced in size and scope, at least.
For those who might shed tears about all the sad Marxist bureaucrats being cut loose to find jobs in the private sector they mocked, hamstrung, and crapped on from their artificially protected positions, cry me a river. No bureaucrat is owed a job. They have these public service jobs solely at the will of The People and their chosen chief executive, the President of The United States. With OPM under new management and this tough love approach to running the federal government, that is the Constitutional democracy the DC bureaucrats say they are so worried about protecting.
A version of this essay was published here at the American Thinker.
Shatter that glass ceiling
The so-called “debt ceiling” is a fantasy of a fantasy. It is the undefined, almost whimsical notion that even when the United States citizenry’s representative government has in-effect borrowed trillions more Dollars than The People can ever hope to repay, it is still yet possible to raise that ceiling even further and borrow more, and spend a hell of a lot more, than ever before.
And so we are told in the sternest of tones by DC Beltway bobbleheads like Chuck Todd at NBC, that we must raise this “debt ceiling” or risk going into default. Default! Like our creditors will demand a refund! Which we all know will never, ever happen, because the entire house of cards upon which the planet’s entire interrelated economy is based will come crashing down, to the loss of most, including the communist Chinese, who have the most to lose.
So, default on the debt ceiling is never going to happen. Invoking it is just a scare tactic by DC Beltway banditos to try to screw us citizens out of more money and power. Forget it, let the debt ceiling break. Hell, go ahead and shatter it. Nothing will happen.
Unsurprisingly, massive RINO US House Speaker Kevin “Sweetcheeks” McCarthy has done ye olde reach across the aisle bipartisan BS and agreed to most of what the America-detonating Biden Anarcho-Administration has demanded, in the name of the sacred debt ceiling. Including funding for 87,000 new gun-wielding corrupt IRS agents who will be crawling up my butt and yours looking for loose pennies, and jailing us en masse for penny ante mistakes. And no cutting of the lawless FBI or the rogue DOJ budgets.
The problem with “Republicans” like Kevin McCarthy (and Tom Ridge, Tom Corbett, and 99.9% of the PA GOP here in PA) is that they believe in government first and foremost. They have no problem growing government or in ceding its unaccountable bureaucrats more and ever more power and centralized control over all us citizens. So long as they get a seat at the table and grow their own power and influence, they don’t give a darn about anything else. Shame on all of them. Shame shame shame on all of you fake conservatives.
No, I am wrong. Let me rephrase this. Shame on all of you fake Republican Americans, because you are directly empowering communists destroying America.
Congressman Scott Perry, if you are reading this, please remove Sweetcheeks McCarthy from the Speakership. Cut 80% of the FBI and DOJ budgets. Put your foot down and give these America destroying lowlifes a severe brake check. If they veer off the road and smash the debt ceiling and leave the budget talks a smoking ruin as a result, good; you get extra points. Because American citizens will benefit the most.