Posts Tagged → staff
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.
To What and to Whom are you loyal?
Couple of interesting conversations in the past 48 hours about loyalties, one in the Juneau, Alaska airport with a guy distributing whisky around the world, and the other guy a lawyer back East. Both educated but practical, both smart and articulate, neither particularly ideological, and neither a consumer of Breitbart or Gateway Pundit news information. Which is to say, both are opinionated but not well informed, and their loyalties show it.
Both men say they are Republicans or the admittedly endangered species Kennedy Democrats (John F. Kennedy today would be a far-right America-First conservative Republican, but I digress) both say they are moderates, both say they want a “centrist” or a moderate to be the next president. Their joint political loyalty is to the idea of bipartisan and moderate political philosophy.
The lawyer takes great umbrage at President Trump taking on the executive branch’s administrative state, saying that “Trump wants to make himself monarch of America.”
The whisky salesman wants “a return to civility.”
As far as I can tell, both these very different men are devotees of ideas or images of ideas that were last seen dead on the side of the road America has traveled in the past ten years. Americans chose Donald Trump precisely because of the so-called “political moderates” standing for nothing in particular and constantly making self-serving “bipartisan” deals amongst themselves that always, always exclude Mister and Missus America. It’s what prompted the America First/ Make America Great Again movement.
As a great sage once said, If I am not for myself, who will be for me? In other words, you can’t live in America and be concerned more about people and places outside of America and still have America thrive and survive or even last as America for long. Thus MAGA and Trump enduring and actually thriving despite an unrelenting attack by the establishment media, Hollywood, academia, the Federal executive branch’s administrative state, corporate America, Wall Street, and the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association, to name but a few of America’s domestic enemies.
The American people know their survival and freedom is on the line, and they have stuck with their only true advocate through thick and thin.
The notion of “civility” also died when the establishment media came out of the closet in 2008 not as ideological crossdressers, but as war-painted cannibals bent on wanton, bloody destruction of everyone they opposed. Compare the openly partisan fake news media now to 2008 and it’s like they aren’t even the same species; that is how much toxic political poison the mainstream media “news reporters” have drunk since going all-in for non-vetted Barack Hussein Obama back in 2008. The un-civil establishment media is so openly un-civil and fake that the Biden White House issued an open memo demanding that all Fake Newsdom rally ’round the Biden Crime Family and attack Republicans instead of reporting on the treasonous international bribery the Biden family has engaged in for years.
As they say, you can’t make this stuff up, because this truth we are living is crazier than any fiction we could write. And I don’t know what planet a grown, intelligent, experienced adult American is living on to want or expect civility and moderation in a heavily one-sided toxic atmosphere like this. Trump isn’t the cause of this environment, he is the victim and the symptom of the corrupt sickness assailing America by way of “moderate” divided loyalties.
You – an American citizen of voting age – cannot both be loyal to America as a sovereign nation with the rule of law applying equally to all citizens and also support a wide-open southern border with millions of illegal immigrants coming in. You – the proverbial reasonable citizen in the street – cannot be loyal to an America where the rule of law prevails in all things, and also support a federal bureaucracy that is untouchable, unreachable, and that insubordinately does not answer to its Chief Executive, who was (and still is) Trump.
Trump a monarch? Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but…well, the US President is Chief Executive of the Executive Branch of American federal government. The Chief Executive is in a way, I suppose, a sort of monarch in his executive domain there. He is the boss. When the taxpayer-paid staff of that same executive branch openly rebels against their chief executive and acts insubordinately, it is they, not the President, who is acting like a monarch. Trump was elected by The People to run the executive branch, and the staff people of that executive branch are supposed to abide by their oaths of office, and follow the orders of their chief executive. When those staff people do what they want, and not what the elected chief executive wants, then they are each acting like petty kings. They are in open rebellion against The People of America.
So here we are, a people of divided loyalties. We want things that can’t possibly exist, and we are loyal to fake news media outlets because we still want the taste and smell of the old civility and moderation we once enjoyed. We want an unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy to continue on as if its continuing rebellion against the President was no big deal, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we are the good Americans. After all, we want stability and security and moderation and civility. And so we support the true villains in American politics, instead of the champions of a free America with the rule of law for all, the MAGA America First advocates like President Donald Trump.
If your hunting club suddenly turns anti-gun, would you stay loyal to it? If your work place suddenly throws you out into the street for no good reason, would you stay loyal to them? If your children’s school suddenly became disloyal to your children’s best interests and to you, would you remain loyal to that school?
I myself am loyal only to the founding first principles for which American government is supposed to stand. When the government ceases to represent or implement those principles, then that government and the individual staff people in it no longer have my loyalty. They are loyal to themselves and to their power, not to me and my rights.
I am loyal to Power To The People. We, The People own the federal bureaucracy, not the rogue, corrupt, violent, lawless staff at the FBI, ATF, DHS et al. who are the Gestapo KGB strongmen of the Biden fascists seeking to bend all people to their evil will through illegal midnight raids on the homes of their political opponents. These people cannot ever have the loyalty of the American People. And people who are loyal to these vile anti-freedom alphabet organizations are no longer Americans, because they have abandoned the basic principles of fairness and due process that used to make America America.
Whither America right now is a question of loyalty, your loyalty, to whom and to what.
Trump wants to be liked by the mean boys
President Donald Trump is a good guy, and it is why he keeps making the same mistake over and over with people who are not good. He understandably sees himself as a reasonable person, a respectable person, a responsible person, and he also desperately wants to be somewhat, even a little bit, inside The Republican Club.
This is why he endorsed politicians who were openly antagonistic to him: Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and Brian Kemp (Georgia), to name just two. Trump keeps thinking, and hoping, that the Republican politicians who hate him and reject him will nonetheless ultimately come to like him, admire him, and appreciate him. This is why he keeps on trying to play their insider game, and he keeps on losing at it.
The problem is that the career Republicans are mean boys (and a few mean girls), occupying their own little tree house club house. And while they may have vicious squabbles amongst each other inside that tree house, their hideout remotes a closed club to outsiders. Closed even to people who may think the tree house is plenty big enough for more people, and in fact might benefit from having more people in it.
We have seen this exact same dynamic play out even down to the legislative staffers in Washington and in state capitals across America. A sense of elitist prestige and exclusive specialness. These people have spent their entire careers knitting together personal power by carving out a niche for themselves inside the bureaucratic spiderweb, and by God, they are never ever going to share that power with anyone they don’t have to share it with.
President Trump’s latest mistake is constantly weighing in on behalf of US Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a highly preened, plucked, scrubbed, and unprincipled careerist from California who desires to be the next Speaker of the US House. We can see by now, after seven failed votes among US House members, that McCarthy obsesses over and craves the Speaker’s gavel and office like various brainwashed victims in The Lord of The Rings who are caught caressing The One Ring and calling it “My precious.”
McCarthy even moved into the Speaker’s office despite not actually being elected Speaker!
Anyhow, President Trump. What a window into his mind this endorsement business has been, this public craving of his to be accepted into the mean boy RINO club, or at least to be publicly valued and acknowledged by the RINOs. It is why he keeps giving them unearned endorsements. And he knows that even if he helps McCarthy prevail and become Speaker, he will still be ignored and cast off afterwards. It is like Trump is so loyal, and so earnest, that he simply cannot fathom the treachery and selfishness endemic to career politicians like McCarthy and McConnell.
No, President Trump, these careerist jerks will never change. Stop thinking they will.
The good news is that a cool black guy, Byron Donalds, got the most dissident votes for Speaker today. Smart, articulate, brave Byron Donalds is exactly what the Republican Party needs from top to bottom. But the bad news is that instead of grooming Donalds for future leadership, the so-called “leaders” of the House Republicans (Scalise, McCarthy) are running around twisting arms and trying to hurt and threaten fellow House members for not supporting McCarthy for Speaker.
Kind of interesting how this mean boys club works. It is almost like it doesn’t matter which political party these people are in, at the end of the day they are all the same: Mean, coercive, uninterested in listening to people who disagree with them, unwilling to negotiate a settlement, and vicious. They never back down no matter how much people reject them, they are always selfish and demand that we all acknowledge their selfishness and reward it. In short, McCarthy et al are gross yucky people. Not nice.
President Trump, this is not your fight and these are not your people. Forget about it, let this play out without your participation. You can’t win here, no matter what you do. You are not a career-long mean boy and you don’t belong in this squabble.
409+
Last week, under pressure to perform at an adult, professional level, the senior staff at the NCAA folded right before appearing in court.
The discovery phase of a lawsuit brought against the NCAA for its disproportionate over-correction of Penn State University was about to begin, and with a handful of damning NCAA emails already in hand, the meaty part of discovery would have exposed the heavy handed NCAA overlords for what they are: Incompetent, vacuous bullies.
The fictional Louis Freeh “report” aka Hit Piece and Flaming Bomb Meant to Humble Penn State has gradually yielded to the collective bits of disbelief and basic deductive logic surrounding the Joe Paterno Assassination aka The Oxbow Incident.
Knowing now what we already knew two years ago, the NCAA storm trooper and tactical nuke assault on one of the very few pristine colleges in the nation has blown up in the NCAA’s own face.
Yes, we got our 409 wins back, but we deserve so much more.
And to have undergone so much knee-jerk reaction injustice…..Penn State deserves compensation, to be made whole, to get back what we lost, if it’s remotely possible.
I want blood.
I want guts.
I want a shred of public justice for Joe Paterno and Penn State, and for the student athletes immorally saddled with faux guilt from the sick, distant actions of a man they’d never met, let alone heard of (Jerry Sandusky).
To begin with, the Joe Paterno statue immediately goes back to its original prominent place on campus.
Then, every member of the PSU board involved in the debacle issues a personal, hand written apology. And then each resigns. I’ve got a few names to go with that demand.
Then each NCAA staff member associated with the debacle issues a hand written apology, and then resigns.
That’s what real leaders do when they fail badly.
And for those folks who really want to demonstrate their earnest attitude, I’ve got some old Japanese swords you can fall on. I’m tempted to serve as your second….to ensure a clean ending, of course.
A clean ending to a tragedy, a failure to protect little boys, a failure to act like grown men and women and apply justice carefully, a failure to protect the grown boys on the team and the many professional educators and students unfairly tarnished by the NCAA’s hasty, shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude.
And then there’s the scholarships, the bowl money PSU lost. The opportunities unfairly crushed. How do we get all that back?
And Mr Louis Freeh, you may be ex-FBI, but I’m ex-Penn State Nittany Lion. Don’t meet me in a dark alley.
Don’t howl too loudly, Wolf Pack
If the Tom Corbett administration was marked by poor communications, unaccountable senior staff running amok in the name of their boss, a hands-off management style by the chief executive, and a general lack of charisma, there’s a good indication that the Tom Wolf administration is headed the exact same way for similar reasons.
And they might experience the same one-term result that marked Corbett.
Maybe Katie McGinty will run a right and responsive ship. Maybe John Hanger will avoid sharp conflicts with the Republican legislature. Those will be advantages over the Corbett administration. But the missing outside voices from across the aisle are an indication that an insular culture is already taking place. From insularity springs all kinds of foolish mistakes.
There will be time enough for natural disagreement. But unless the Wolf Administration wants to go down fighting from the beginning, and thus get saddled with a deadly four years of failure, they’d better start thinking hard how to navigate the minefield, to give and to take, to lead.
An open letter to Patrick Henderson
Dear Patrick,
Years ago, you were a sweet kid from Western Pennsylvania, beginning your career in the state legislature. Working for state senator Mary Jo White and the senate environmental resources committee gave you lots of opportunity and exposure to political issues, outside issue groups, and the overall political process, including the executive branch. You were smart, interested, thoughtful, and principled, and although we occasionally disagreed I really enjoyed working with you….. way back then.
But something changed. You changed. You seem angry, hateful, even. Even towards people who have done nothing to you, at least that they are aware of; although I write this for myself, I write knowing that many other individuals have experienced the same unfair, undeserved treatment from you.
Your role in the Governor’s Office the past few years seems to have been largely dedicated to using state government to settle old scores with real or imagined “enemies” of yours (they were not Tom Corbett’s enemies, that’s for sure, although after you alienated them they aren’t up for helping Tom now), or to create new vendettas as you demonstrate that you have influence over government functions. For now.
At Governor Tom Corbett’s inaugural back in early 2011, you treated my wife Vivian rudely, to her face, despite her sweet nature and she having never met you before. She did not deserve that. Was it your way of getting at me, trying to hurt me, one more time? Whatever your purpose, it was petty behavior unbecoming someone in your senior, public role.
It is difficult to accept that you have become this way, but it has become a universal truth in Harrisburg that you are, in fact, angry at the world and determined to get even with everyone in it, whether they are guilty (of what?!) or innocent.
I suspect a lot of this negative change is a result of your cocoon-like experience inside the Republican Party, where you have been sheltered from the real world for your entire career. Like all of the other professional staff on the Hill, in both parties, you merely must meet a technical standard, not a performance standard.
Meeting a technical standard means that you, and other professional party people paid by the taxpayers, must merely show up for work and stay out of trouble with your elected boss. If you were held to a performance standard, then you’d be in a world of trouble. Other than using your public position to hammer away at “enemies,” what performance for the public have you achieved on the taxpayer’s dime these past three and a half years?
Taking risks, making sacrifices, meeting real deadlines, making personally uncomfortable decisions — none of these are part of the professional life on the Hill, although I am confident that you or others in those roles (even friends of mine) would disagree. We taxpayers who underwrite your salary see it differently.
As a public servant, Patrick, you are subject to writing like this. You may hire an attorney to try to get this off the web, and I sarcastically wish you good luck with that. I stand behind everything written here, as you well know, and if I am pushed to do so, I can certainly provide any necessary evidence to support it.
Good luck with your career, Patrick. Unless you are recycled back into the Republican Party, and God knows I really hope you are not, because I think you are a huge liability to our party, you are destined to work in the private sector. Here is some valuable advice: Don’t treat people in the private sector the way you treated them when you were in the public sector. You won’t last five minutes. Other than that, I hope you enjoy your family and show humble appreciation for all of the good things that God has bestowed upon you.
–Josh
PGC: Great, Old Agency Unused to Modern Limelight
If there is one take-away from my many years in federal and state government jobs, it is that agency staff cultures change slowly. In Pennsylvania, a great example of this is one of my favorite agencies, the Pennsylvania Game Commission. PGC is an agency that is used to doing things the way it wants, often relying on its impressive history as evidence for its present day independence and independent culture.
PGC is presently in the headlines because of a $200,000 payment to its former executive director, Carl Roe, now very recently departed of the agency.
I thought it was an amicable departure; maybe not. PGC staff say this is a settlement to avoid a possible lawsuit. Critics of the payment include the governor’s office, the PA Comptroller, the PA attorney general, and many elected officials. They say this is a sidestep around the state’s prohibition of severance payments, made between a board of directors and an executive director who were actually very cozy with one another.
This is sad, because PGC is a storied agency, a trend-setter in the area of wildlife management, wildlife science, habitat management, and public land acquisition. Something I like is that PGC has uniformed officers who stand in front of Hunter Trapper Education courses filled with 10-18-year-old kids, and tell them that they have a Second Amendment right to own firearms. Few states in America have such a wonderful role for their uniformed law enforcement officers. We are fortunate to have this agency with this culture, and it is for this reason that I oppose merging PGC with DCNR. Ranger Rick and Smokey Bear are not going to purvey that valuable message.
The flip side of the culture is what is often described as a “bunker mentality” among the agency’s staff, and this payment to Roe probably fits in with that view.
Most agencies are careful to avoid controversy, especially controversy that does not have a strong basis. This payment does not appear to have a strong basis, so it is an unnecessary controversy that is likely to damage the agency’s standing among lawmakers and executives, as well as the general public and hunters who otherwise happily buy hunting licenses to support their favorite agency. It comes at a time when the agency is already under the gun from oversight legislation (HB 1576, which does not address actual problems, but rather imagined problems unrelated to PGC and PA Fish & Boat Commission).
Don’t get me wrong, I like Carl Roe, and PGC has also driven me nuts at times. I clearly recall the day he was brought on to the agency as an intern. Me, then PGC executive director Vern Ross, PGC biologist Gary Alt, Carl Roe, and senior PGC staffer Joe Neville drove together up to Bellefonte to participate in the swearing-in of a new PGC commissioner. Carl struck me as a bright, quantitatively-oriented, inquisitive, experienced manager. Over the years since that day I have had many opportunities to meet with Carl, and he has always impressed me as a stalwart and intelligent promoter of PGC, hunters, trappers, and wildlife conservation. This huge payment lightning rod situation just does not make sense in that context.
But on second thought, this payment does make sense if the insular agency culture managed to eventually penetrate into Carl’s otherwise solid judgment. That has been a phenomenon witnessed among other new PGC staff; the broad “something-is-in-their-water” observation that people’s personalities changed dramatically once they joined PGC. Other evidence of an insular culture was recently brought to my attention: Four of the agency’s biologists (all of whom have some or all of the deer program’s oversight) have graduate degrees from the same school and they studied at the same post-graduate field station. And no, they ain’t from Penn State, or any Pennsylvania university, for that matter, dammit.
I fear for PGC, because at a time when the agency is already under scrutiny from HB 1576, this new payment debate threatens to add fuel to the flames, and add a straw onto the camel’s back. Part of the culture driving these problems is the same kind of culture that can cause the roof to suddenly come down. Careful there, boys, careful.
*******UPDATE:
So, as has happened before, these essays get read, and I get phone calls and emails. People calling me usually do not want to post on the blog, being afraid of attribution, and frankly, what some other people want to post here is not always worth keeping. So here is the gist of what came over the transom in the past half hour: Things between Carl Roe and the PGC board were not chummy. The payment to him is seen as a real money-saver. I am unsure how an at-will employee like an executive director has any real legal recourse, unless he is fired for his religion or political views, things that are a) hard to prove and b) unlikely. Also, I neglected to mention that Roe had, indeed, given away about $300,000 in agency funds to Hawk Mountain (GREAT PLACE, but not necessarily deserving of big PGC money) and other groups. This unaccountable and unapproved largesse caused real friction between Roe and the board, not to mention the rest of the stakeholders whose donations to and purchases from PGC are expected to be spent in a pecuniary fashion.