Tag Archives: civil-service

The Real Reason For Decimating The Federal Government…

I should have seen it.

The Washington Post recently reported on what should have been obvious to those of us who have studied the Right’s constant efforts to privatize governmental functions: Elon Musk’s mass government cuts will make private companies millions. While Trump and Musk are framing the immense and indiscriminate cuts to federal governance as removal of “waste,” they are really likely to provide what the article calls “a boon to private companies – including Musk’s own businesses – that the government increasingly relies on for many of its key initiatives.”

Much of my academic life was devoted research on contracting-out, a/k/a privatization–the decision to provide government services through private contractors rather than government employees.

My skepticism began with obvious misuse of the term.  Actual privatization would mean selling off government operations and allowing them to sink or swim in the marketplace (a la Margaret Thatcher). Americans, however, use the term to mean something else entirely: government “contracting out” with private companies to supply goods and services being financed with tax dollars.

There are certainly times where contracting makes sense, but government hasn’t been a very good judge of when those are. Contracts with units of government are qualitatively different from contracts between private actors, and those differences make it far more likely that the contracts ultimately negotiated will be unfavorable to the taxpayers who are funding them–and that’s even without the predictable “crony capitalism” that rewards campaign donors and favored billionaire sycophants with lucrative contracts at taxpayer expense.

As Musk has proceeded to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy, many objectors have noted that despite population growth, the federal workforce has been flat for decades. There’s a reason: a few years ago, I came across data showing that the federal government was actually paying the salaries of some 17 million full-time contract workers who weren’t technically government employees.

Criticisms of government operations ignore the reality that programs are often stymied by a lack of skilled in-house personnel. That includes–among other things– the government’s inept handling of refugees and the (mis)management of Medicare and Medicaid ($103.6 billion in improper payments in 2019 alone).

Too few critics recognize that passing a law to do X or Y is only a start; the unit of government charged with administering the law or program needs sufficient resources to do so. Those resources include adequate numbers of well-trained employees and skilled supervision– virtually impossible when contractors are providing the bulk of the services.

Back in 2021, I posted about an example from 2004, when George W. Bush turned the job of collecting the hundreds of billions of dollars that tax scofflaws owed Uncle Sam over to private collectors–parroting the GOP insistence that private business would do a better job than federal workers.  Most of what the private firms brought in was from easy-to-collect cases that began running out after just a few months. When the IRS brought the work back in-house, agents collected some two-thirds more money in that same few months, and it came from the harder cases the private companies had avoided. Relying on private tax collectors actually ended up costing the federal government money.

I should note that Republicans’ subsequent actions suggested that “efficiency” hadn’t really been the goal. They slashed 20 percent of the IRS’s budget and 22 percent of its staff. For people making more than $1 million, the number of tax audits dropped by 72 percent—and the money the IRS collected from audits fell by 40 percent.

The Guardian report noted that private firms are salivating as Musk decimates the federal bureaucracy.

Musk’s plans have already excited Silicon Valley mainstays such as Palantir, whose executives praised Doge on an earnings call last week and talked about how the disruption by the billionaire’s strike squad was good for the company. Palantir already has won hundreds of millions of dollars in US military contracts in recent years for AI-related projects.

Musk himself has extensive contracts worth billions of dollars through companies like SpaceX that are set to expand under the new administration.

There are certainly situations in which contracting out makes sense–but we are already relying on private contractors beyond the point of reason. We have contractors who do more or less the same work as civil servants, sitting in the same offices, for years on end, and typically at far higher cost. We have contractors who oversee contractors, contractors who write policy for government officials, and Trump is firing federal contract managers who are already too few in number and too outgunned in skills to manage it all.

The GOP’s persistent attacks on civil servants costs taxpayers and enriches privateers. The Trump/Musk goal is more of the grift.

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The Work Of Governing

An unfortunate side-effect of Americans’ fascination with celebrity is their accompanying confusion of fame with competence. That inability to understand the difference–especially when it comes to political campaigns– is largely a result of widespread ignorance of the day-to-day grunt-work of governing.

John Sweezy, the long-ago (now deceased) Republican chairman of my county party used to say that every citizen should be required to serve two years in government, and prohibited from staying for more than four years. While I disagreed with his four-year edict, I completely understood the benefit of a two-year stint that would introduce citizens to the distinctly unglamorous realities involved.

I served as Corporation Counsel in Indianapolis for a bit over two years, many–many–years ago, and it was an education. I was disabused of the then-widespread notion that civil servants were largely folks who couldn’t find private sector jobs–my co-workers were some of the brightest and most hard-working people I’ve ever known. Most of all, I came to understand the realities of government service, along with the difficulties of weighing competing public interests.

In one of her recent Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson illuminated those lessons by recalling the efforts that averted a threatened Y2K calamity.

When programmers began their work with the first wave of commercial computers in the 1960s, computer memory was expensive, so they used a two-digit format for dates, using just the years in the century, rather than using the four digits that would be necessary otherwise—78, for example, rather than 1978. This worked fine until the century changed.

As the turn of the twenty-first century approached, computer engineers realized that computers might interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000 or fail to recognize it at all, causing programs that, by then, handled routine maintenance, safety checks, transportation, finance, and so on, to fail. According to scholar Olivia Bosch, governments recognized that government services, as well as security and the law, could be disrupted by the glitch. They knew that the public must have confidence that world systems would survive, and the United States and the United Kingdom, where at the time computers were more widespread than they were elsewhere, emphasized transparency about how governments, companies, and programmers were handling the problem. They backed the World Bank and the United Nations in their work to help developing countries fix their own Y2K issues.

Those of us who were adults in the run-up to the turn of the century still remember the dire warnings. Planes would fall out of the sky, computers would fail to work, the funds in your bank account would be inaccessible…on and on. Preachers of some religions predicted the end times.

None of that happened, not because the threat was unfounded, but because public servants worked for many months to correct the problem. As Richardson wrote,

In fact, the fix turned out to be simple—programmers developed updated systems that recognized a four-digit date—but implementing it meant that hardware and software had to be adjusted to become Y2K compliant, and they had to be ready by midnight on December 31, 1999. Technology teams worked for years, racing to meet the deadline at a cost that researchers estimate to have been $300–$600 billion. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration at the time, Jane Garvey, told NPR in 1998 that the air traffic control system had twenty-three million lines of code that had to be fixed.

Richardson followed her description of the problem and its solution with what I will label “the moral of the story.”

Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with. In the aftermath of the Y2K problem, people began to treat it as a joke, but as technology forecaster Paul Saffo emphasized, “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job.”

I don’t know how to make the majority of American voters understand that when they cast a ballot, they need to vote for someone with the skills or background to understand the job–someone who is competent to fix the sorts of problems governments encounter. When they vote for an entertainer, or culture warrior, or “outsider” who proudly claims to know nothing about politics or government, they get what they vote for–and governing suffers.

After all, most of us wouldn’t choose a doctor who’d never been to medical school…

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The Theocracy At The Center of Project 2025

A writer for The Guardian recently read the entire 900+/- pages of Project 2025, rather than relying on what she called “snippets.” What she found was even more appalling than the various excerpts most of us have seen.

Basically, the Project lays out a road to theocracy.

The document repeatedly characterizes America as a country poisoned by “wokeness.” And it proposes, as an antidote to “wokeness,” remaking the government in accord with a fundamentalist version of Christianity.

Across multiple agencies, it would make access to abortion infinitely more difficult. It would change the name of the federal health and human services department to the “Department of Life”. It would criminalize pornography. There would be mass deportations and curtailments of legal immigration programs, including Daca. It would dismantle the Department of Education.

Throughout the manifesto, authors also recommend ways to increase funding for religious organizations by giving them more access to government programs – largely through increased use of school vouchers that could go to religious schools or by modifying programs like Small Business Administration loans to make religious groups eligible for funding.

In some parts, the project takes a more explicit Christian worldview. In the chapter about the Department of Labor, the manifesto suggests a communal day of rest for society because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”. One way to enforce this idea would be for Congress to require paid time-and-a-half for anyone who works on Sundays, which the project calls the default day of Sabbath “except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time”.

In nearly all chapters, there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government. And whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them.

Heritage might just as well have named Project 2025 “Project Christian Nationalism.” The document doesn’t stop with the enumeration of goals, either–it outlines the practical steps that would enable a Trump Administration to reach those goals.

Achieving the goal of “Christianizing” America would be the task of loyalists who would replace civil servants–as has been reported, Project 2025 advocates reclassifying thousands of federal jobs as “political” rather than non-partisan, in order to replace the civil servants who are currently doing those jobs with Trump loyalists.

The effort would also require taking control of the census.

The census helps decide how federal resources should be allocated to communities, but, for our purposes here, it’s most relevant that census data is used to decide how to divvy up seats in the US House and make electoral maps during decennial redistricting done by states. The census can alter the balance of power in statehouses and in Congress.

Given its influence, the project suggests an incoming conservative president needs to install more political appointees to the census bureau and ensure ideologically aligned career employees are “immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda”. The next census isn’t until 2030, but plans for it are already under way.

That conservative agenda includes adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do for the 2020 census but was blocked by the US supreme court. The project says “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”

The project also suggests reviewing and possibly curtailing plans to broaden the race and ethnicity categories because “there are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”

There is much more, of course, but the quoted material is enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck, and probably the necks of most rational Americans.

Those of us tempted to dismiss Project 2025 as a theocratic fever dream unlikely to be realized even in a Trump administration need to understand that the people committed to imposing their beliefs on the rest of us are nothing if not patient. They worked for fifty years to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Trump wins, their wait will be shorter–as the article notes, to the (very limited) extent that Trump has enumerated any policies (or would recognize one if he encountered it), they’ve aligned with those in Project 2025. Even if he loses narrowly, they will be encouraged to dig in.

Even a massive loss–a Blue Wave–will only slow them down. They will bide their time and continue trying to “return” the country to a place that existed only in their twisted imaginations. Americans who want to protect our constitutional system will need to stay perpetually alert.

As the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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The New McCarthyism

Americans have long demonstrated a distrust of bureaucracy–generally seeing the growth of that managerial cohort as exclusively governmental, although it is typical of any large corporation or organization. More recently, MAGA Republicans have deepened the hostility to government workers by accusing civil servants of being a malevolent “deep state.”

That “deep state” of MAGA imagining is a cabal of anti-American “woke-ism,” dedicated to helping “those people” and restricting the God-given rights of the good White Christian men who are the only “real Americans.” Any government officials with the temerity to block one of Trump’s fever dreams is clearly a member of that “deep state.”

And according to Project 2025, the denizens of the “deep state” must be removed.

The public is gradually becoming aware of Project 2025, the detailed, thousand-page “transition plan” produced by a consortium of far-Right think tanks led by the Heritage Foundation. These culture warriors have (accurately) determined that their Presidential candidate– profoundly ignorant of government and rapidly losing touch with reality–would, if re-elected, be even more incapable of ushering in their desired changes than he was during his first term, so they have come together to provide a road-map.

That road map is filled with horrifying policy positions, a large number of which are (currently) unconstitutional. One of them, as described in the linked report from Talking Points Memo, takes aim at that hated “deep state.” (When I read it, it triggered a vision of Joseph McCarthy waving a paper and claiming he had the names of multiple Commies working for the government…)

The Heritage Foundation is funding the creation of a blacklist of federal government workers who MAGA loyalists claim might obstruct the Trump II agenda, the Associated Press reported Monday.

The work of compiling the list of names of some 100 government employees is being done by a Kentucky fellow named Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation. The work is being financed with the help of a $100,000 “Heritage Innovation Prize” from the Heritage Foundation, long a bastion of Reagan conservatism in DC but now fully in MAGA mode. Heritage announced the prize winner back in May, referring to “the presence of anti-American bad actors burrowed into the administrative state.”

In announcing the prize, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts touted it as effort to expose the “Deep State”:

“The weaponization of the federal government under President Joe Biden is only possible because of the deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats in the White House and its agencies. I am proud to support the outstanding work of AAF in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors determined to undermine our constitutional republic and weaponize government against the American people, our economy, and our institutions.”

Notably, the plan is to publish the list online. A doxxing in the public square as it were, with all the obvious historical echoes, as the AP rightly notes:

The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War. The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump.

As for the criteria used to determine who makes the list and how those criteria are applied, the AP provides this chilling methodology: “They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers.”

Civil service protections are only one of the many, many elements of American government that would be jettisoned by Project 2025. If even a small number of the desired changes were to become law, America would be a profoundly different place–and far less hospitable to women, non-fundamentalist Christians and minorities.

As Congressman Jared Huffman explained,when he announced the creation of a Stop Project 2025 Task Force:

“Project 2025 is more than an idea, it’s a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will.

Project 2025 advocates placing all government workers– including employees of independent agencies like the Department of Justice– under direct presidential control, allowing the president to “efficiently” implement policies in a number of areas. Civil service employees would be replaced by “loyal” political appointees.

In other words, Separation of Powers would be replaced with a “streamlined” dictatorship.

So much for those silly Founders, and their devotion to “checks and balances”…Meanwhile, people upset with Biden’s debate performance want to replace him, a mere ten weeks before early voting starts.  They are mimicking Nero, who–you will recall– fiddled while Rome burned.

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Blast From The Past Makes Me Happy!!

On family excursions into nature–admittedly, not my strong suit, but hey! grandkids–I became aware of the lasting contributions of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corp. That program not only offered employment to some three million Americans who had found themselves out of work during the Depression—it also built lasting improvements to the nation’s parks, roads and forests.

Workers enrolled in the CCC planted more than three billion trees. They paved 125,000 miles of highways, and built  3,000 fire lookouts.. Trails and structures from the Grand Canyon and the Pacific Coast Trail to the Smokey Mountains remain in use today.

According to The Guardian, Joe Biden has taken a leaf from the CCC–one of FDR’s most popular and successful efforts.

As part his recent climate policy spree, Biden announced the establishment of a “Civilian Climate Corps Initiative” that could harness the energy of the very generation that must face – and solve – the climate crisis by putting them to work in well-paying conservation jobs.

After Biden’s omnibus executive order, the heads of the Department of the Interior, the Department of Agriculture and other departments have 90 days to present their plan to “mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers”, a step toward fulfilling Biden’s promise to get the US on track to conserve 30% of lands and oceans by 2030.

This is exactly the sort of effort we need right now. Not only will this Civilian Climate Corp provide gainful and undeniably useful job opportunities at a time when the economy is reeling from COVID, not only will it provide training to young people who participate, not only will it be an important part of America’s response to climate change, but it will offer the demonstrable benefits that attend national public service programs.

This is far removed from “make work” programs. This CCC will work on projects that are clearly and substantively important. The article quotes Mary Ellen Sprenkel, head of the National Association of Service and Conservation Corps, for the range of issues such a Corp can address:

Far beyond just planting trees, a new conservation corps could pour money into tackling a bevy of other environmental problems, too. According to Biden’s website, projects will include working to mitigate wildfire risks, protect watershed health, and improve outdoor recreation access. Sprenkel thinks the effort could also include more activities at the community level, like urban agriculture projects and work retrofitting buildings to be more energy-efficient. And as Sprenkel pointed out, the federal government owns and manages thousands of buildings that need help to become more energy-efficient. The buildings “could even become sources of renewable energy generation with solar or wind power installations”, she added.

This reconstituted and reimagined CCC can and should provide apprenticeships and on-the-job education equipping participants for long-term employment. But even more important, at a time when Americans live in very different realities and occupy informational and residential “bubbles,” it will provide the democratic benefits offered by public service programs by bringing young people from widely different backgrounds together.

Back in 2014, I advocated for a new GI Bill that would require young people to enroll in a year of civil service between high school and college or trade school. Among the many benefits of such service would be an appreciation for the role of government; another benefit would be the experience of working with Americans from diverse backgrounds and communities. The original CCC was segregated by race and gender–realities that detracted from its otherwise positive influence. Biden’s CCC, to the contrary, would build non-corporeal bridges along with the physical ones–and it would do so at a time when the bonds of citizenship have become deeply frayed.

My youngest grandson is currently taking a year with Americorp, and as I watch his progress, I can attest to the maturation and  flourishing–and cross-cultural understanding– that occurs in such programs.

I say three cheers for the three Cs!

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