Good day all. When President Trump was running for office, he said he wanted to “Drain the Swamp.” A major part of that is dealing with the federal employees who operate under the Civil Service system.
The problem with federal employees is that it’s almost impossible to fire them for incompetence or corruption. They basically have to criminally charged and convicted before they can be fired.
The Veterans Administration is a major case in point. Thanks to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, unions and the Civil service laws, sick and injured men and women who served in the military were treated like dirt. A number died from the lack of care and the incompetence of the managers in the system. President Trump started taking actions to clean p that mess and he wants to extend it to the rest of the federal work force. Here are the details from Pravda USA Today:
President Trump will seek to “hire the best and fire the worst” federal government employees under the most ambitious proposal to overhaul the civil service in 40 years, officials said.
The measures will be outlined in the budget plan that Trump will send to Congress Monday, said four Office of Management and Budget officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the budget hasn’t been released.
Oh yes, the infamous “Anonymous Sources.” I wonder, are these Obama holdovers or those who’s actual jobs might be on the line?
Trump foreshadowed the proposal in a line in his State of the Union address last week: “Tonight, I call on Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people,” he said.
Well, as the old saying goes, “Them’s fighting words!” to the Unions. More on that later. Last year, working with Congress, President Trump started cleaning out the disaster that is the Veterans Administration. He is looking to expand that act to cover the entire federal civilian work force.
Trump is using the VA Accountability Act, which gave the Secretary of Veterans Affairs greater authority to fire and discipline workers, as a model. The White House says that law has resulted in the dismissal of 1,470 employees, the suspension of 443, demotions for 83 others last year.
I call that a good start. It’s going to take years of work to clean up that mess, and honestly, I think a few prosecutions may be in order as well. Now, the Unions. They aren’t at all happy with what President Trump is planning. No, they aren’t happy at all.
“While to some people those are code words, they’re very clear to us,” said American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox, who represents about 700,000 workers for the federal government and District of Columbia. “Basically it wipes out due process rights for employees.”
Due process is something you get when you are arrested for criminal acts. Is J. David Cox saying that his union is made up of criminals? In any case, most people have little sympathy for federal workers or their union. Most Americans are “At will” employees. That means they can be walked out the door at any time for essentially any reason. But, as the commercials say, There’s more!
Another pillar of the proposal would reduce automatic pay increases and instead use that money for a performance bonus pool.
Under the current system, federal employees get a review every one to three years. Employees whose performance is “fully successful” — as 99.7% are — get a within-grade “step” increase in addition to annual cost-of-living increases.
Are you saying that .3% of federal employees are not fully successful? Now that concerns me. How bad to they have to be in order to get that bad a grade? My guess, they’ve just been convicted of something and have yet to be sentenced. My guess is the review form has a checkbox that says “Has the individual been convicted of a felony in the last year?” If that’s checked off, then they aren’t “Fully successful.” (In other words, they were careless and got caught)
Trump’s plan would stretch out the amount of time it takes to go from step 1 to step 10 from 18 years to 27 years, saving $10 billion over the next decade, officials said. That money would then go to high-performing employees either as merit raises or one-time bonuses.
I suspect that many long term federal employees won’t qualify. It will be the junior employees, probably with only a year or so on the job who get the bonuses and merit pay. Why? They won’t be jaded yet.
Federal employee unions fear the pay-per-performance plan would be used to reward loyalists and discriminate against women and minorities.
“He seems to be interested in political revenge by firing people,” Cox said. “The government is not a family business that you get to be in total control of.”
Some of Trump’s proposals can be done administratively, and others would take congressional action.
Allow me to explain something to this person. The only reason unions have any say over the Federal workforce is due to the Democrats, specifically President John F. Kennedy. He rewarded the Unions for helping him get elected in 1960 by allowing them to organize the federal workforce. Prior to that, no president was dumb enough to allow it, including the Democrats “Progressive Icon” Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If President Trump really want to lower the boom on the unions, all he has to do is start the process of ending their privilege of representing federal employees.
Since President Jimmy Carter signed the Civil Service Reform Act in 1978, every president has tried — to some degree or another — to promote greater efficiency in the federal workforce.
And every president has largely failed, running up against an entrenched culture in the bureaucracy, opposition from labor unions and a fickle Congress, said Donald Devine, who was President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director. Reagan tried implementing Carter’s reform law, but ran into resistance from Congress
President Reagan had a problem. It was a big fat slob called Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil. O’Neil was both a firm believer in unions and wholly owned by them. He liked unions because they would rape their memberships paychecks and funnel it to the Democrat Party, which continues to this day. Reagan had the last laugh when he broke the Air Traffic Controllers union, PATCO after their illegal strike.
Trump administration officials say Devine’s work has inspired their efforts, but they weren’t popular at the time: Newspapers gave Devine nicknames like “the Grinch,” “the Rasputin of reduction in force,” and “the terrible, swift sword of the civil service.” He served four years as director of the Office of Personnel Management but withdrew his re-nomination in 1985 amid congressional opposition.
You get bogged down, the unions keep threatening you, they get Congress so upset,” Devine said. “All the presidents, after a while, give up and forget about it. Some of them make it worse, some of them do a little better.”
Mr. Devine is a bit out of touch I think. The times are very different today then they were when he was the Director of OPM. Today, people are angry. They see what the bureaucracy is doing to them and they want it stopped. Most people see the federal bureaucracy as out of control and tyrannical. Under the worst case scenario, “The People” might decide to do something about it themselves. This is one reason I think that President Trump might just get some real reforms through that hive of scum and villainy known as Congress.
And while he credits Trump for taking on the issue with new enthusiasm, he said the real estate mogul and former reality television star will soon learn it’s harder to fire people in government.
“Optimism is not my middle name, especially when it comes to the civil service,” he said.
I take it that Mr. Devine has not been paying attention to what’s happening at the VA. People are being fired. Then we have the State Department. No one is replacing people who leave, and Secretary Tillerson would like nothing better then to lay off hundreds of the useless layabouts. The times, they are a changing. I think there is a good possibility that President Trump will succeed, and we will all be better for it.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
[yasr_visitor_votes size=”large”]
