Tag: bloated bureaucracy

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 28SEP2025 – Dem’s Scylla and Charybdis

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Milo’s analogy reminds me of a situation I saw. There was a pear tree on land near my home that was unclear if it was on my property or the neighbors. It was in a bad way as where it had been planted was rocky quick draining soil so it was often starved for moisture. After a couple dry summers and cold snowless winters it was on its last legs. I got out my pruning saw and was ready to do some major clean up removing some of the branches which were clearly damaged or diseased. The neighbor came out and said it was his tree and I was not to touch it. In the interest of neighborhood peace I didn’t even argue. withing 2 years the pear tree was dead and he had to have someone come in and remove it.

Like that tree the US has some damaged sections. Radical pruning is called for to solve (or at least mitigate issues) now. But the Democrats see this as our tree don’t you touch it! In my case the tree had been planted by the previous owners so I had little interest and just walked away. We can’t do that we depend on this tree and honestly, it feels like the USA is the last flowering tree of the Scottish Enlightenment. The UK, Australia and Canada (and little New Zealand) have all fallen to the modernist tilt.

I think Trump has carefully wedged the Democrat leadership between Scylla and Charybdis and is enjoying watching them squirm. Because the language the Trump Administration proposes is such that the removed positions are not layoffs or furloughs the positions cease to exist. Because of the language (unfunded positions) the removals essentially go around the civil service protections. In general, this hurts primarily Blue voters in areas so blue that they are bound both by representation and electoral votes to the Democrat party. Schumer can’t let this happen as hordes of his supporters will be unemployed. But neither can he give in as other parts of his base would be enraged. I suspect he chooses the former, hoping that the enraged unemployed Democrats vent their anger at the Administration. The one downside of this for the Republican party is this probably wipes out any Chance Winsome-Sears had of winning the Virginia Gubernatorial election if this falls out like I suspect. That’s a shame. Ms. Winsome-Sears is an impressive lady but not being native born she is not eligible for Vice president or president. A ticket with Vance/Winsome-Sears in 2028 would have made the Democrats heads explode.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 28SEP2025 – Trim It Back

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Sometimes the thing best for a social organism is hardest on the individual.
Our government is vastly bloated with bureaucratic leeches, and other parasites. These unelected bureaucrats are not working to serve the American people, but preserve their sinecures and privilege.
Shutting down the government again at this time will hopefully demonstrate the true authors of the shutdown. It seems that every time the government gets shut down Republicans get blamed, even when the president holds line item authority.
Congress has the requirement to present a budget, but we have been working under a series of continuing resolutions. The last time the federal budget was passed as a total is 1996. This should be criminal as the continuing funding resolutions are focused spending.
Shut it down, and rather than than leave the rotted branches, trim it back.

The Sesquarcentennial Man

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Today is my regular Wednesday zoom call with the boys and of course we were hooting about last night’s speech.  Everyone loved the hilarious jabs at Biden, the endless list of billion-dollar boondoggles cut from USAID and Trump’s droll braggadocio of his list of accomplishments.  But I think I had them laughing hardest when I reminded them of the three hundred- and fifty-year-old social security recipient.  I thought a couple of them were going to have a stroke or swallow their tongues.  I think everyone inherently senses how this absurdity just encapsulates what runaway bureaucracy looks like in its terminal stage.  As Trump said, “This guy is a hundred years older than the country but he’s still on the rolls!”  You have to have a kind of primal respect for someone defending a lie that big.  It’s epic.

Now some would rightly point to the much greater financial impact of there being many millions of Americans claiming to be alive after 110, 120, 130 and even 140 years of age.  The benefits for millions of people are enormous.  They’re in the tens of billions of dollars.  They are an outrage and they should be crimes that are rooted out and punished.  Even the people just working in the social security department and ignoring the absurdity of these impossible ages should be punished.

And yet I can’t help but hearken back the Sesquarcentennial Man.  So that means he was born in 1675 AD.  Isaac Newton and Louis XIV of France were still alive back then.  In that year King Philip’s War broke out, as the Wampanoags attacked Swansea, Massachusetts.  Maybe Sesquarcentennial Man remembers the trauma of those frightening days.  Maybe he still requires medication to deal with the fear.  But whatever else we can say about him the most important characteristic he possesses is that we’re still paying for him.  And without Elon Musk we probably would continue to pay for him until the US Treasury finally closes its doors and goes out of business.

So yeah, we got a hoot out of it and thank you Donald Trump for your love of comedy.  But the real point is that the federal government is filled with people making six figure salaries while ignoring the apparently endless incompetence and corruption going on all around them with no concern for how it impacts their fellow Americans or the country as a whole.

Well, I think it just hardens our resolve to see DOGE fire as many of these useless and despicable individuals as is humanly possible.  We should want to see the number of federal employees reduced to the bare minimum possible through the use of automation and continuous improvement of the systems and processes needed to perform the critical functions of the government.  And by eliminating all non-essential functions of government.  No more research studies into fields that the government has no business funding.  If anyone has an unquenchable curiosity about the sex lives of any animal (including humans) let him pay for that voyeuristic pursuit out of his own pocket.  And likewise for every other pseudoscientific time sink.  Fund yourselves.

But more than anything else, I want to know about Sesquarcentennial Man.  Who is (or was) he?  How many descendants has he?  And most urgently, who’s cashing his social security checks.  Elon, can you help us out here?

Controlled Burn

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I was thinking about the second Trump administration as you know.  I asked folks what they thought would happen and they gave some feedback (thank you).  And folks have some confidence from what I can tell, that Trump will probably get some stuff done.  Maybe he’ll purge the FBI and Justice Department of the die-hard Democrat partisans.  And maybe he’ll reform some of the policies and rules at some of the other agencies like the IRS, ATF, EPA and the DOD.  Good.

But what happens going forward?  Is it possible to “fix” a giant bureaucracy permanently?  I think we all have to agree you can’t.  The closest to that that can be achieved is specifying a procedure to prune the bureaucracy on a regular schedule.

One idea I read of that makes a lot of sense is to separate the bureaucracy into two buckets.  In one bucket is stuff that is permanently necessary like the Post Office (?) and the military.  For these things that have easily defined scope, normal control methods can be used to keep their size in check.  For everything else, their charters from Congress include sunset provisions such that if they need to be extended the Congress has to explain exactly why and exactly how much money they will need to continue.  And then Congress will have to approve this reauthorization and the president will have to sign it.

I think there may be a state that handles their bureaucracy this way.  I think it’s a brilliant idea.  I mean, who really believes that 80% of the workers and the rules being made are necessary?  Even necessary agencies like the Defense Department are oceans of waste and corruption.

And for that reason, I see the value in having people from the private sector looking at the “books” and recommending cuts and changes to this empire of waste.  I know it’s probably mostly a pipe dream but I get a little giddy thinking about what could be done if an honest auditor looked at the government from an efficiency perspective and took a chainsaw to the federal government.  How many billions of dollars could be eliminated in salaries and contractors’ fees?  It staggers the imagination.  Look at the damage that California’s local environmental protection agency just caused because of their ridiculous regulations banning controlled burning.  Because of their insane laws some of the richest and most beautiful neighborhoods in Los Angeles were torched to the ground at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate.  Imagine the gains if the federal EPA were evaluated regularly and pared down to only the functions that need to exist.  Land owners and communities would regain millions of hours a year that go into the endless paperwork needed to propitiate the stupid acolytes of the idiot goddess Gaia.

So, it seems clear to me that trimming the federal bureaucracy is a permanent part of every administration’s workload.   And this should be one of the selling points that Republicans use to justify hiring them every four years.  And the way to sell this is to publish the fact that they reduce the federal budget and the debt every four years.  Just like a CEO has to publish the annual report to declare how much the company made in profits or losses the president of the United States should have to give a shareholders meeting to all of us telling us whether he shrank or grew the budget and the debt.

Trump is a businessman of sorts.  His is not a public corporation so mostly he’s responsible to himself but he knows the realities of a balance sheet and how awful the United States’ balance sheet currently looks.  What he needs to do is teach the voters that they are small shareholders in a runaway corporation that is hemorrhaging money into the ground and the president is the CEO who has to justify his leadership every four years.

I’m really hoping that buying Greenland isn’t his first order of business.  I hope a controlled burn of about 80% of the FBI (and the rest of the dead wood) is.

Double Milei

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I read (or heard) that Donald Trump was talking about getting input from Elon Musk on streamlining or pruning the federal government.  Now why Elon Musk would be a qualified individual for such an endeavor is far from clear to me.  It is true that he reduced the headcount at Twitter by something like 70-80% after he bought it but since the social media platform is mostly an automated business, he probably just asked his direct reports to terminate everyone who couldn’t code.  End of story.

But all of this brings up a good point.  Why does the federal government employ millions of people to do clerical work?  Just as banks and insurance companies shed millions of paper-pushing positions when they eliminated the paper, shouldn’t the various departments, bureaus and agencies do the same?  And how about the fact that it seems there are multiple agencies working on the same “problems.”  For instance:

The Administration for Native Americans (ANA)

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

Or how about:

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)

And finally:

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The Office of Environmental Management (no acronym!)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)

The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC)

 

How much you want to bet that you have to get all these agencies placated before you can get anything done that they have staked out as their turf?

I think Donald Trump is absolutely correct that streamlining the federal government (or more felicitously expressed, “taking a chainsaw to it”) is one of the greatest public services that any president could perform for this country.  He has my whole-hearted support in such an endeavor.  But will he be able to do it?  Didn’t the Obama administration distribute tanks and automatic weapons to everybody from the IRS to the post office?  I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some IRS guys would go postal after being fired.  But the real trick will be performing surgery on the FBI and the other intelligence agencies.  Those guys are vicious.  And that’s not mentioning the CIA.  After all most people think they actually did kill Kennedy and all he did was abort the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  Imagine what they’ll do if you try to take the food out of their mouths.  They’d probably break out a suitcase nuke.

But almost as much fun as firing everyone, would be to impose an across the board 25% reduction in pay for the whole federal bureaucracy (except the armed forces).  For the armed forces the trick would be a reduction in the number of generals by a factor of five.  That should keep them out of trouble.

Trump is definitely onto something.  And the idea of enlisting actual businessmen to help identify the dead wood in the federal government is a good idea.  Bloated bureaucracy has been the cause of over taxation and inefficiency since the Han dynasty ruled China.  I would guess that reducing the size of the federal government by 10% would balance the budget immediately.

Now granted these fired individuals would be mostly permanently unemployed.  They would initially cause a burden on our economy.  Basically, they would have no usable skills and no work ethic.  But this would eventually come off the books as they quickly starved to death.  And after all these government departments were neutered the rest of the American workforce would surge forward in productivity, no longer hampered by the stupidity and malevolence of the vast government bureaucracy.

On second thought, Trump should consult with Javier Milei.  If it worked in Argentina, it should work twice as well here.  Just double whatever he did.