Tag: Drain the Swamp

TANSTAAFL!

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I was looking at the latest available numbers for the federal budget (fiscal 2023).

Mandatory
Social Security $1.3 trillion 1,300,000,000,000
Medicare  $839 billion 839,000,000,000
Medicaid $616 billion 616,000,000,000
Welfare $448 billion 448,000,000,000
Other $502 billion 502,000,000,000
subtotal 3,705,000,000,000
Discretionary
Defense $805 billion 805,000,000,000
Non-Defense $917 billion 917,000,000,000
subtotal 1,722,000,000,000
Interest on the Debt $659 billion 659,000,000,000
Grand Total 6,086,000,000,000

And we only brought in about 4.4 trillion in revenue that year so we ran a deficit of about $1.7 trillion dollars. And that is equal to all of the “discretionary” spending which by the way includes all of defense spending. Now that is a grim picture.  But as the kids say, “It is what it is.”  What we should be shooting for is a budget that doesn’t exceed our revenues minus our debt payment.  So, our budget should be around $3.74 trillion dollars.  Or roughly speaking we have to trim the budget by 40%.

That’s a lot.  But you know, I’ll bet it’s about in line with the amount of waste we could delete from the budget if honest people were looking at it.  Even line items like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are riddled with inefficiency and featherbedding employment practices that a determined auditor could ferret out and eliminate.  If Elon Musk could fire 70% of the staff at Twitter without any noticeable diminution in the capability of the business surely the federal bureaucracy can be pared back by 40% without too much trouble.  Let’s face it automation probably already does most of the work that these people get credit for.

It may not be possible to reduce all that spending within a year or even four years but what is needed is a detailed plan to do just that. The plan needs to be a continuous improvement process that allows managers to apply metrics that tell them how many people to remove from the system on a monthly basis and how the remaining human resources are allocated and rated to determine who stays and who goes.  It will be as murderous and cutthroat as the private sector is.  Basically, it will be hell for bureaucrats and many of them will run away screaming just to avoid the stress.  But it is exactly what’s needed.  We can’t afford to make the federal government a jobs program for the dim-witted and lazy people who can’t make it in the private sector.  At the very least the first thing we should do is lower all salaries by 40%.  And I understand there may be some lower paid employees for which this is an unreasonable cut.  But that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis.  But it’s a good estimate for what we’re trying to do.  And as far as boondoggles, we know there are plenty of those.  Probably not two and half trillion dollars’ worth but still plenty to trim.

And let’s be honest.  We all probably benefit from many programs that will have to be cut.  So be it.  Everybody will have to suck it up to some extent.  Who knows, it may turn out that we can’t have free Chat GPT because it’s really paid for by our tax dollars.  Fine.  We’ll have to pay for that and probably a whole bunch of other things ourselves.  Well, in the words of RAH, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

USAID and Other Agencies Shut Down and Suddenly Politico Can’t Make Payroll

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Has the US federal government been propping up left-wing media operations like Politico?  Maybe it is.

According to Zero-Hedge:

“So 90% of “subscribers” to left-wing publications like Politico are fake and “taxpayer funded”. And then using fake subs to artificially pump up revenue, Politico gets to sell itself to German propaganda giant Axel Springer for $1 billion.”

It’s far from clear if this is exactly what’s going on.  But at the very least the feds have been throwing resources at these sites through advertising money and very large “subscription” checks.

It looks like Trump has declared war on all facets of the Left.

Good.

Fear and Pain.  Good.

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So, I was an hour late for work clearing the stupid snow this morning.  Well, because of the snow and because I’m overly optimistic when it comes to estimating snow removal time.  Or maybe I’m too lazy to get up that early.  But it all got done and the world didn’t end and so I can move along with my day and week.

Yesterday Trump ordered sanctions against Canada, Mexico and China.  Today Canada and Mexico came to terms by agreeing to Trump’s border security requirements and got a reprieve of a month on the tariffs to prove their good faith.  And Panama has agreed not to extend China’s management of the canal.

And today I listened to Marco Rubio declaring USAID a rogue agency that will now be brought to heel for ignoring orders to account for who it has been giving money to.

Could this be “Little Marco” sounding more like Donald Trump, or at least an ally of Donald Trump and America?  Has the world gone topsy-turvy?  Or is it just that no one has ever stood his ground against the bureaucrats, influence peddlers and sycophants that infest Washington and waste our money by the imperial ton.  Seeing the progress of Trump’s seemingly endless initiatives I can’t help but think that this is the first man to stand up to the bureaucracy.  Ever!  And it occurs to me that all those impossible things we heard about; defying the FBI and the CIA, and finding out what actually gets done with the defense budget, and reining in the EPA; all of these unattainable goals can be had for the cost of doing the hard work to find out what the bureaucrats actually do all day, and using presidential power to hold them accountable.

I was reading the ZMan’s post today comparing Trump to Isaac Asimov’s character the Mule in his classic science fiction series Foundation.  The Mule was an outlier because his mutant psychic talent was not predicted by Hari Seldon’s “psychohistory.”  And so, he blew up all of the best laid plans of the Foundation.  ZMan thinks that Trump is the destructor laying waste to the managerial state (aka the Deep State).  Well, I don’t disagree with that analogy.  But maybe he’ll be more than that.  Maybe he’ll be like the child who wasn’t afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes.  And imagine if that lesson gets learned by not only JD Vance but even Marco Rubio.  Now, of course, most of these Republican Senators and Congressmen are crooks and they want the payoffs from the defense and pharma lobbyists.  But even if it’s only a handful of honest men, Trump has let the American people in on the secret and anyone who wants to inherit his mantle will have to call out the corruption, waste and inefficiency of the bureaucracy and get us our money back from the crooks that infest Washington.

I’m starting to get hopeful that Trump is going to take a chainsaw to the budget.  And he has several incentives.  Reducing government excesses will lower the debt, rein in inflation and lower taxes.  But it will also starve his enemies of funds with which to attack him.  They won’t be able to hand out millions of dollars to left-wing crazies.  And the NGOs are where most of Trump’s enemies work when the Democrats are out of the White House.  Losing their cozy perches and lucrative salaries will frighten them out of their wits.  And that is exactly when they’ll be least likely to cause trouble.  They’ll be forced to scramble to find a new source of income and they’ll lose the microphones they typically have to organize trouble for conservatives.

I don’t want to sound like a Pollyana.  It’s not as if the Left no longer controls most of the institutions; the schools, the universities, the Media, Hollywood, the book publishers and most of Silicon Valley.  But Trump has show us that controlling the White House can be incredibly helpful in throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of the Deep State.  And since the Deep State at this point is the Left, it’s causing our enemies fear and pain.

Good.

Ten Days of Trump

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It’s good to be home again.  Also today I picked up my photography computer from the local cyber-surgeons.  There was considerable sticker shock (yikes) for the new motherboard and processor and some adjustment for the new hardware (adapters, cables and such nonsense) but I’m back in business with my photos again.  I haven’t really tested out it’s capabilities but the tech guy told me the new processor will be ridiculously faster than my old system.  I can’t wait to try importing a thousand raw files and see how quickly it “renders” them.  But enough geeking out.

I had my usual Wednesday virtual coffee break with the boys from the old firm.  I have to say the giddiness is getting a bit ridiculous.  Can unbridled enthusiasm be considered a form of backwards Trump Derangement Syndrome?  There’s just too much laughing and optimism.  It seems unnatural.  Someone was claiming that Trump was talking of eliminating the Income Tax altogether.  Now that just sounds nuts.  But the angle was to switch over to a consumption tax.  I have to confess that would suit me fine.  But is everything going to be revolutionized?  What’s next?  Will all the currency be made over with pictures of The Donald?  Will Trump’s signature hairstyle be added to George Washington on Mt. Rushmore to update the monument?  Will the end of the Pledge of Allegiance be modified to “one nation under God with liberty and justice and so much winning for all?”  Have Trump’s words from the 2016 election come true? Is it too much winning?

Well … no.  I’ll put up with more winning.

There are still more things we need fixed.  First of all, Kash Patel still hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate.  That means there are hundreds of Stasi agents still working for the FBI.  Once he’s had a chance to clean house, I’ll have a better idea how much more winning is needed.  In fact, you know what I want to see?  I want Trump to issue executive orders categorically forbidding Patriot Act or FISA Court actions against American citizens during his administration.  Let’s have at least four years without our constitutional rights to due process being violated by tinpot Thought Police.

You see, that’s what happens when Trump starts issuing executive orders by the metric ton.  We start assuming he can do anything.  And then we become impatient if he hasn’t read our minds and already done the stuff we just thought of.  Why hasn’t there been a special prosecutor empowered to go after Joy Reid for being an eyesore on television.  Surely having her on cable tv is a form of cruel and unusual punishment for all of us.  And what about the “ladies” of the View.  Surely someone can turn the show into some kind of dunk tank / lie detector suspense show where Joy Behar or Whoopie Goldberg or one of the other crones is hooked up to a lie detector and asked a question about Donald Trump or some other conservative she hates and if she lies about something, like whether he’s been convicted or rape, she falls into a water tank filled with sharks or piranha fish and has to swim for her life to a distant ladder.  I bet the ratings would be through the roof.  So that’s kind of where I am right now.  For the most part I’m happy with Trump 2.0.  But a few little tweaks couldn’t hurt.

Well, that’s enough ranting for now.  I’ll be waiting to see how Patel, Kennedy and Gabbard do in the Senate next week.  If all three get through, Trump will have most of his core team in place and he can really get started with draining the swamp and taming the Leviathan.

So far so good.

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.

How Will We Know?

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So, we’ve had a lot of fun.  Since November 5th most people on our side have had a real holiday from grief.  We got to enjoy Thanksgiving and Christmas buoyed by the knowledge that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been relegated to the ash heap of history.  What a wonderful phrase that is.  What an image.  There’s this enormous pile of cinders and burnt garbage and jumbled among these things are Joe Biden and Kamala Harris laying there covered with debris and looking extremely sad and confused.  So evocative of a better world!

But it’s best not to forget that this victory is just the beginning of a very long and difficult struggle to wrest control of the federal government from the horde of awful bureaucrats that make everything about our government expensive, inefficient and destructive.  It will be up to Trump’s cabinet to force a monkey wrench into the gears of government and wreck it.  And the question remains; will they do it?

I get the impression that Kash Patel really means to do just that.  And the fact that he was a prosecutor leads me to believe that he might have a good idea how to accomplish his goal of disemboweling the FBI.  I think of his tenure as the test case.  How long will it take for him to get going on the job?  And how long will it take before someone like me can tell that it’s working?  I’m guessing I’ll be able to tell if he’s having the desired effect if the New York Times and NPR are screaming that he’s destroying the FBI.

Maybe a bigger fish to fry is the purview of the Secretary of Defense.  Assuming Pete Hegseth is approved by the Senate he’s going to have an enormous job clearing out all the woke generals and other officers that Biden and Obama plunked down in the military.  But almost as important will be his implementation of Trump’s plan to end the Ukraine war.  I assume it’s going to be necessary for Hegseth to micromanage the defense department personnel to prevent them from continuing to supply the Ukrainians with endless weapons and money to keep the killing going until the last Ukrainian is dead.  He’s going to have to replace the existing supply chain personnel with people loyal to himself.  That’s going to take some doing.  There’s an enormous amount of money that gets distributed from the billions that go to Ukraine.  Shutting off that spigot is going to anger hordes of people and it might even trigger violence.  Hegseth will have his hands full.  I guess I’ll know that Hegseth is succeeding if the number of Ukrainians being killed falls drastically.  Probably the best indicator will be peace negotiations breaking out between Ukraine and Russia.

And finally Trump himself has a big part to play.  He has to get involved in the negotiations on the budget.  What I’m secretly craving is to hear that he’s managed to slip into the budget the elimination of the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  If this could be eliminated it would put an enormous hole in the funding for PBS and NPR.  The elimination of those two toxic waste sites would in one fell swoop elevate the public discourse in this country immensely.  Think of it.  I might never see Jonathan Capehart’s homely face ever again.  For that alone I would consider Donald Trump’s second term in the White House a thunderous success.

Top Men Working on It – Part 2

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Well, I enjoyed yesterday’s outing so much I thought I’d have another go at solving the world’s problems on Uncle Sam’s dime.  Here are some more projects to keep me off the streets and make the world a better place:

  • Stamp Out the Metric System. – That’s right. I want to outlaw it and insist that the freezing point of water is 32 degrees and the boiling point is 212 degrees.  And I’m talking Fahrenheit.  I want halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths and thirty seconds of an inch as the way we measure lumber.  I want everyone to know that a pint’s a pound the world around.  I want horsepower, tons of cooling, foot-pounds, cubic yards, pounds per square inch and inches of mercury everywhere you look.  I want the speed of light to be 186,000 miles per second.  I want pounds and ounces and BTU’s and I don’t want any kilometers or kilograms or ergs or any of that European or Canadian jazz, thank you very much!  And I will back up my hatred with the force of Trumpian law.  Anyone found using a metric tape measure, scale, thermometer, pedometer or any other metric device will be subject to public dunking followed by banishment to Bogeyland.  And no one will be immune.  If I find out that Elon Musk is using metric tools and hardware on his cars, they will be forced off the roads.  And if his rockets are instrumented using metric units, the Air and Space forces will be authorized to shoot them out of the sky.  This may sound harsh but order must be maintained.  Some of you may claim that decimal units simplify and make calculations easier.  I say, calculations are supposed to be difficult.  So, suck it up!
  • Defund PBS and NPR and Subject the Personnel to the Inquisition – My hatred for these institutions knows no bounds.  Every time I heard some bow tie wearing doofus on NPR whispering softly about some pathetic cause he wanted me to espouse I had to change the channel.  Now it’s time for payback.  And closing down their operations and returning that money to the American people is a wonderful accomplishment.  But shutting them down is not enough.  I propose that a sort of Artificial Torquemada (AT) be programmed to subject these awful people to whatever punishments will make them suffer the most.  First off, their diet will be Big Macs and fries, morning, noon and night.  Secondly, a public address system will play a loop of Donald Trump’s greatest hits from his campaign rallies, played twenty-four hours of the day.  Each inmate will be provided with a mockup of the Sunday New York Times newspaper featuring a facsimile of the Times crossword puzzle but unfortunately, none of the possible answers will fit the spaces.  The gulag will have mandatory television viewing of reruns of Hee-Haw, The Dukes of Hazzard, Benny Hill, Home Improvement and Baywatch.  The prison library will consist of the collected works of Mickey Spillane.  And finally, every month there will be a special session where the inmates will be strapped into chairs and forced to watch a ten-hour compilation of the 2016 and 2024 election coverage including the rants and crying jags caused by the epic failures of the Clinton and Harris campaigns.  None of the inmates will be available for parole until under surveillance of a lie detector they can state honestly that “The 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump through voter fraud.”

Okay so that’s enough for now.

Top Men Working on It

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My recent thought experiment to determine whether the geometry of our universe is Euclidean or not has inspired me to get involved in the upcoming Trump Administration.  Just as Trump has farmed out budget cutting to DOGE, I would like to volunteer (well not for free though) my services to perform research that is woefully needed by the United States government.  I haven’t come up with a snappy acronym for my team but I’m working on it.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the projects I’d like to tackle for Uncle Sam.

  • Global Warming – Now, this is a no-brainer. Up until now research on this subject has been performed by commies.  And no matter what information they get they “analyze” it until they can work it into a hockey stick graph that warns that the end of the world is imminent.  What is needed is an objective, scientific approach.  And that’s me all over.  I will analyze the hell out of that data and something tells me that my result will be a call for more fossil fuel and nuclear energy to stave off the next ice age which is already rearing its ugly head.  Also, I’ll perform a mass and energy balance and a cost analysis around such technologies as wind generators and solar energy panels.  Something tells me that the cost of each kilowatt hour taken over the usable life of the equipment and including the replacement cost of the equipment (not neglecting the cost of environmental remediation for mining and processing of heavy metals and other toxic materials) will be an order of magnitude higher than either fossil fuels or fission reactors.  Is it too much to ask to have the “climate scientists” hauled into court for fraud?
  • The Definition of a Woman – In a country where this

Is called a woman, things are not going to go well.  What I propose to do is convene a panel of experts.  I will use the most credentialed individuals available.  I will include married men, wedding planners, hairdressers, script writers from the Hallmark Channel, employees at grocery and clothing stores and shoe salesmen.  In addition, I’ll recruit a fair cross-section of guys found habitually at strip joints from across this great land.  Between them all we will work long and hard to come up with a consensus definition and if necessary, a list of qualifying and disqualifying “conditions.”  I’m sure the team will have a contentious and spirited discussion about everything from terminology to visual aids but we’ll make sure that the exhibit shown above or anything like it is never mistaken for a woman again.

  • My team will devote a full year to trying to figure out exactly which mental conditions Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suffering from. After making an exhaustive study we will try to translate their last four years of speeches into rational English sentences.  Where no meaning can be found we will overlay those sections of the transcripts with pictures of kittens and puppy dogs.

So that will be a start.  Eventually we’ll expand out and solve all the problems of the multiverse.  But I will charge time and a half on weekends.  After all I’m only human.

Counting Down the Days

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At the rate things are going there won’t be much left of the world by Trump’s inauguration.  Israelis, ISIS, Turks and Iranians are scrambling to claim parts of Syria.  Romania has overturned their elections because the people chose the right-wing candidate.  Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan are seething with unrest.  South Korea has arrested the head of the military and is investigating their president for treason.  France’s parliament was dissolved through a vote of no-confidence and Trump has told Canada and Mexico that if they want any more money from him, they’ll have to agree to become parts of the United States.  And that’s on top of the usual carnage in Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war if NATO continues to allow their long-range missiles to target Russia.

Well, I don’t suppose that the State Department and the Department of Defense have anything to do with any of these events.  Do you?

I think what the geniuses in those departments don’t realize is that Trump thrives on chaos.  I forget which of Bill Clinton’s psychopathic advisors said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  But Donald Trump has learned that lesson by heart.  I suspect that he will be using his authority to apply leverage on his enemies foreign and domestic.  The crises he will put to good use are the migrant crisis and the wars in Ukraine and Syria.

This week Trump met with France’s Macron and Ukraine’s Zelensky.  I think he gave both of them the same general message; prepare to make a deal with Putin.  We don’t know what Macron’s reaction was but Zelensky went ballistic.  He was so upset that he declared that Biden must allow Ukraine to become part of NATO before Trump gets into office.  Well, that’s not going to happen.  What will happen is unknown.  The neo-cons unleashed the chaos in Syria in hopes it would deter Putin from continuing his progress in Ukraine.  It doesn’t seem to have worked.  Chasiv Yar, Pokrovsk, Kurakhove and several other major Ukrainian defensive centers are on the edge of collapse and there does not seem to be a pause in sight.  The Ukrainians have decided to drop the draft age to eighteen to provide an additional 200,000 soldiers for the front but there seems to be a significant desertion rate occurring and mass surrenders are also increasing.  I suspect by January 20th things will be increasingly desperate for the Ukraine.

As for Syria, well, I hope Trump will be wise enough to leave Syria to those who want to burn their fingers on a boiling pot.  We have no business there.  And it looks like a trap for anyone who is stupid enough to think that trying to referee a free-for-all of raving religious lunatics is a good idea.  Think of Iraq.

As for his domestic enemies, cutting off the checks to sanctuary states like New York and California should be great sport.  New York especially has gone out of its way to antagonize Donald Trump through lawfare.  The least he could do is return the favor.  Something tells me there is an imbalance between what Albany can do to Trump and what Trump can inflict on the Empire state.

And finally, there is Trump’s main event; waging war on the Deep State.  There is the place where his personal desire for revenge and the country’s interests intersect beautifully.  Any and all havoc he can wreak on those bureaucratic tyrants will lessen their ability to torture us.  I think the DOGE initiative is exactly the way to tame the monster in Washington.  Freeze their salaries, brutally slash their ranks and reduce their power.  Actually, closing down divisions and departments would even be better.

Well, it’s a little more than a month so we’ll continue to hear about the chaos that the desperate minions in Washington are unleashing on the world.  But their days are numbered and they know it.

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.