A senior Trump administration
official just took the extraordinary step of publishing an op-ed about the
shutdown and the Democrats are not happy.
The anonymous author
paints a different picture of the shutdown and the government as a whole, one
at odds with the Democrats and their friends in the swamp.
The official wrote: “As one of the senior officials working
without a paycheck, a few words of advice for the president’s next move at
shuttered government agencies: lock the doors, sell the furniture, and cut them
down.
Federal employees are
starting to feel the strain of the shutdown. I am one of them. But for the sake
of our nation, I hope it lasts a very long time, till the government is changed
and can never return to its previous form.
The lapse in appropriations
is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful
government agencies for good.
On an average day, roughly 15
percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their
country. I wish I could give competitive salaries to them and no one else. But
80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing
what they are told, they don’t.
Why would they? We can’t fire
them. They avoid attention, plan their weekend, schedule vacation, their second
job, their next position — some do this in the same position for more than a
decade.
They do nothing that warrants
punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for
the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on
process. “Process is your friend” is what delusional civil servants tell
themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across
their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative
chores.
Process is what we serve,
process keeps us safe, process is our core value. It takes a lot of people to
maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts
and certified process managers who protect the process. Then there are the 5
percent with moxy (career managers). At any given time they can change, clarify
or add to the process — even to distort or block policy counsel for the
president.
Saboteurs peddling opinion as
research, tasking their staff on pet projects or pitching wasteful grants to
their friends. Most of my career colleagues actively work against the
president’s agenda. This means I typically spend about 15 percent of my time on
the president’s agenda and 85 percent of my time trying to stop sabotage, and
we have no power to get rid of them. Until the shutdown.
Due to the lack of funding,
many federal agencies are now operating more effectively from the top down on a
fraction of their workforce, with only select essential personnel serving
national security tasks. One might think this is how government should
function, but bureaucracies operate from the bottom up — a collective of
self-generated ideas. Ideas become initiatives, formalize into offices, they
seek funds from Congress and become bureaus or sub-agencies, and maybe one day
grow to be their own independent agency, like ours. The nature of a big
administrative bureaucracy is to grow to serve itself. I watch it and fight it
daily.
But President Trump can end
this abuse. Senior officials can reprioritize during an extended shutdown,
focus on valuable results and weed out the saboteurs. We do not want most
employees to return, because we are working better without them. Sure, we
empathize with families making tough financial decisions, like mine, and just
like private citizens who have to find other work and bring competitive value
every day, while paying more than a third of their salary in federal taxes.
President Trump has created
more jobs in the private sector than the furloughed federal workforce. Now that
we are shut down, not only are we identifying and eliminating much of the
sabotage and waste, but we are finally working on the president’s agenda.
President Trump does not need
Congress to address the border emergency, and yes, it is an emergency. Billions
upon billions of hard-earned tax dollars are still being dumped into foreign
aid programs every year that do nothing for America’s interest or national
security. The president does not need congressional funding to deconstruct
abusive agencies who work against his agenda. This is a chance to effect real
change, and his leverage grows stronger every day the shutdown lasts.
The president should add to
his demands, including a vote on all of his political nominees in the Senate.
Send the career appointees back. Many are in the 5 percent of saboteurs and
resistance leaders.”
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