This past week, a Washington Post article titled “Federal employees scramble to insulate themselves from Trump’s purge” appeared.
It explains how there’s been a massive effort by federal employees to safeguard and shroud their jobs, in hopes of maintaining the cushy, no-stress environment they’ve carved out for themselves.
They’re panicking. For example, they’re changing titles of jobs that they feel might come under Trump’s scalpel, specifically those related to things like Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and environmental justice. Some of these civil servants are even taking out liability insurance to cover lawyers if they're deemed demoted or fired.
What we’re seeing here is very plain: They’re willing to do what it takes to maintain the status quo.
Even more simply: They’re working very hard so that they can do as little work as possible.
I want to be clear. What I’m calling for right now isn’t even necessarily a smaller government— although if you know me you know I strongly believe the government is far too excessive. But that’s not even the point I’m trying to make.
Rather, all I want is an honest conversation and an approach to efficiency. I want any presidential administration to begin to identify the areas that are overstaffed and redundant, but maybe there are others where we’re understaffed. It’s called rightsizing.
We ought to be doing operational audit audits of each and every one of these agencies in order to determine where they are, why they are, and whether or not they are appropriately or overstaffed and ask that all-important question: How can we save the taxpayer money?
There’s a problem, though. Our government loves redundancy. It’s obsessed with it. And I can promise you that about five individuals are doing the job of one person in almost every role of our federal government.
I understand the backlash from the employees all too well. I’ve worked in government agencies for decades. I know there’s a lot of human interest involved people are relying on employment to fund their pensions. But the hard truth—truth I’ve learned from experience—is that for governments to function the main interest must be the entity itself. Otherwise, everyone loses; systems decay, and then they crumble.
If you listen to the show you’ve heard me say this a million times: The entity's interest always outweighs that of the individual. And I mean Always.
Everyone is expendable. There's no single person in any of these bureaucracies that this government can’t do without.
I can rail on how Democrats get this flagrantly wrong constantly. But the incoming administration isn’t Democrat-run. So it’ll be interesting to see where we’re headed, and it’s a good sign that the federal employees are already sweating.
Trump has his head in the right place, planning to appoint people who’ll head a new Department of Government Efficiency. Of this agency, Trump stated, “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,”
There’s a lot of hope here. But Trump also often places a high value on personal loyalty when he should always be communicating in terms of loyalty to the entity he’s in charge of.
You don't get to put your personal preferences in front of the entity. And that's the friction here. But I think the Trump administration is headed in the right direction because he’s strategizing with efficiency in mind.
