"Wtf, Wray? Arizona is about to outlaw federal agents from entering Arizona."
The executive branch of the federal government employs an estimated 4 million employees and that includes the military. The FBI is a federal law enforcement agency and comes under the executive branch (bureaucratic double speak here) of government vetted by the Senior Executive Service (SES). Under the current director of the FBI Christopher Wray, the FBI's FY 2023 budget request proposes a total of $10.8 billion in "direct budget authority." Authority? Of that budget request of $10.8 billion, a total of $10.7 billion is slated for salaries and expenses alone, which will "support" 36,945 positions (13,616 special agents, 3,287 intelligence analysts, and 20,042 professional staff), and $61.9 million for construction. Don't forget payment for informants and inside snitches. With that kind of money discounting dark money, what do Americans's expect? A friggin' Efrem Zimbalist Jr kind of FBI?
If you were one of these FBI employees with an average yearly salary of $66,542 under the executive branch of government and President Trump just threatened to fire you, how would you collectively respond? SES-vetted FBI executives pull in on average $235,143 in yearly salary. That is about $1 million over four years in federal pay. What would you do to protect that kind of income? Would you obtain a search warrant signed off by the DoJ to "raid" Donald Trump's private property in Mar-a-Lago in Florida as a direct threat against Donald Trump? Think about it seriously. How much crime really goes on in America including "domestic terrorism" to justify $10.7 billion in federal salaries for 36,945 federal executive employees who are a paramilitary organization?
If you take those 13,616 special agents and break that number down in practical terms, that would mean there are 272 FBI special agents per state. There is no telling how many FBI special agents are serving overseas, so we don't really know the exact numbers per state. What are they doing from day-to-day including 20,042 professional staff? Wouldn't you like to have lunch with them to find out? If anyone has ever switched from being employed by the executive branch of government with a guaranteed paycheck twice a month for years on end including benefits and perks, then find employment in the private sector, it is a serious jolt of reality. You are on the clock and every minute counts in productivity and output. Yes, it is clear enough the FBI is thoroughly corrupt, but really, who is going to investigate the FBI for political corruption? Why are Americans waiting for Donald Trump to start knocking the FBI down to size? Irregardless of Donald Trump, the FBI needs to be abolished with its USA Inc. corporate charter revoked and that does not mean "civil war" to do that. This level of lawless corruption is no longer tolerable.
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Source: Federal News Network
Trump stokes calls to easily fire 'rogue bureaucrats' from federal workforce
By Jory Heckman | July 26, 2022
Former Trump administration officials, lawmakers and former President Donald Trump himself are revisiting some of their most controversial federal workforce policies as a playbook for a possible second term.
Trump said Tuesday that he supported bringing these policies back as part of a campaign promise to "drain the swamp" and rid the career civil service of "deep state" actors.
"We need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy, or at a minimum just want to keep their jobs," Trump said during the summit's keynote address.
Trump urged the Defense Department to rehire every service member removed from military service for failing to comply with the Biden administration's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, as well as provide them with back pay since their removal.
Trump also urged lawmakers to pass legislation that would make it easier to fire career federal employees — echoing several of the executive orders he signed during his term.
"Congress should pass historic reforms empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who was corrupt, incompetent or unnecessary for the job can be told — did you ever hear this — 'You're fired. Get out, you're fired," Trump said.
Administration officials on Monday, speaking at the America First Policy Institute’s summit in Washington, D.C. talked about resurrecting Trump's Schedule F executive order that would make tens of thousands of members of the federal workforce at-will employees.
The executive order, signed in October 2020, but repealed during President Joe Biden's first week in office, gave agency heads the authority to reclassify certain policy-making positions from the career civil service to the excepted service under this new schedule.
Former Trump administration officials also proposed bringing back policies that would restrict the collective bargaining rights of federal employees and their unions, as well as moving agency headquarters outside of the Washington, D.C. metro area.
Former President Donald Trump, according to recent reports from Axios, plans to make these policies the focus of a not-yet official campaign for a second presidential term.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a former Republican member of Congress, proposed a Republican-controlled Congress advancing two of his bills, the PAGE Act and the MERIT Act. The former would classify all new federal hires as "at-will" employees, while the latter would shorten the disciplinary appeals process for most federal employees.
Rokita said the legislation would be necessary for a future Republican administration to prevent the federal workforce from undermining their agenda, adding that the appeals process for firing a federal employee takes too long.
"It's completely unworkable, if you're there to do a job under President Trump, or any president, and you have limited time. If you want to get that agenda done, you don't have any time to go chasing around poor employees for part of a 15-year period," he said.
Former Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy James Sherk, now the director of the Center for American Freedom at the America First Policy Institute, singled out former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, a longtime federal employee, who "boasted about everything she was doing to undermine the policies of the president's appointees" and circumvented review from White House policy officials.
Birx, in a recent book, described how "rank and file" federal employees would "question everything" that came from political leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the White House. She also wrote that she re-inserted language into the final versions of reports that administration officials had previously removed.
"There's obviously room for government experts, and for them to make their views known. But the appropriate procedures are for them to then have conversations with those who are accountable to the people's elected representatives about the policy, not to unilaterally go behind their back and then boast about how they deceived those who were supposed to be supervising them," Sherk said.
Former administration officials also proposed using pandemic-era telework as a jumping-off point to relocate more federal employees and their agency offices outside the D.C. area.
Former Interior Department Secretary David Bernhardt, who relocated the Bureau of Land Management's headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, said some of his best managers at the agency didn't want to live and work in the D.C. area.
"I think people can report to Washington quite well without living in Washington, and COVID has proven that, because most of the buildings in D.C. are currently vacant, certainly for the government employees. So there's really no communication reason for not doing it," Bernhardt said.
Bernhardt said managers cited a high cost of living and longer commutes as their chief complaints about living and working in Washington. He said relocating employees beyond the Beltway would also put them closer to communities they oversee, as well as state and local government officials.
"It saves a ton of money, because rents here are very high, and we pay locality pay here that's much higher than if somebody was working in Indianapolis. And so I think there is a great deal of merit to taking folks and moving them to other places in the country. I think that has great value. It doesn't necessarily shrink government, but it does create a more informed government, which I think is in all our interests," Bernhardt said.
The Biden administration announced last September it would relocate BLM headquarters back to D.C. but would maintain the Grand Junction office as BLM's "western headquarters."
Kevin Hassett, a former senior advisor and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump administration, recalled a former Cabinet official complaining about telework preventing federal employees from returning to the office.
"People just weren't coming to work, and they weren't really, as far as he could tell, doing any work at all. So we have this problem where we have these entitled people that have jobs for life, and they're not even showing up for work, which means if we got rid of them all, we wouldn't notice, I would guess," Hassett said.
Hassett also cited research from the Heritage Foundation claiming federal employees earn about 20% higher pay than they would make in the private sector
"Congress has been giving people pay raises that are way too large for a really long time. They don't come to work, it's completely unacceptable, and yet it continues to happen year after year after year," Hassett said.
Please go to Federal News Network to read more.
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