Free Republic

Obama's "echo chamber" lives on and the media are still buying... In an article on the Atlantic website, a former Obama White House staffer explains why she resigned from the Trump White House after only eight days. . . . Hers was the second story in less than a week in which a government official explained that they’d resigned because of Trump’s policies. Ned Price, a CIA analyst who worked at the Obama White House, authored a cri de coeur for the Washington Post to explain why his disagreements with Trump’s policies prompted him to leave government service. “To be...

President Donald Trump pointed the finger at Obama administration holdovers at the White House and National Security Council for leaking information about private phone conversations he had with leaders of Australia and Mexico. “It’s a disgrace that they leaked because it’s very much against our country,” Trump told Fox News Sunday, accusing “Obama people” in civil service positions for the leaks. “It’s a very dangerous thing for this country,” he added noting that these individuals were still being sought out and replaced. Trump described the media stories of what seemed to be contentious interactions between him and the two foreign...

As part of its broader package of rules for the 115th Congress, the House of Representatives revived the Holman Rule, a provision that allows House members to propose amendments to spending bills that closely manage federal agencies. These "retrenchment" amendments can affect details down to individual federal salaries and the number of staff in an office. ... The restoration of the Holman Rule means merely that when it comes to firing a federal employee, the president's signature on an act of Congress can do it. It doesn't seem extraordinary that the heads of the federal government should be able to...

Reflections on Barack Obama's legacy... While there is nothing particularly “happy” about warfare, some aspects are even more distasteful than others. There must be shooting in battles; there must be conquest of land; this is what warfare is made of. But some tactics go too far… such as mines. In the 1990s, for example, the Ottawa Convention sought to put a global end to the use of mines – both land and sea varieties – an aspect of warfare that still costs several thousand lives per year worldwide, even long after the wars in which they were used have ended....

The Nigerian government has rid its civil service of 50,000 ghost workers and saved over 600 million dollars in the fight against corruption, the presidency said on Tuesday. “The Federal government payroll has been rid of 50,000 ghost workers, saving the country a huge amount of N200 billion ($636 million USD),” spokesperson of the presidency, Garba Shehu, said in a statement. “Over N13 billion has been taken off the payroll monthly from February to December this year … The pension bill was N15.5bn monthly as at February. Now it is down to N14.4bn, which means average monthly saving is made...

Thomas Lifson has correctly observed that reforming the Civil Service System ought to be a high priority for President-Elect Trump and the new Republican Congress. We need to understand why the Civil Service System first created as a reform in how the federal government operated. "To the victors go the spoils" was the way Andrew Jackson put it almost 200 years ago. Jackson expressed the view that the president has the right – legal and moral – to throw out government employees and replace them with cronies. The size of the federal government was proportionately much smaller then than today,...

The federal government requires structural reform. Because it is very expensive and time-consuming to fire anyone, bad behavior is not just tolerated but propagated. Civil Service protections originally intended to guard against a politicized bureaucracy have now become guarantors of the high-handedness and lack of accountability we saw with Lois Lerner, now retired with a six-figure pension after pleading the Fifth Amendment. Government employee unions have become a mainstay of the Democratic Party, with employee dues, harvested from taxpayers via salaries, laundered into the party’s coffers. So the Democrats will fight like hell, up to and including a filibuster, mass...

Full Title: You MUST deliver Brexit: Civil servants are warned by May after former chief sparks fury by saying that leaving EU is not inevitable -Theresa May has ordered all Europhile civil servants to embrace Brexit -She said it was their job to implement the decisions made by ministers -Came after a top mandarin said that leaving the EU was 'not inevitable' -Gus O'Donnell made the comments saying the UK could remain 'aligned' to the EU Theresa May has ordered Europhile civil servants to embrace Brexit after a former top mandarin sparked fury by saying leaving the EU was not...

Madison— The collapse of Gov. Scott Walker's presidential campaign could actually propel conservative legislation in Wisconsin over the next several months. From ending all public money to Planned Parenthood to allowing state retailers to sell goods at cost or at a loss, lawmakers are considering proposals that conservatives have sought to pass in Wisconsin for years. Bills before the Legislature this fall could put new limits on biomedical research and remake the state's ethics and elections agency. The controversial bills could match scientists against activists opposed to abortion and big Wisconsin retailers like Kwik Trip of La Crosse against far...

The Office of Personnel Management is under fire again today after it was revealed hackers, allegedly Chinese, stole 21 million social security numbers during a massive data breach discovered last month (which officials originally said only impacted 4 million people). The social security numbers belong to Americans who have, or who currently are, working for the federal government. This new information comes on the heels of news hackers were able to obtain extremely sensitive information, including classified background check information that can be used for blackmail, belonging to tens of millions of government employees. More bad news: Here’s the kicker:...

Infidelity. Sexual fetishes. Drug abuse. Crushing debt. They’re the most intimate secrets of U.S. government workers. And now they’re in the hands of foreign hackers. It was already being described as the worst hack of the U.S. government in history. And it just got much worse. A senior U.S. official has confirmed that foreign hackers compromised the intimate personal details of an untold number of government workers. Likely included in the hackers’ haul: information about workers’ sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, and any criminal activity. Those details, which are now presumed to be in...

Labor giant SEIU spent more than $100 million on union overhead and political activities in 2014, according to federal labor filings released Tuesday evening. The union collected about $320 million from its 1.8 million members, who are primarily government employees and health care workers. For every $3 that a union member contributed to its coffers, $1 went to functions outside of membership services. The union spent about $55 million paying union administrators and covering overhead costs, including more than $276,000 to president Mary Kay Henry.

Military veterans are receiving preferential treatment for many federal job openings, and as with any kind of preferential-treatment program, it’s causing a backlash. In a remarkable story, the Washington Post describes growing tension between veterans and civilians who never served in the military throughout the federal government. Civilians complain that their veteran colleagues are conservative yes-men who don’t question authority and are sometimes lacking in the necessary skills. Some complained that male veterans sometimes act inappropriately around their women peers. “You’re getting a very conservative worker that’s very narrow-minded,” said one civilian who works in the Office of Personnel Management....

Something has gone wrong in our civil service. Consider some recent developments. The IRS was forced to pay the National Organization for Marriage $50,000 for leaking the group’s donor list. Tea-party organizations and donors were much more likely than others to be audited by the IRS. This misbehavior was not the work of a few rogue employees in Cincinnati. In general, the IRS stalled tea-party applications for status as 501(c)(4) groups. Meanwhile, April Sands, an employee of the FEC, recently pleaded guilty to violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from campaigning at the office. Ms. Sands, who worked...

Flint may be Michigan’s second city to plunge into bankruptcy unless retirees accept cuts in health benefits that threaten to unravel a balanced budget. As Crain's Detroit reports, Emergency Manager Darnell Earley (Flint’s third emergency leader since it was placed under state control in 2011) warned "If we have no ability to mitigate the cost of retiree health care, that’s going to make it very difficult for the city to remain financially stable over the next few years." As Eric Scorsone notes, "Flint's at the forefront, but a lot of cities are on the same train, and that train is...

The House's No. 2 Democrat accused Republicans of exploiting the scandal that has enveloped the Veterans Affairs Department for political gain and said he is worried that civil servants could be swept up unfairly in a witch hunt. "I don't think there's any doubt about it … that is essentially the tactic that Republicans are trying to employ," Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters Wednesday. "In some cases there are huge fishing expeditions which are going on for millions of documents that goes beyond the realm of oversight and politicizes the issue very greatly." The Republican National Committee...

Yup, 11 Mondays of furlough starting 8 July until the end of the fiscal. We had a briefing today from our GO (Major General, USA) and FY14 & 15 is not looking good. Reduction in force (RIF) looks probable for both the active and civilian Army force. Myself - being associated , active duty (Navy), contractor or civilian with the military since I was 17, it is very depressing. I am the first to admit that there are areas of personnel waste to trim, but we are at the point of "gutting" our defense. IMOHO This may be worse then...

SIERRA VISTA — Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has ordered the furlough of Defense Department civilians to begin in early July. Today, Hagel directed 11 furlough days for civil service employees which is half of what was initially anticipated.

There is a bright spot in the March jobless numbers, if government is your line of work. The unemployment rate for civilian government workers dropped to 3.6 percent in March from 3.8 percent in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. …

Whenever someone suggests that California's public employee pension systems need reform, civil service unions react dismissively, often with attacks on the credentials or even the morals of critics. When, for example, a Public Policy Institute of California poll found strong support – even among public workers themselves – for Gov. Jerry Brown's middle-of-the-road pension reform plan, the union-backed Californians for Retirement Security reacted thusly: "These poll results are not surprising. They amount to more fallout from a sustained and unrelenting misinformation campaign being fed to Californians," and continued: "Millions of public servants in California are doing their jobs and planning...