Free Republic

MANHATTAN - As the coronavirus continues to spread around the country, New York is preparing for the financial crisis left in its wake. Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Balsio issued a stark warning if the city doesn't get financial help. "If we ever got to the point of having to activate that layoff plan for the fall, we're talking 22,000 employees, that's a vast, vast number of people," de Blasio said during a press conference. For weeks protesters have called on the mayor and city council to defund the NYPD. With the 2021 city budget due next week, hundreds of people...

There’s a stark contrast in suffering between the private and public sectors in this era of unprecedented government intrusion into American life and business. Millions of mom-and-pop shops are shut and their income is decimated and large-company employees are furloughed. But we hear virtually nothing about government workers being laid off – or even taking a pay cut. Let that sink in: the folks whose work and taxes underwrite bureaucrat pay are cut off from livelihood while those they support in government are not only not hurting, but many are being given what are essentially paid vacations. And we’re hearing...

An epidemic of federal employees watching porn on taxpayer time has reached a new low at one agency where a veteran staffer “viewed child pornography on a government computer on multiple occasions,” according to an audit. The unidentified employee worked at the Bureau of Land Management, which operates under the Department of the Interior (DOI) and admitted to investigators from the agency’s Inspector General’s office that he viewed adult pornography on multiple occasions though he knew DOI policy prohibits it. A year ago, a separate DOI employee infected agency networks with Russian malware after visiting thousands of porn sites on...

I just read an article today that bureaucrats are blaming President Trump for their increased alcohol consumption. This is hilarious. Bureaucrats are finally being treated with the disdain they've always deserved. They're not appreciated. And they are behaving in much the same way as our campus snowflakes. You see, government employment shields their employees from the vagaries of the market. Unlike private-sector employees, bureaucrats don't have to concern themselves with termination, lay-offs, pay and benefits cuts, and the like. The have a guaranteed lifelong job with over-the-top benefits, Cadillac health-insurance plans, annual cost-of-living increases, and about eight weeks of paid...

With 17 people murdered Wednesday at a Florida high school in yet another mass shooting at a public place, the immediate reaction in the media and the left has been predictable. The go-to phrase from comedian Chelsea Handler, newspaper columnist Jessica Valenti and SiriusXM Radio executive Norm Ornstein — and now thousands of others — is that Republicans and Second Amendment defenders “have blood on their hands.” This is a despicable response, of course, but par for about everything from the left nowadays. Worse, it does nothing to actually limit future atrocities. There is no compassion in that. But there...

“This is a declaration of war, a war on the environment,” John O’Grady, an EPA union leader and agency employee, told E&E news. “It’s a declaration of war against children with asthma, against women of child-bearing age, against the elderly.” Trump is expected to ask Congress to cut EPA’s budget 24 percent and reduce the agency’s staff by 3,000 employees. O’Grady works out of EPA’s Chicago office where about 30 agency employees took to the streets to protest the nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the agency. The Senate confirmed Pruitt in February.

Most voters support President Trump’s plan for major spending and staffing cuts in the federal government, but many still worry he won’t shrink the government enough. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 54% of Likely U.S. Voters favor a proposal that would cut spending up to 10% and cut staffing up to 20% in some federal government agencies. Twenty-seven percent (27%) oppose such cuts, while 19% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Just how much “due process” for Federal employees is needed?

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 Democratic Party’s top donors are pouring money into Colorado political groups, drawing attention to state legislative contests and ballot fights that could affect the redrawing of key congressional districts, public records show. Billionaire hedge fund managers George Soros and Tom Steyer are steering money to Colorado state senate candidates, while the Democracy Alliance, a leading left-wing donor club created ten years ago by four wealthy Colorado Democrats, provides financing for an interconnected network of Democrat-aligned political groups. Campaign finance data reveals how the Alliance and its top donors are implementing a strategy conceived last year to retake power at...

Across the United States, government employees’ right to bear arms while working is being restored.  One of the pernicious erosions of the right to bear arms that occurred over the last 50 years is the right of government employees to bear arms while employed.  At the start of the progressive era, government employees were considered part of the elite, and could bear arms when and where others could not.In the first laws adopted by the new state of Oklahoma, statutes were adopted en masse from other states.  One of them exempted “public officials” from a ban on carrying weapons,...

BREWER, Maine — When Ken and Jo-Ann Arbo moved into their home in Eddington 22 years ago, they thought they found the perfect place to live.“I hunt right there. I fish out there. I snowmobile out there,” Ken Arbo said of the woods and fields near the couple’s home. “That is why we moved out there.”Now the Arbos face the real possibility of moving again.Their Lambert Road home is within the path of the controversial I-395/Route 9 connector, a proposed two-lane road from Brewer to Eddington meant to ease heavy truck traffic and improve safety on nearby routes 46 and...

Raising the minimum wage in California to the highest statewide level in the nation would eventually cost taxpayers an additional $3.6 billion a year in higher pay for government employees, legislative analysts determined. The estimate was disclosed as an Assembly committee gave initial approval Wednesday to boosting the wage to $15 an hour by 2022. The full state Assembly and Senate could vote on the deal between Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and labor unions as early as Thursday. […] First-year costs to the state would total $19 million, when the minimum pay bumps to $10.50 on Jan. 1, according to...

Tommy Scott Photo courtesy of wdbj7.com In Bedford County, Virginia, Supervisor Tommy Scott has proposed a change to County administrative policy to restore County employee's ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights while at work.  Infringements such as these are common for lower levels of State and local governments.  They gradually crept into administrative codes that became popular during the "progressive" era of the last 100 years.  From wdbj7.com: At Monday's supervisor meeting, Tommy Scott proposed a change to county policy that would allow employees with a concealed carry permit to exercise their right while on the job. Scott...

Employees for the federal government earn far more than their counterparts in the private sector, according to a new study by the Cato Institute. Federal workers’ pay and benefits were 78 percent higher than private employees, who earned an average of $52,688 less than public sector workers last year. The study found that federal government workers earned an average of $84,153 in 2014, compared to the private sector’s average of $56,350. Cato based its findings on figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). But when adding in benefits pay for federal workers, the difference becomes more dramatic. Federal...

Those employed by government in the United States in August of this year outnumbered those employed in the manufacturing sector by almost 1.8 to 1, according to data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There were 21,995,000 employed by federal, state and local government in the United States in August, according to BLS. By contrast, there were only 12,329,000 employed in the manufacturing sector. The BLS has published seasonally-adjusted month-by-month employment numbers for both government and manufacturing going back to 1939. In the first 50 years of the 76-year span since then, manufacturing out-employed government. But in August 1989,...

While the kneejerk headling scanning algos are focusing on the seasonally-adjusted headline monthly NFP increase which came in a worse than expected 173K, the presidential candidates - especially the GOP - are far more focused on another data point: the labor force participation rate, and the number of Americans not in the labor force. Here, they will have some serious ammo, because according to the BLS, the main reason why the unemployment rate tumbled to the lowest since April 2008 is because another 261,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force, as a result pushing the total number of...

Federal employes will be given at least six weeks of paid leave to care for new children under plans unveiled by the White House to kick-start legislative efforts to close the gap in family benefits offered by the US and other wealthy countries. Democrats have been pushing for better maternity and sick leave rights for over a decade in Congress with little success, but plans by Barack Obama to back the passage of a Healthy Families Act with the executive action for government workers and $2.2bn of new funding for state efforts would be the first time the president has...

Prosecutors are using a law originally enacted to go after mobsters to accuse former principals, teachers, and administrators of trying to boost their bonuses by conspiring to artificially raise kids' test scores. While only 12 ex-educators are on trial in Atlanta, dozens of teachers and administrators were initially charged and many have since pleaded guilty in exchange for their cooperation. The dozen on trial could get up to 20 years in prison, and they might never have been prosecuted if it weren't for a pair of ambitious reporters at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). Back in 2008, Heather Vogell, now a...

An employee at the U.S. Office of the Trustee — an arm of the Justice Department charged with overseeing the integrity of the bankruptcy system — spent up to five hours a day on the job looking at pornography, visiting more than 2,500 adult websites during 2011, investigators found. The case was just one of more than a dozen investigations into computer misuse closed by the Justice Department’s office of inspector general from 2013 through early this year, according to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.