President Trump just
retweeted the following 'anonymous' op-ed from The Daily Caller saying it
is "worth the read."
Worth the read.
I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/14/smoke-out-resistance/ … via @dailycaller
I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/14/smoke-out-resistance/ … via @dailycaller
The Daily Caller is taking the rare step
of publishing this anonymous op-ed at the request of the author, a senior
official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose
career would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing
this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to
our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our
vetting process here.
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 moxie (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.
When the agency is
full, employees held liable for poor performance respond with threats,
lawsuits, complaints and process in at least a dozen offices, taking years of
mounting paperwork with no fear of accountability, extending their careers,
while no real work is done. Do we succumb to such extortion? Yes. We pay them settlements, we
waive bad reviews, and we promote them.
Many government
agencies have adopted the position that more complaints are good because it
shows inclusion in, you guessed it, the process. When complaints come, it is
cheaper to pay them off than to hold public servants accountable. The
result: People accused of serious offenses are not charged, and self-proclaimed
victims are paid by you, the American taxpayer.
The message to federal
supervisors is clear. Maintain the status quo, or face allegations. Many
federal employees truly believe that doing tasks more efficiently and cutting
out waste, by closing troubled programs instead of expanding them, “is morally
wrong,” as one cried to me.
I get it. These are
their pets. It is tough to put them down and let go, and many resist. This
phenomenon was best summed up by a colleague who said, “The goal in government is to
do nothing. If you try to get things done, that’s when you will run into
trouble.”
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.
A word of caution: To be a
victory, this shutdown must be different than those of the past and should
achieve lasting disruption with two major changes, or it will hurt the
president.
The first thing we need out of
this is better security, particularly at the southern border. Our founders
envisioned a free market night watchman state, not the bungled bloated
bureaucracy our government has become. But we have to keep the uniformed
officers paid, which is an emergency. Ideally, continue a resolution to pay the
essential employees only, if they are truly working on national security. Furloughed
employees should find other work, never return and not be paid.
Secondly, we need savings for
taxpayers. If this fight is merely rhetorical bickering with Nancy Pelosi,
we all lose, especially the president. But if it proves that government is better
when smaller, focusing only on essential functions that serve Americans, then
President Trump will achieve something great that Reagan was only bold enough
to dream.
The president’s instincts are
right. Most Americans will not miss non-essential government functions. A referendum to
end government plunder must happen. Wasteful government agencies are fighting
for relevance but they will lose. Now is the time to deliver historic change by
cutting them down forever.
The author is a senior official
in the Trump administration.
