This post was inspired by a tweet by Glenn Greenwald on X:
The US has no functional president and has not had one for months, and it’s barely noticeable and barely matters because there’s a permanent unelected machine that runs the government.
You may note the resonance between that and my frequently mentioned plaint that whoever is elected president the highest priority for the new administration should be civil service reform.
The Trump fans’ approach to this which appears to be reinstating President Trump’s Executive Order 13957 which was rescinded by President Biden won’t work. For one thing it’s unconstitutional—it’s explicitly not within the president’s authority to overrule the Civil Service Act of 1883 and its subsequent reform, the Civil Service Act of 1978. As such it will simply be ignored. That’s why the reform must come from the Congress.
In the past I’ve complained about the nomenklatura and it has occurred to me that I might need to explain what that means. In the old Soviet Union the nomenklatura referred to the posts in government and industry, staffed by people appointed by the Party, who reliably implemented Party policies. That’s what we have here in the United States now and Mr. Greenwald is right to complain about it.
What are these policies? You will probably recognize them. They include federalizing just about everything, increasing the number of people beholden to the federal government, increasing the wages of federal employees, “liberal interventionism” in foreign policy, DEI as a priority objective, and others.
What’s so wrong with that? Look around you. The great failures of the last five years including our response to COVID-19, the botching of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the baby formula shortage, the inflation of the early years of the Biden Administration, our failure to anticipate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and our inability to meet military staffing levels can all be attributed to those policies.
Consider this, too:
That was from 2017. It’s closer to eleven million now. It does not include the 30% of state and local employees who are dependent on federal grants to the states or the many sectors of the economy that depend largely or in part on federal tax dollars.
There are about 30 million people in the top quintile of income earners. Government employees, contractors, grant employees, and the other groups mentioned above comprise a big chunk of those 30 million. The average income of federal employees is around $90,000; the median is around $80,000. That puts them at the top of the third quintile of income earners, the fourth quintile, or the top quintile. The highest paid federal employee earned more than $400,000.
I cant quite figure out what you or Greenwald are complaining about. In any large organization things go on when you have leadership change or have no leader for a while. An organization that would fall apart the moment it did not have a leader would be a pretty poor one.
In your protracted rant there is too much to take time to respond to. So lets take military staffing since I spent more time in the military than you did and I still follow the issues, still talk with friends I have made who are int he reserves. What policy do you think made it hard to achieve staffing numbers? I would guess you think it’s the DEI stuff but that takes up not much time, maybe 1-2 hours a month at most. If you read military sources, including comments from recruiters, and read the chat sites where vets talk there are bigger issues.
First is the pace of overseas deployments. It has shredded a lot of families and we are seeing fallout from that. Even post Iraq/Afghanistan deployment rates are high. Even if not replying overseas you still need to move a lot (not as bad as in the past) but it makes it hard on spouses trying to keep a job. Next, pay remains low at lower ranks. Not as bad as when I was in but it’s hard to have a family, especially if you have to keep moving. As noted above it is hard for the spouse, usually a woman, to obtain ro keep a good job but the pay isn’t good enough to have only one spouse working in many cases. Next, on a practical level, they have changed how they medically screen people. They are trying to avoid recurring people likely to have medical issues but their new system adds a month to the recruiting effort, going from about 30 days to 60 days to complete the recruiting process. If memory serves I walked into the recruiters office and left for boot camp in about a week.
Then there is all of the change in society stuff. Obesity is so bad the potential number of recruits is lower. Men, most fo the recruits, are shying away from manual labor jobs. It’s not a high status job anymore. It was right after 9/11 but after the time and lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan we have little to show for it.
Steve