Perpetual Crisis

[bblhead672]

Originally Posted by Ret10Echo

So Border Patrol agents would only serve 5 years? Likewise other Federal LE? Federal Firefighters...5 years and your gone?

Civilian instructors in the schoolhouses across the DOD?

What do you believe to be the composition of the incompetent "civil servants"? (emphasis added)

There needs to be a method to determine when a "civil servant" quits serving the American taxpayer and starts "self serving" or "agenda serving."

I have no idea what that would look like. Its amazing to me the number of federal employees who are furloughed yet "essential" government services continue to function. Always thought that indicated how many extra people there are on the federal payroll.

[Badger52]

Originally Posted by bblhead672

There needs to be a method to determine when a "civil servant" quits serving the American taxpayer and starts "self serving" or "agenda serving."

I have no idea what that would look like. Its amazing to me the number of federal employees who are furloughed yet "essential" government services continue to function. Always thought that indicated how many extra people there are on the federal payroll.

As TS indicated in the marksmanship/training thread, the rank & file don't get to have an "agenda." Agendas are typically managed by executive branch appointees, ultimately not even GS/GM-15's etc. These are the people sitting in positions with titles like "Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Superfluous Affairs." The problem is often that these don't get purged all the way down when a new cabinet secretary comes in. They remain, like ticks, burrowed deep. If I were new secretary for a day & you were one of those ticks, the first thing you'd get from my office would be all previous appointees have their letter of resignation on my desk by COB Monday. I'll research & let you know if I accept.

Much of the rank & file (within DA anyway), still subject to furlough, are that support "tail" often spoke of. It is very often tough at a base level to decide who's essential & who's not, beyond the obvious life/safety categories. NG/AR unit shows up to do a week at their base, training planned out, including lots of live-fire drills/range-time. Is that guy/gal at the Ammo Supply Point who's going to issue their ammo load essential or not? How about the range control guys who deconflict range activity? Should the unit just say, "screw it, we're going to do a week of diversity training instead and bugout for beer & pizza, road march back home early Thursday morning" ?

[Box]

Civil Service employees are non-elected, public sector employees of the federal government. I am not sure how civil service employees can really be "self serving" - they do not set policy - they simply implement policy legislated by politicians. Running off civil servants after five years because of morally corrupt career politicians doesn't seem like it would have an overall positive impact on the USA.
If you think the troops are inundated with paper work now, start running off the General Schedule employees after five years and watch how fast the systems grinds to a crawl.

-You say you want more slots to a specialty school? Too bad - the new ATRRS guy doesn't understand the system well enough to get you into the next class and the last guy just hit 61 months.
-Institutional knowledge would be a thing of the past - consider what 18C MOS training might be like if SWC would have been forced to release Ernie Tabata way back in 1989.

General Schedule employees don't really have much power on a national scale - they can certainly serve as speed bumps to progress in some cases, but they hardly get to implement any type of policy without tons of oversight.

Senior Executive Service employees may deserve some scrutiny as career bureaucrats since they are operating at the same level as General Officers, but they also have cabinet level bosses that give them their marching orders. (It doesn't help that as many as 10% of the SES could be made up of political appointees.)

A non-essential employee might be the one that is staffing the paper work for a detailed off post training event that is set to occur in April - but if that paper work don't make its way through the system before the suspense date because the GS employee was furloughed - your training isn't going to happen on time.

The fact that "essential" programs continue to function during a furlough is smoke and mirrors cultivated by politicians that use the event as political leverage.

The truth is, for every citizen that thinks the civil service employees are concubines for the political class, there is a politician that hates the civil service for their perceived disloyalty. The poor old GS guy is stuck in the middle, doing the best they can despite being reviled as the toad in the road.

As an instructor at the MFF, I realized that we would be in a huge hurt if civil servants were only glorified part time employees. Rigging and Life Support maintenance would be a fucking disaster if we had to hire a new SME every few years. Working as a Staff NCO at USASOC, I came to the realization that most of the real paperwork gets done by GS workers because a green-suiter rarely does it right the first time.

It isn't the civil servants shutting down government, it is PETTY partisan politics.
Meanwhile these motherfuckers collect all of their pay and allowances on time, and spend their taxpayer funded three-martini-lunches planning the next golf trip.

Lets just make sure we are hating on the right people.



...just my two cents, I could be wrong

[cbtengr]

Originally Posted by Box

Civil Service employees are non-elected, public sector employees of the federal government. I am not sure how civil service employees can really be "self serving" - they do not set policy - they simply implement policy legislated by politicians. ........................

BINGO!! They do not make policy but they have been known to benefit from some overly generous policy, such as pension funds that are under funded. When my friends who are state employees bitch about the rollback of some of their incredibly generous tax payer funded benefits I ask them if they are not tax payers also? It is easy to be generous with someone else's money, like these dipshits that call for mandatory minimum pay raises, it is not coming out of their pockets.

[Ret10Echo]

Originally Posted by bblhead672

There needs to be a method to determine when a "civil servant" quits serving the American taxpayer and starts "self serving" or "agenda serving."

I have no idea what that would look like. Its amazing to me the number of federal employees who are furloughed yet "essential" government services continue to function. Always thought that indicated how many extra people there are on the federal payroll.

Some good examples provided previously about the very challenge...

I think the simplest example of how the essential services continue would be the equivalent of your team medic being unavailable for a deployment.. BUT your Team Sergeant was a medic but really hadn't done the work for a while. Risk determines that the deployment can still go with him serving in that role, but it's not a permanent fix... It'll just get you by. Does that mean your team is operating at optimum capacity? Probably not.

So in the Fed you end up with senior folks or political appointees filling in for the specialists to keep the wheels on the car for a short term. Most of this are those administrative and support-level staff tasks that tend to just "happen" in the background. Pay, travel voucher processing, personnel actions and all the associated stuff that keeps the bureaucracy running.

As to the thinning of the herd... That's a cultural change that would have to take place and given trend towards extremes of administration approach, it's hard to work through.

For self-serving. I tend to disagree with others. There are in fact groups of civil servants that lose their azimuth on what they are there for. The "service" becomes less about what the customer (the American public) wants or needs and instead becomes what they personally determine to be the purpose of what they are doing or becomes an effort to simply justify the existence of their office. This is reflected in the crazy that comes out of agencies such as the EPA where mission-creep is SOP. The MORE you do the MORE money you can ask for. (sound familiar right?).

Unions in civil service is another area that continues to baffle me, but that has a large impact on decisions and processes related to personnel.

Generally an office or area within an agency is never dissolved....they just create new ones to execute new tasks and directives. The ability to repurpose federal employees is very limited either by OPM, Merit Systems Protection Board, EEOC, etc...etc... and "supervisors" really don't know how to supervise. It's just easier to spirit someone off to a closet somewhere than to deal with the issue and make a hard choice.

The fed in some areas is also a huge jobs program. Just like a GM plant shutting down, what happens if you ditch 30% of the federal workforce because they are redundant or unnecessary? If you accept the Fed to be somewhere around 9 Million (not including active military) then you're saying 2 1/2 Million layoffs.

The other part of this, and Military retirees live this every day....is the pension costs for retired civil servants. If you're an old-school CRS retiree...it's pretty good. FERS employees.... not so much.. Expect that to shift even more in the future as employees are expected to shoulder a greater amount of their retirement costs through TSP or other such arrangements.

So.. Somewhere between the way it was before President Garfield and where we are now is probably a good spot.

Just need to determine what percentage of that formula is private contractor? There are flaws in both (as we have seen in the not so distant past).

How much is civil servant?

How do you reform civil service law (given the strength of the unions) and decouple the civil servants from the political will of any particular administration?

A random number (percentage) is not a good approach, neither is a generalization about "unneeded" feds.

[bblhead672]

Good points by all. I did not mean to disparage the rank and file civil servant, meant the Lois Lerner type.

[Badger52]

Originally Posted by bblhead672

I did not mean to disparage the rank and file civil servant, meant the Lois Lerner type.

Different problem-set; a solution for that type is available though, just to the right of Attilla the Hun. You know, pour encourage' les autres.

[Ret10Echo]

Originally Posted by bblhead672

Good points by all. I did not mean to disparage the rank and file civil servant, meant the Lois Lerner type.

I'm not fully clear but often times what you will find in some more senior positions within government is that they are Schedule C appointees...

[Box]

Lerner was appointed to her position as the head of the Federal Election Commissions Enforcement Division in the mid-1980's
...where she was also accused of unfairly targeting religious organizations

She was appointed to her position as the director of the IRS' Exempt Organizations Unit in 2006. Coincidentally, when she was found in contempt of congress, the Justice Department refused to pursue contempt charges (since Eric Holder himself had been in contempt of congress in 2011)


Not without a small degree of irony, she is also a past president of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws

[Ret10Echo]

Originally Posted by Box

She was appointed to her position as the director of the IRS' Exempt Organizations Unit in 2006.

So apparently an appointee, not a civil servant. What I figured.

There are a LOT of appointees that are low-level without Senate approval.



Thanks B.

[Joker]

Originally Posted by Ret10Echo

So apparently an appointee, not a civil servant. What I figured.

There are a LOT of appointees that are low-level without Senate approval.



Thanks B.

Yep, they can be GS1s through SESs. No DAS (Deputy Assistant Secretary) needs confirmation. Met a bunch of GS14s and GS15s Schedule C employees (Political Appointees). When Pres. Trump just took office they advertised (uh, announced) the empty positions, I saw GS5s positions through Assistant Secretaries (SESs).

[Box]

Depending on where you chase the information she WAS a civil servant - she reportedly enjoys a healthy pension from the Civil Service Retirement System to the tune of roughly 90-100 thousand dollars a year. Forbes even reported her getting as much as $129,300 in bonuses between 2010 and 2013. She was also getting full pay even after she was put on administrative leave. Her pension is 'free-chicken' since she "retired" before the House Ways and Means Committee could drive a stake through her heart.

Meanwhile, if one of us peasants drops a DTS claim for 75 dollars or more without a receipt,
well.... just don't do it


The problem isn't that we live in a perpetual state of crisis within our government; the problem is WHY we live in such a state. It's all about the art of misdirection. Its why the government is so good at letting the tail wag the dog - they are nothing more than street performers dressed in seersucker suits. Face it folks, our representatives in Washington DC run the old Three-Card-Monte with such surgical precision that would make any self respecting New York street hustler jealous.

Keep your eye on the Ace of Spades my good man, watch it close: left to right, right to left, front to back, back to front......
...okay - where is it

AW... too bad. I'll tell you what, double or nothing, and I'll do it slower to make it easier for you to follow - ok, nice and slow - watch close this time:
left to right
right to left
front to back
back to front......
...okay my friend; I think you got me this time
...aw wow - too bad wrong again

[tonyz]

Hiding the pea until retirement is the career goal of far too many bureaucrats.

But, even those useless parasitic bureaucrat types are less loathsome than those of the “I know how to misuse the whole weight of the system to crush you” Lois Lerner type.

[Ret10Echo]

Originally Posted by Box

- too bad wrong again

Ain't that the truth...


But in THEORY the differentiator is that a civil servant applies and is hired based upon their having the appropriate skillset to perform a job whether it is blue collar, white collar or executive.

The appointee is put in place to move an administrations agenda forward using the agency as a tool to execute. The qualification is whether they are seen as a footsoldier of the administration.

Funny how that works.

[Golf1echo]

"-Institutional knowledge would be a thing of the past - consider what 18C MOS training might be like if SWC would have been forced to release Ernie Tabata way back in 1989. "
Powerful example of a fortunate situation! Having been in his group In the late 80's I was astounded to hear from some of our racers several decades later he was still there...good stuff!