We Do Need to Return to the Past

By Rich Kozlovich 

Editor's Note: I originally published this on Sep 30, 2022, and it's been hit lately so given what's happening, I thought it worthwhile to republish it now with some updated points.  RK

On September 29, 2022 Steven Hayward posted this article and video, Thought for the Day: Populism Galls Galston saying:

William Galston, the liberal columnist for the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page (they always like to have one around) writing every so gently yesterday on the need for Democrats to pay attention to the legitimate grievances of populism lest they get buried in a populist electoral tide:

“Powerful forces in the Democratic coalition oppose crafting the sort of moderate policies that could win back these [working class] voters. But if Democrats refuse to compromise, the alternative may be something like the recent right-wing populist surges in Europe.”

Good luck with that compromising, Bill. The progressives own the Democratic Party now, and are in no mood to compromise.  (start video at the 25 second mark):

His argument about returning government back to 1920 levels is a logical fallacy. No one is suggesting that so it's a non sequitur, simply a distraction to avoid attacking the outrageous size of large government and it's abuses of the Constitution, which have been massive, corrupt, and so often fraudulent in nature. 

But the fact is there's no reason why the federal government should have over two million employees, and that doesn't include all the contractors or grant recipients, especially in the scientific community where government grant money has made scientific integrity an oxymoron. 

If the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation and especially the Department of Education were totally eliminated that would only amount to about 52,500 employees.   So, please don't tell me the remaining 1,947,463 employees are really all that necessary, especially since the vast majority work in the defense/intelligence community, and we're seeing the consequences of that, as noted in this piece by Dan Mitchell of an out of control FBI and Department of Justice.   

We're now finding the FBI is deliberately hiding documents the new AG Pam Bondi has ordered released, and whistle blowers are claiming the FBI is destroying evidence!   Not to mention the abuses of the and , all of which has led to a massive levels of

That doesn't count those actually serving in the military, about another million and a half, along with another eight hundred thousand reservists.

Maybe we should be demanding 1920 levels of government, and those reductions should include local and state governments, which currently employs another 16 million people, then maybe we can return to the past and get a 1950 level of government as a compromise.

What If Federal Workers Never Showed Up for Work and No One Missed Them?

Stephen Moore  |  Feb 14, 2023 @ Townhall.com

This is one of the greatest federal government scandals of all time. Many hundreds of thousands of federal employees have been getting a full-time paycheck from Uncle Sam (meaning from all of us) without showing up for work for three ears now. They don't call it Club Fed for nothing.

To be fair, just because an employee is working remotely doesn't mean they aren't working. Only a little more than half of private sector workers are actually in the office these days -- although, with each passing day, private workers are returning to work sites. But in the public sector, the percentage of remote workers remains much higher than that. The Federal Times news outlet reports that at the end of 2022, only about 1 in 3 federal bureaucrats were on the job in the office.

Wait. The COVID scare ended two and a half years ago, and most private businesses have demanded their employees show up for work at least some of the time -- or find a new employer. What's so special and privileged about government workers?

Now, new House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is pushing a bill that would require all federal agencies to reinstitute their telework policies as they existed on Dec. 31, 2019, with expanded remote work only for authorized projects. That bill passed the House on a 221-206 vote. Guess what? All but six House Democrats voted no. Is there any wonder why? Well, more than 90% of PAC donations from federal employee unions go to ... you got it, Democrats.

Who are the Democrats accountable to? Federal employees, or their own taxpayer voters and constituents who pay these workers' salaries? This vote makes the answer to that question crystal clear. So, the rest of America in private sector jobs is back to work, but not the 1.9 million federal employees, who often make $100,000 a year in salaries and benefits. All of this is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer money, but there is a silver lining here. Raise your hand if you've even noticed that federal workers are not showing up at the Department of Energy or Education or Transportation or the State Department or the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Has this disrupted your life in any material way? Not mine.

Maybe we've all learned a valuable lesson here. Maybe these agencies aren't as indispensable as President Joe Biden says they are. We could potentially save billions of dollars and reduce our debt by getting rid of some of these obsolete or irrelevant agencies, departments and bureaus.

A budget impasse between Biden and congressional Republicans may lead to a temporary shutdown of some of these agencies. How could that be Armageddon if we don't even know when the workers are on the job?

Maybe we could cut the federal workforce in half from 2 to 1 million employees. My best guess is nobody would notice, and nobody would care.

Democrats Don’t Want Federal Employees to Have to Come to Work

Daniel Greenfield October 26, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The pandemic divided Americans into two classes: those who could work from home and those who could not. Federal government employees were members of the privileged class.

And they don’t want that to change.

During the pandemic, over 90% of the EPA, USAID, the Department of Education and, ironically, the Department of Labor, were 'working' online.

The utility of federal agencies could roughly be measured by whether their employees were mostly showing up to work, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, or were permanently out to lunch like the Department of Housing and Urban Development which did the vast majority of its work over the internet..

While the pandemic is over, the privilege of the political pajama class isn’t.

Long before the pandemic, Obama had signed into law the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. Two years before the pandemic, Rep. Sarbanes of Maryland, who had originally introduced the Act, alongside Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, both of whose districts are full of federal workers, proposed the Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act to free even more federal employees from having to come to work. The 2018 Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act wanted over a fifth of federal employees working from home in response to efforts by the Trump administration to get them to come to the office.

“We must push back against the Trump administration’s repeated attacks on federal telework programs," Sarbanes had complained.

That bill never went anywhere, but it’s now being rebooted by Sarbanes and Connolly as the 2022 Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act with a new post-pandemic gloss.

The bill once again includes a ‘floor’ on online work for government workers.

Rep. Sarbanes told an interviewer that his bill would "pressure, in some instances, the agencies, all agencies, to look at how they can embrace telework."

During his State of the Union address, Biden had promised that, "The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.” The telework push violates that promise which was never properly implemented. At the time, Republican House members Rep. James Comer and Rep. Jody Hice had warned that not only weren't government workers back on the job, but that the Office of Personnel Management was describing a transition to a "hybrid work environment" and promising to use the experience of the pandemic to "integrate telework and remote work".

Biden, his speechwriters and his teleprompters were not telling the truth. The administration's appointees and political allies had been hard at work, figuratively, cutting attendance requirements and allowing federal employees to stay home well after the threat had passed.

A month later, Rep. Yvette Herrell had proposed her SHOW Up Act, which argued that "Americans are struggling to receive their tax refunds, veterans are having difficulties accessing their benefits, and it’s all because of backlogs created by expanded telework policies for federal bureaucrats. It is long overdue for the federal workforce to return to work in person."

But pandemic ‘zoom’ work was not a temporary phenomenon. Nor was it meant to be.

Rep. Connolly cheered that due to the pandemic, "the cultural barriers to telework have essentially collapsed."

Rep. Sarbanes boasted that, "You’re going to continue to see a real premium on this that has been kind of enhanced and introduced to a lot of the workforce because of the pandemic."

This is not about the pandemic. It's a longstanding effort by politicians who represent government workers legislating to protect them from having to actually work. Much as teachers’ unions tried to keep schools closed in order to force a permanent transition to ‘zoom class’, federal unions exploited the pandemic to fundamentally restructure what their jobs look like.

The teachers didn’t want to come back to work. Ever. Neither do federal bureaucrats. And both have powerful unions and a lot of politicians working for them, not for citizenry.

While some remote work makes sense, the pandemic push to have federal government workers stay at home proved disastrous.

25% of Department of Health and Human Services personnel didn't even bother logging in.

A Functional Government Initiative report revealed that HHS had discovered that, "on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working". The report had to be leaked because of the partisan political pressure to push telework without any regard for the consequences to citizen services or national security.

Senior citizens and disabled people calling social security hotlines were unable to get through because the SSA had put workers who couldn't take calls at home on leave. The IRS proved even more dysfunctional with offices overwhelmed and hotline calls going unanswered.

National defense, which has already been compromised by multiple Chinese and Russian hacks, has new vulnerabilities being introduced in order to accomodate online work for people handling classified materials. Despite that, Biden’s Defense Department people are pushing telework because national security isn’t a Democrat priority, but catering to federal unions is.

“As we look at our reentry to the workplace, we can’t expect to return to ‘business as usual’,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks argued. “Throughout the pandemic we learned a lot about how we can embrace telework."

While career bureaucrats like Hicks “embrace” working in their pajamas, thousands of active duty military personnel who risked their lives under fire are being forced out over Biden’s illegal vaccine mandates. The same policies are destroying the military in two complementary ways, firing heroes who actually show up in the line of fire, while enabling DOD bureaucrats to log in online to their daily diversity seminars. This is a simple process for destroying the military.

It’s understandable that federal unions want to use politicians like Sarbanes and Connolly to maximize their benefits. And that includes not having to commute to work. Especially in Washington D.C. The country would probably get along better if the majority of federal employees stayed home and never showed up to work at all. Especially in the EPA and the Department of Education which make the country worse each hour that they’re on the job.

But the demands for telework are another painful reminder to most of the country that the balance of power long ago shifted away from voters and to the administrative state. And while we would be better off without much of the federal government, telework tends to hit customer services first as we saw with the IRS and social security hotlines. Federal agencies won’t actually stop working or cashing checks, but they will be sloppier in ways that hurt people.

Telework will then make accountability and getting answers much harder to achieve.

National security agencies pursuing telework benefits are exposing even more of our systems to our foreign adversaries. Even when online work doesn’t involve any classified information, remote accesses help open doors that our enemies can begin to exploit.

And it’s not only agencies and departments that are directly intelligence or military in nature whose telework poses a national security threat.

The Office of Personnel Management is at the epicenter of both engaging in telework, (75% or more of OPM employees worked remotely during the pandemic), and promoting it to the rest of the government, but it was responsible for one of the worst government hacks under Obama.

The OPM hack by the Chinese Communist regime exposed tens of millions of records and provided the enemy in Beijing with a thorough list of government employees including possible secret operatives. Hearings into the hack revealed that OPM had not secured the majority of its own systems. And that a contractor who had been brought on board to manage personnel records had one administrator in Argentina and another in China.

Telework is a bad risk.

Americans already pay for a massive government bureaucracy. Would it be too much to ask its members to actually show up to work? 

 Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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Thank you for reading.

Tags: big government, recent, unions