How to Shut Down the Democrats’ Alternative Universe

President Trump needs to be far more serious in his second term about personnel, ensuring the executive branch is filled with staffers working on his administration’s behalf every day.

Ned Ryun

By now, only a person living in Alternate Universe One could fail to understand that the past three years have precisely nothing to do with Russian collusion or Ukraine corruption and everything to do with who makes decisions about American policy: the duly elected president of the United States or the administrative state. That is the struggle right now. The crux is a struggle between advocates of our constitutional republic and those who prefer government by an administrative state composed of unelected elites.

There are no guarantees about who will win the fight.

The first public impeachment inquiry hearings on Wednesday showed that very clearly: George Kent and William Taylor weren’t witnesses per se as they clearly had witnessed nothing. In reality, they were mere opinionists. It became clear very quickly that Festivus had come early as two self-important bureaucrats took the stand for a grand airing of their grievances with the president over his policy decisions.

While some may call their behavior seditious, there is no doubting these types feel emboldened in today’s political climate. Bolstered by their propagandists in the media, an effete legal system, and a major political party, the administrative state actors are feeling so confident they’ve actually dropped the pretense that there is no such thing as a deep state. Old and broke is “the devil isn’t real.” New and woke is “the devil is real and he’s here for your good.”

But another factor tilts the contest in favor of the administrative state: it’s a rigged numbers game pure and simple.
Let me explain: the Plum Book is the list of every political position to which each new administration may appoint people across the Executive Branch and various agencies when it comes into power. In 2017, the Plum Book listed about 7,000 positions. These ranged from the secretaries of the various departments to the lower-level Schedule C appointees. (These last are known as Sched Cs; before I was a writer in the White House, I was a Sched C at the Pentagon working for Air Force Public Affairs).

While Sched Cs get to do some fun and interesting work, in no way do they have any authority to make decisions about implementing presidential policy across the administration. By the time you remove those 1,400 or so Sched Cs from the equation of those with any real power, along with a few thousand more lower and mid-levels from the 7,000, you’re left in the neighborhood of just a couple of thousand political appointees appointed by the president who have any real authority to implement his policies.

Juxtapose that number against more than 430 departments, agencies, and sub-agencies in our government peopled by nearly 2 million career federal government employees, many of whom have been around for decades inside the various institutions.

A quick survey of political donations from every cycle reveals that only about 4 percent of the District of Columbia voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And if you simply live in Washington, D.C. and ride the Metro with many of these federal employees, as I do, it becomes very clear the overwhelming majority of them are in no way interested in an America First agenda. They are not interested in reducing the size and scope of government; partly because of self-interest and job security, and partly because they hold to a political worldview and a mistaken belief that a large bureaucracy is a sign of progress and a healthy society.

Now for the sake of argument, let’s say every last political appointee with authority to implement the president’s vision is simpatico with him and, moreover, is a political rockstar. That is not only not true but impossible to imagine, especially with the Trump White House. When you have a deeply moderate establishment Republican like Johnny DeStefano running the Office of Presidential Personnel for more than two years inside the Trump White House, perhaps you’re hoping that some America First types get appointments to places of authority, but you cannot expect that such people would fill the majority of the positions.

And, of course, they have not.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say there were thousands of political rockstars sent into the fray to combat nearly 2 million federal employees and implement an America First agenda. Who do you think is going to win that fight, especially given a compressed time frame? Again, these appointees are only there for the duration of that given administration, and many don’t even last that long.

In his second term, Trump needs to be far more serious about personnel and make sure PPO is staffed with America First types who then fill his executive branch and administration with people who are working on his behalf every day. He should clean house at the Republican National Committee while he’s at it and truly make the party into his own.

But before any of that can matter he needs to work on shutting down a department or two—the Department of Energy would be a good place to start—and then devise a plan on how to migrate the 800,000 nonessential federal employees out of government and back into the private sector. Working with and championing a plan by Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to send several departments out of D.C. and into the various states, Trump could drain the swamp by breaking apart the administrative state.

Fact is, there really is no way you can win such a rigged game if you continue to play it by the rules laid out by the Left, which is precisely what conservatives have been doing for decades—really since the beginning of the 20th century. Some have done that willingly because they believe in big government so long as they’re the ones controlling the levers of power.

We’re never going to win if we continue down this path. We need to make new rules for the game, and change the dynamic.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/1...lternative-universe/

Another article which makes essentially the same argument: Cut Government

Impeachment Lesson: Cut Government
By Fletch Daniels

This current impeachment theater is the equivalent of Caddyshack II, a sequel so dreadful that nobody is bothering to tune in.

Even my liberal colleagues who despise President Donald Trump can’t be bothered watch. It’s as if everyone not named Chris Wallace knows this is a complete sham. The stock market yawned as it rocketed upwards.

What we have is a parade of bureaucratic power players preening before friendly Democrats to complain that nobody listens to their sage counsel and that the president has the audacity to think he decides foreign policy.

The biggest villain in this ill-begotten administrative coup sequel is Joe Biden, whose corruption is so obscene that even ruthlessly friendly media can’t keep it from sneaking through. Hunter Biden sucked in dirty Ukrainian cash like he was hooked up to a beer bong, getting drunk on his father’s political influence.

For proof of the damage, look no further than a rising Pete Buttigieg, who is now in the lead in Iowa.

Democrats think our national interests are items to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Win elections, become multimillionaires, complain about billionaires while offering to drink beer with the peasants. Rinse and repeat.

The media reacted in horror when the phrase “I hired Donald Trump to fire people like Yovanovitch” trended on Twitter. The idea that a sentiment shared by nearly all rational-minded people would catch fire was inexplicable to the outraged media and the Twitter overlords.

But this really gets to the heart of what is going on here and is the biggest lesson of the Schiff Show. The only way to drain the swamp is to cut the bureaucracy. That is accomplished by firing as many Yovanovitchs as possible.

This story centers around the disloyal bureaucrats on the Ukrainian desk, but they are representative of the entire bureaucracy.

Every Republican president starts day one on the job in charge of a massive disloyal workforce. Follow the money. Almost every single dollar, to the tune of 95%, donated by a federal bureaucrat during the 2016 election went to Hillary Clinton.

This is a massive challenge for every Republican president. One of the easiest jobs in the world is being a Democratic president. The federal bureaucracy quite literally worships you. The media, academia, and entertainment industries call in supporting fires to portray every move as a Nobel Prize-worthy gesture.

The corollary to this is that the hardest job in the world is to be a Republican president. The executive branch workers you oversee despise you and seek to undermine every move. They are the head of the resistance, the very heart of the deep state snake.

To date, the biggest mistake that President Trump made was not firing every political appointee from the previous administration on his first hour in office. They quite literally saw themselves as the leaders of the resistance. Chalk that up to bad advice he was getting from the establishment Republicans he brought on board in the early days of his administration.

Every government agency sings homilies to the “diversity is our strength” catechism of the church of liberalism. But not a single agency actually has the one form of diversity that truly matters, diversity of thought. The entire government is one giant exercise in leftist groupthink.

When a Republican is president, the entire government is one giant “whistleblower” operation, as low-level bureaucrats whistle at their Democrat allies and the press who strut by their offices.

The deep state is not very deep at all. It is the entire state. When the entire bureaucracy is leftist in orientation, “resistance” happens quite organically and naturally. The bureaucrats believe they are on the side of the angels as they spend their well-compensated hours acting to undermine the very president they are supposed to serve as a sedition squad.

During the impeachment shenanigans, the veneer frequently slips off, as it did when Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman indicated that the president was undermining U.S. national security, clearly believing that the bureaucracy should set foreign policy instead of the president.

Almost every Republican agency head oversees a hostile workforce, some worse than others. Imagine going to work as Betsy DeVos each day at the Department of Education knowing your entire, mostly worthless staff hates you and is seeking your scalp. The State Department is another leftist cesspool where Republicans need not apply. It takes a very strong person to be successful in these dens of vipers.

Every single word and action by a Republican political appointee is under hostile scrutiny by the bureaucracy. Within this environment, impeachment is a standard power play of the Democrats, because the bureaucracy is constantly feeding them fodder.

Consider that Democrats have tried to impeach every elected Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Republicans? They’ve only done it once when they grudgingly impeached Jeffrey Epstein’s bosom buddy in a case that was beyond a slam dunk.

Impeachment was a near certainty before President Trump even took office since the collective psychosis was already taking hold. I took my daughters to a young adult writer conference in Charleston a couple days after the election. That was a mistake. The writers and organizers were in a state of shock and were regularly breaking into profanity-laced tirades. At the keystone event, the organizers and writers told the audience of hundreds of young people that they were all part of the resistance now.

We literally felt like we were in the middle of a giant breakout of mass psychosis. But, three years later, the entire Democrat party is suffering from the same insanity.

This is not going to trend better as Democrats become more extreme. It is highly doubtful that there will ever again be an effective Republican president not tossed into the impeachment briar patch.

The best solution that President Trump could offer the nation during his second term is to cut the bureaucracy, and not with a scalpel. It may be impossible to actually drain the swamp, because Swampy McSwampthing is a Democrat monster protected by Democrats. But, as the temporary head of that bureaucracy, he can certainly shrink it and take away a lot of its power through hiring freezes and concerted pressure.

My hope is that it becomes one of his biggest priorities following reelection. We have the worst government that near limitless wads of cash can buy. The federal government employs over two million, which doesn’t sound too bad. But that number is an accounting sleight of hand. America has close to four million contract workers supporting that bureaucracy, a number that has exploded in recent years. Both numbers should be rolled way back, perhaps cut in half. This would likely serve a few goals -- making the government a leaner and more effective organization, reducing some of the seditious tendencies of an entirely liberal bureaucracy, and saving much-needed money that America simply cannot afford to throw into the government shredder.

We did indeed hire President Trump to fire the Yovanovitchs and a healthy chunk of the unhealthy bureaucracy. My hope is that the Schiff Show further drives home the imperative of getting it done.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.co...t.html#ixzz65eOeUs8Y

First terms are all about getting a second term. The second term (with a term-limited president) is about making a mark.

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
First terms are all about getting a second term. The second term (with a term-limited president) is about making a mark.

True in the past, but Trump has gone way past the first hundred days and kept the throttle to the floor.
Even if he were to only serve one term, he has done way more than others.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
The federal government employs over two million, which doesn’t sound too bad. But that number is an accounting sleight of hand. America has close to four million contract workers supporting that bureaucracy, a number that has exploded in recent years.

The Bureaucratic / Admin .Gov Civilians are worse that the worst Union you can imagine.

Impossible to fire, Overpaid, and Entitled as fuck.

At least the Contract workers know that the money spigot can be turned off and typically act accordingly, but not always.

I hope Trump takes a flamethrower to the fat, bloated size of our Gov't.

quote:

At least the Contract workers know that the money spigot can be turned off and typically act accordingly, but not always.

... and there are lots of people who figure out a way to jump between the two. When they can make big money as a contract worker, they take it. But, of course they also want the gov. pension and benefits. So they jump back and forth.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:

quote:

Originally posted by fpuhan:
First terms are all about getting a second term. The second term (with a term-limited president) is about making a mark.

True in the past, but Trump has gone way past the first hundred days and kept the throttle to the floor.
Even if he were to only serve one term, he has done way more than others.

True. More's the reason the Left hates him. He's delivering on his promises.

I am not concerned about a second term for President Trump - that's almost a given when you look at who the socialist democrats have fielded

What I am more worried about is who succeeds Trump in 5 years. As much as I like Mike Pence, I don't think he's of the same mindset and has the same resolve that DJT has.

It would be a shame to lose the WH to a democrat so I think we need to see who is potentially on the horizon and they need to be someone who will deal with the smoking ruins of the democrats and not feel the least bit sorry to see them in whatever amount of distress we can inflict upon them in the next 5 years