President Donald J. Trump is a true tree hugger, and I’m not sure he has ever been in a forest.
We mustn’t let any liberals, progressives, or snowflakes see this, they wouldn’t be able to handle it. Many of those snowflakes claim to be tree huggers while they have in fact facilitated the destruction of forests.
While the liberals/progressives have busily and forcefully obstructed good husbandry of our forests and wild lands, we have recently experienced some of the most violent and destructive fires imaginable. Those so-called wild fires have destroyed untold millions of trees. Many of those fires were man-caused, and the liberals are happy. Governor Moonbeam has said that we should expect more wild fires while he continues with his train to nowhere and refuses to practice forest husbandry and to provide water to farmers.
President Trump has, over the past eighteen months rescinded thousands of bad rules and regulations imposed by thousands of power hungry idiots and fools in high places who abused their authority. These rules and regulations caused millions of Americans to spend valuable time and millions of dollars filling out and submitting forms that few if any were actually read or studied. That often useless or meaningless paperwork required millions of trees to be cut and made into paper. Trump’s regulation killing is in fact saving millions of trees.
President Trump is not finished ...
He needs to take the next step for our republic.
President Trump is not finished. He needs to take the next step for our republic.
With no forms to create and collate, there are thousands of Obama era regulators left with nothing to do. Why are they still around? It’s time for President Trump to conduct a major reduction-in-force (RIF), especially of agencies involved with those now defunct regulations.
President Trump has already taken a first step by holding off on pay raises for often overpaid federal employees.
He needs to stop all promotions into the Senior Executive Service (SES) and start cutting superfluous positions (there are lots of them wasting your and my money). The top echelons of government have a policy for high ranking officials in that they must move up or out. It’s called Time-In-Class (TIC) – a policy that requires that SES officials be forcefully retired if they don’t get promoted after a certain number of years. By driving thousands of SES types out and not replacing them, President Trump will save billions of taxpayer dollars.
GRADE CREEP Over the years, civil servants have engaged in what is referred to as empire building. They strive to create ever more subordinate positions in their little empires, and then work to increase the grades of those positions. Next, they use the increased number of employees and their higher grades to justify raising their own status, titles, and pay grades to get more authority and pay.
EXAMPLE: When I was a HR director in a large government organization a senior officer who had 49 subordinate employees came to me and asked me to justify five more positions. This would have added another feather in her hat and a higher grade. This opened the door for me, because I was aware that the workload for this division had actually decreased. I spent several months conducting a formal staff review which included desk auditing (with interviews, reviews of the actual work and such) all existing positions to see if they were overworked or underworked and to review them based on established criteria, etc. When I concluded my work, eleven senior positions were downgraded and nine lower ranked positions were upgraded. I also concluded that a dozen positions were superfluous.
At the end of the day eight senior positions were eliminated and nine were downgraded; and the employees in those positions decided to retire. Ultimately over one-and-a half million 1990 payroll dollars were saved. The senior officer who asked for the additional positions was not pleased. (This is probably one of the reasons that I couldn’t get promoted, I pissed senior brass off by being professionally and fiscally responsible, a serious “no-no” in government.). Of course, my determinations were protested and appealed to higher authority. After review, those determinations were 100% upheld.
James E. Horn is a Retired American Diplomat
He is an activist, a writer, and a speaker who knows his subject
He can be reached at james@portervillepost.com
