Categories
Government People

Dear Buddy Carter

Winning.

“This will decimate our ability to function as an institution,” says one senior NIH scientist who had to notify staff that HHS was firing them. “Whatever the opposite of government efficiency is, this process will take us there.”

‘Wrecking ball’: RFK Jr. moves to fire thousands of health agency employees

“The actions taken against the federal workforce thus far by the administration have already dramatically diminished the capacity of CDC to respond adequately, in the way that Americans deserve, to emerging public health threats,” the person said. “And cutting EIS will make Americans and global populations less safe in years to come.”

CDC cuts expected to devastate Epidemic Intelligence Service, a ‘crown jewel’ of public health

“On Friday, an employee still at NNSA told NPR that the firings are now “paused,” in part because of the chaotic way in which they unfolded. Another employee had been contacted and told that their termination had been “rescinded.” But some worried the damage had already been done. Nuclear security is highly specialized, high-pressure work, but it’s not particularly well paid, one employee told NPR. Given what’s unfolded over the past 24 hours, “why would anybody want to take these jobs?” they asked.”

Trump firings cause chaos at agency responsible for America’s nuclear weapons

““This has been slash and burn,” said Nicholas Detter, who had been working in Kansas as a natural resource specialist, helping farmers reduce soil and water erosion, until he was fired by email late Thursday night. He said there seemed to be little thought about how employees and the farmers and ranchers he helped would be impacted.”

Anger, chaos and confusion take hold as federal workers face mass layoffs

“Allowing parks to hire seasonal staff is essential, but staffing cuts of this magnitude will have devastating consequences for parks and communities,” NPCA President Theresa Pierno said in a statement.

US Forest Service fires 3,400 workers, Park Service cuts 1,000

“Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that defends government workers, said the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service would be hit especially hard by laying off probationary employees because it has trouble recruiting inspectors required to be present at all times at most slaughterhouses.”

Trump administration initiates new round of layoffs for federal workers with least experience

Ah…winning?

“Nearly half of the FDA’s $6.9 billion budget comes from fees paid by companies the agency regulates, including drug and medical device makers, which allows the agency to hire extra scientists to swiftly review products. Eliminating those positions will not reduce government spending.”

Trump administration cuts reach FDA employees in food safety, medical devices and tobacco

““Tribes who receive direct service will be hit the hardest,” one official told ICT. “In communities across the country, if there are not protections for employees providing services for Indian Country and protections for mission-critical occupations, exempt employees, excepted employees and emergency employees, tribes will see a loss of essential services: healthcare, emergency services, childcare and educational services, justice services.”

https://ictnews.org/news/abrupt-federal-layoffs-expected-to-hit-tribal-programs

More winning.

“The tax agency grew by about 10 percent last year, as its ranks swelled from roughly 90,000 employees in fiscal year 2023 to 100,000 employees this fiscal year. The IRS has said publicly that personnel critical to the tax filing season are ineligible for the “deferred resignation” plan that encouraged federal personnel to quit. That has fueled speculation that the cuts to IRS personnel will be concentrated among the agency’s tax collection staff, which could reduce the amount of revenue brought into federal coffers even as Musk calls for a reduced deficit.”

Layoffs to hit IRS as DOGE targets tax collections

“Violent political demonstrations erupted and protesters attacked the U.S. Embassy. By the end of the day, most staff were told to evacuate.

But just how they would get back to the United States was unclear: The White House had frozen foreign aid spending about a week earlier and put senior USAID leaders on leave. The agency had stopped paying for employee travel.”

Forced to flee Congo, USAID workers lost everything. They’re suing Trump.

“The USAID inspector-general also revealed last week that almost half a billion dollars’ worth of US-grown food and grain was spoiling at ports and warehouses due to confusion over the funding freeze. The inspector-general was subsequently fired by the Trump administration.”

USAID IG fired day after report critical of impacts of Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency

“The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.”

Trump begins firings of FAA air traffic control staff just weeks after fatal DC plane crash

“Van Tol said the impact of DOGE’s HUD layoffs would reverberate quickly. “You shut down the CFPB, it’s going to affect real people but it’s likely to be felt over time. You mess with HUD, you’re potentially impacting people right away — immediately.””

DOGE discussing Housing Department layoffs

Still winning.

“The cuts to National Institutes of Health grants, on pause in federal court, would immediately wipe out well over $100 million in research overhead funding in Georgia alone, and billions of dollars nationwide, with massive ripple effects. Georgia last year received $788 million in NIH funding, and experts said much of that money, even for multiyear projects, now is tied to projects whose budgets don’t work.”

Ossoff, Georgia biomed industry slam Trump’s cuts to biomedical research

“Nearly 1,300 people at the Atlanta-based CDC with jobs classified as “probationary” are being targeted. The category includes recent hires and longtime staffers who, throughout their tenures, have moved into new positions internally within the CDC.”

Georgia CDC jobs slashed amid Trump administration federal workforce cuts

“If the purpose of such cuts is to make sure taxpayer dollars are not wasted and used well, the evaluation and data work that has been terminated is exactly the work that determines which programs are effective uses of federal dollars, and which are not,” Tofig wrote, noting several contracts were nearing their completion.

Crucial research halted as DOGE abruptly terminates Education Department contracts

So. Much. Winning.

Categories
Government People

Let’s end, once and for all, the myth of Elon Musk’s genius

Both Joe Rogan and Donald Trump call Musk a genius. In fact, they call him a ‘super genius’.

Except that Musk is no such thing. As Bill Clayton wrote in November of 2023

Musk’s strength is having the enormous wealth to breathe life into existing ideas by hiring experts who do have the expertise to achieve his goals. I haven’t seen any reports about what goes on behind closed doors, but I’m guessing he hasn’t contributed anything in the way of engineering insight and problem-solving that puts people in orbit.

Musk’s wealth arose from a joint effort between Musk and his brother, Kindal and one other person. By all accounts, Kindal is actually the smarter of the two though Musk is the more aggressive when seeking attention.

For instance, when Musk bought Twitter, his first thought was to use a blockchain, somehow, with the application—solely because this was the ‘kool kidz’ tech of the time. It was Kindal who talked him out of his idiotic idea. Now Musk wants to put the treasury systems on blockchain, a plan so idiotic that it makes my teeth hurt even thinking about it.

Then there’s the Musk proposition about using AI to root out all fraud and waste in government. Sure, it’s easy to convert a decades-old legacy system that’s likely the largest in the world consisting of millions if not billions of lines of code into gee-wiz AI in a day or two. No prob.

However, you only have to look at the AI search results we’ve all laughed at to know how moronic this idea is.

Or look at the current use of AI art. Now, whose arm is that? What’s wrong with those thumbs?

Badly done AI generated image of Trump, Netanyahu, and Musk.
AI Fake!

Musk is aggressive, shrewd, brash, petty, and impulsive, but he is no genius. And what he and his band of merry little Musketts are doing to the government is proof positive that he’s not only not a genius, he’s actually not all that bright.

Take the government firings. The DOGE decided that they wanted to reduce government costs easily, so they focused on firing government employees as low-hanging fruit—without any attention to the fact that the total compensation for government employees is approximately $293 billion dollars, or 4.3% of government funding.

(And why not? After all, Musk crowed about feeding USAID to the wood chipper and bragged about the money saved, when our foreign aid is about 1% of the budget. Oh, and people died.)

DOGE also didn’t take into account that many of these employees live throughout the country and federal employment is a major financial benefit for many areas.

As an example, take Wyoming. Beautiful land for the most part, and a favorite tourist destination. As part of an effort to incorporate a sense of stability for the seasonal workers in the area, President Biden categorized these workers are permanent seasonal employees, with all the rights of government workers.

As new employees, each was put on probationary status, even though most have worked in the national parks for years. But being on probationary status was enough for DOGE to fire at least 10% of park workers, maybe more. That’s almost 1,000 people fired of the 8100 jobs in Wyoming.

And each of these jobs, with their stable income, leads to other jobs in the community where the federal workers reside. So firing these workers will not only mean our national parks aren’t being maintained or kept safe, but will have an economic ripple effect across the entire state.

Many of the Musk/DOGE firings weren’t just ill-considered and bad, they were a major screw up.  An example of this was the firings of the people in the National Nuclear Safety Administration, part of the Department of Energy, who keep our nuclear stockpiles safe and secure.

Sources told CNN that DOGE staffers apparently did not realize that the agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons stockpile when the employees were fired Thursday. The terminations were quickly rescinded Friday, CNN reported

 

The workers were fired because “no one” had “taken any time to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security,” one source told CNN.

Energy Department scrambles to rehire nuclear bomb experts fired in major DOGE screw up

What’s worse, now the government can’t find the people to rehire them because they cancelled all their federal emails.

A memo sent to NNSA employees on Friday and obtained by NBC News read: “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”

 

“Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails,” the memo added.

US government tries to rehire nuclear staff it fired days ago

The Musk/DOGE team also fired 50 first year members of the elite CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service, one of the premier disease research groups in the world. This, as humans infected with bird flu have been discovered in several new states this week.

Firing critically necessary people demonstrates how poorly managed this destructive action was. People fired were fired, unfired, and fired again. There’s been chaos across the government, which means our tax refunds aren’t being processed, our FEMA requests aren’t being answered, and any number of other essential government services aren’t being performed.

Also, by firing the newer members of government, we have lost a generational chance to bring in new ideas, new technologies, new training, as well as ensuring there are enough workers to actually perform the tasks and jobs delegated to them by Congress.

We know we don’t have enough migration judges, but we have even less now because Musk/DOGE just fired twenty.

The sheer stupidity of this mass, sudden firing is mind-boggling. It’s like Musk and his little gang of ijits didn’t spend ten minutes on trying to understand what a government is, and how it works. Musk somehow believes that what worked for Twitter—nothing more than one social media app among many—would work for the US Government.

And then forgot that whole sudden firing thing didn’t work that well for Twitter, either.

The federal employees fired were told to get out now;  in many cases, to clear out in 30 minutes. There’s no time to ensure a half finished job will be finished correctly, or let folks know where you’re at with a task. It will be days just to discover where people left off, and even more days (weeks or months) to finish the task, because there won’t be enough people to do all the work that needs to be done even when they finally recover from the chaos.

Just like Twitter. Except it won’t be a social media site going offline for a few hours every other day, it will be closed national parks, disease outbreaks, criminals who won’t get caught, risks to our national security, unpaid taxpayers, no support in a disaster, no home loans, no VA medical, and who knows, maybe we can no longer count on getting our Social Security checks, or that our doctors will get paid by Medicare.

The havoc happening right now will negatively impact on the government for years. The only silver lining is that when all of this crap really hits the fan, the country will have no doubt as who is to blame, and it certainly won’t be someone named Biden or Harris.

That’s probably the ultimate measure of Musk’s supposed ‘genius’: smart people don’t shoot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly.

Caricature of Musk courtesy DonkeyHoteyCC BY 2.0

Categories
People Weather

A return to normalcy

We’ve been through two major weather events in the last few months in Savannah: Debby and now Helene.

Our home didn’t flood during Debbie, and didn’t lose power in either system since our subdivision has buried lines. We did have several hours of power cycling and had to turn major appliances off at the breaker but power never went completely out for more than 1/2 hour.

We also lost roof shingles and the emergency repair on them was a bite out of the wallet, but we could pay it. We have lost internet access, first because of the power loss, and after power was restored, because AT&T Fiber had a break in the line and is still waiting on a permit to dig to repair it.

We’re retired so we haven’t suffered loss of wages. And by having power, we haven’t had to throw anything away in our refrigerator.

We, individually, and generally throughout the Savannah area have not suffered the devastation that communities in Florida, south-central Georgia, and especially Tennessee and North Carolina have suffered. In particular, the floods from Helene have taken out entire towns in North Carolina, and isolated communities throughout the western part of the state. Sadly, over a hundred lives have been lost in several states, both because of Debby and now Helene.

Each community impacted by these storms has suffered as a consequence of them, though the amount of impact can be drastically different in each. But, big or small, impacts because of natural disasters leave everyone feeling vulnerable. And the solution to that vulnerability is normalcy.

Categories
People Political The Democratic Difference

Goodbye Joe, Hello Kamala

A whole lot changed since my last defense of President Biden. Last week he decided to step down from his re-election attempt and put all his support behind his VP, Kamala Harris.

Democrats came together behind Kamala Harris in enthusiastic numbers I haven’t seen in a long, long time. Within two days, she had enough delegation support to win the Democratic primary. I suspect by the time the convention rolls around, she’ll have everyone’s support.

I am sad that President Biden had to end his campaign, but ultimately, he sacrificed his ambitions for the country, and he did the right thing: he gave us a candidate we can ALL embrace.

And I want to go down on record as saying I want to be adopted by the Harris/Emhoff family.

Categories
People Political

Biden is our President. Biden is our candidate. This isn’t going to change.

To whom it concerns:

Biden is the President of the United States. Biden has done. and continues to do, a good job as President of the United States.

Biden is also our pick as candidate for a second term as President of the United States. The people made this selection. Not some quisling Congressional members, and definitely not the media. We, the people.

Biden will be our Presidential candidate this November. This is not changing. You are either with Biden, or you’re supporting Trump.

Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.

Joy Ann Reid, on Threads

‘As you think about the media and how as a collective my industry is behaving in this moment, it’s helpful to understand that other than purely infotainment media (like Fox, Newsmax or OANN) mainstream media only has two real biases: toward change and conflict. They will almost always lean toward a change agent, whether that change is hopeful and historic (Obama) or horrific (Hitler, Trump). And they will almost always lean into conflict, whether that means wars or internal political destruction.’

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board;

At each stop there will be no margin for error. The media is tracking Biden’s every move with an obsession greater than the 2016 focus on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The rules have always been different for Trump. Recall when seven members of Trump’s team used private email accounts, including his daughter and son in law, it barely caused a ripple.

A similar imbalance has taken hold in the coverage of Biden’s debate performance. For example, in less than a week, The New York Times published 70 news stories, 20 opinion columns, four podcasts and one editorial about Biden’s shaky debate. Cable TV and social media piled on as well, according to Heartland Signal, a digital news site in Chicago.
But little attention has been paid to Trump’s incoherent debate performance because he is often incoherent. Trump told more than 30 lies in 90 minutes during the debate like it was another day at the office.
In discussing abortion, he falsely claimed Democrats want to execute babies in the ninth month of pregnancy. Trump also claimed migrants were taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” — whatever that means.
During a discussion about the environment, Trump — who rolled back more than 100 regulations and withdrew from the Paris climate agreement — said: “we had H2O, we had the best numbers ever.” Huh?’