America’s national debt is a much bigger ticking time bomb than it was ten or twenty years ago. If the debt was a Hiroshima-sized device in 2005, it now has the hydrogen payload of the Soviets’ Tsar Bomba nation-destroyer, making the debt a national security threat as America teeters on the brink of fiscal insolvency.
If voter entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) are truly the untouchable third rail of American politics, then workplace attrition and culling entitlements for lower hanging fruit like millions of past, present, and future government employees becomes even more of an existential necessity.
Steve Bannon famously referred to this aspirational undertaking as the deconstruction of the (permanent) deep state. President Trump’s executive order (EO 14171) reinstating Schedule F (making some career federal employees subject to dismissal) remains in legal limbo amid furious pushback from government unions, the woke judiciary, and media.
Contrary to what the public is told, millions of federal employees didn’t enter into government work out of the goodness of their hearts, or a desire to solve problems or “give back” to their communities. They’re in it for the easy money, the no-work Club Fed lifestyle, and the many, many bennies.
Millions of employees throughout the federal government’s cabinets, departments, agencies, and sub-agencies (numbering in the many hundreds, nobody knows exactly how many)) contribute virtually nothing to the economy in terms of goods and services.
The roads and dams and electrical grids are already built, and still they can’t fill that pothole or that dry reservoir or break ground on that high-speed rail project that has already cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
Speaking of high-speed rail to nowhere, why are working class conservative taxpayers in Oklahoma and Kentucky on the hook for California’s or New York’s cost overruns, poor decisions, fiscal mismanagement, graft, and blue social experimentations gone awry?
Bureaucratic mediocrities used to be benignly referred to as pencil or paper pushing dorks but today’s Poindexters don’t even do that. Once they have attained civil service protections, federal government employees have an inside joke about going ROAD (Retired On Active Duty).
What does ROAD look like, in practice? It means sitting at home or in the office with the laptop on, pretending to be working while shopping or looking at porn online. Maybe working out at the gym or hitting the beach or planning that next paid vacation (airfare and other travel expenses often taxpayer subsidized as well), or simply taking care of personal chores.
Even in the lowly quasi-governmental U.S. Postal Service (USPS), it means endless paid “sick” days, thousands of hours of paid vacation, ample opportunity for criminal mischief, supervisors making six figures while doing virtually nothing other than showing up when they please to spend the day checking their social media or tending to their personal affairs.
Private companies like FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) turn profits without injections of taxpayer money, but USPS squanders billions each fiscal quarter because the employee entitlements have run completely amok.
Oh, and when you retire as a federal employee (age 50 in many cases, even younger), it gets even better.
How about retiring young and receiving most of your final highest salary annually for the rest of your natural life? Or how about double dipping (dual compensation waivers, in government-speak) after retirement by getting rehired for another highly compensated and coveted federal job while still receiving all your retirement pay from the first federal job you “retired” from?
Throw in platinum health care for the federal welfare queen for life. And all the free time of a fifth grader on the first day of a long summer vacation.
It has been forecast that the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) mostly threatens jobs in the white collar or information economy. Absent robotics, blue collar vocations in the physical, productive, goods and services economy (welding, transportation, carpentry, manufacturing, hospitality, et al.) are mostly safe.
Properly programmed, AI can serve a noble purpose by cheaply replacing redundant employees throughout virtually all government agencies. America’s so-called Tax Freedom Day, typically designated for mid-to-late April, could be moved back by months as taxpayers retain far more of their income for themselves.
Even the Internal Revenue Service could be administered far more efficiently and fairly, without the nonstop political targeting conservatives are all too familiar with.
If new regulations need to be written or enacted, (or, preferably, subtracted), AI can achieve far better results than any human. And while large-scale AI data centers would require lots of electrical energy, the energy could be obtained from abundant fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and even renewables.
And AI wouldn’t waste or steal taxpayers’ money with self-dealing, fraud, or loud demands for higher salaries and more benefits from despised citizens (snarky pejoratives like “cash cattle” and the portmanteau MAGAts are commonly voiced by federal employees when they ridicule private sector taxpayers).
DOGE was on its way to making significant federal cost-savings inroads before being derailed by progressive judges issuing judicial fiats well beyond their jurisdictions in tandem with hysterical, hair-on-fire bureaucratic and media resistance.
We all recall the sob stories, whining, and pity parties when a handful of federal employees were cashiered or otherwise dismissed, as if nobody in the private sector had ever faced termination or job uncertainty before.
Provided its algorithmic engrams don’t reflect those of progressive programmers, AI itself can easily compose a workable roadmap to eliminating the vast majority of federal jobs, most of which are charitably described as superfluous to begin with. On your smartphone or computer, simply ask Grok or ChatGPT for guidance and you will find no shortage of excellent ideas and insights.
The biggest downside to laying off a million or more federal employees is the possibility for mischief and payback for the loss of their sinecures.
CIA and FBI personnel who faced possible layoffs earlier this year openly threatened they would share sensitive intelligence with rogue foreign states, the American news media, and other bad actors. Which proves that even if you take the progressive out of the government, you can’t take the pouting, entitled ingrate out of the progressive.
Much of the existing flea-bitten federal bureaucracy is already united on a resist and sabotage agenda, slow-walking or refusing to implement MAGA reforms, lawful directives, or action items that offend progressive sensibilities.
Nevertheless, the national debt and unfunded entitlements given to nonperforming federal drones demands a reckoning. Any midterm examination or stress test of the Trump administration needs to address whether and how much deadwood and dry rot has been removed from government.
Image: AT via Magic Studio