New Trump Memo Promises "Dramatically More Efficient" Government; Lifts Federal Hiring Freeze

On his first full working day in the White House, President Trump issued an executive order implementing a hiring freeze until such time that his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, a position now filled by Mick Mulvaney, could recommend a “long-term plan” to reduce the federal workforce.  While the initial EO allowed 90 days for such a plan to be crafted and presented, like many of Trump"s other policy initiatives, that deadline proved overly aggressive and has been pushed back to the end of June, with final plans due in September...the swamp apparently doesn"t drain as quickly as expected.

Now, a new memorandum is expected to be issued by Trump on Thursday morning that will lift the hiring freeze but will require federal agencies to submit plans for making themselves leaner.  Per Bloomberg, the Presidential memorandum will call for a "rethinking of the entire structure of the federal government."

President Donald Trump is issuing a presidential memorandum that will call for a rethinking of the entire structure of the federal government, a move that could eventually lead to a downsizing of the overall workforce and changes to the basic functions and responsibilities of many agencies.

The order, which will go into effect Thursday, also will lift a blanket federal hiring freeze that has been in place since Trump’s first day in office almost three months ago and replace it with hiring targets in line with the spending priorities the administration laid out in March, said Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The move is a part of Trump’s campaign pledge to "drain the swamp" and get rid of what the administration views as inefficiencies in the federal government, Mulvaney said. It comes as the White House also is trying to curb the size of many government agencies through a proposed budget that calls for historically deep spending cuts to everything from medical research to clean-energy programs.

The push to reshape the government as well as the budget cuts are almost certain to draw opposition from Congress.

Meanwhile, OMB director Mulvaney made the media rounds this morning describing the "government reorg" as "probably the biggest story nobody is talking about."

“The government reorg is probably the biggest story nobody is talking about,” Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday. “We’re trying to do something that’s never been done.”

"We think at the end of the day this leads to a government that is dramatically more accountable, dramatically more efficient, and dramatically more effective, following through on the very promises the president made during the campaign and that he put into place on day one," Mulvaney said.

“You can’t just wave a magic wand in the Oval Office and do these things,” Mr. Mulvaney said of the process by which major changes, many of which would need congressional approval, could take place. Ideas proposed by agencies would be “hard-wired” into the federal budget for fiscal year 2019, he said.

OMB Director Mich Mulvaney details the lift of the federal hiring halt. pic.twitter.com/jp0UZDfxI1

— The Rouser (@RouserNews) April 12, 2017

As the Wall Street Journal notes, Trump"s original federal hiring freeze seemingly backfired as vacancies mounted at federal prisons and the Department of Veterans Affairs, two areas that Trump championed throughout his 2016 campaign.

For example, about one out of 10 positions at the Bureau of Prisons are vacant, meaning that at some facilities medical personnel are working additional overtime and correctional officers are spread more thinly.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, the backlog of veterans’ claims recently topped 100,000. Hiring of staffers to process benefits claims was frozen for six weeks before VA Secretary David Shulkin in mid-March ordered that those jobs be exempted. That backlog was over 600,000 in early 2013 before the department made a concerted effort to reduce it below 100,000 starting last year.

Of course, while the Trump administration continues to tout plans for a massive restructuring of the federal government, albeit with a delayed timeline, naysayers will undoubtedly say that lifting the federal hiring freeze without a full-fledged reorganization plan in place is just another early defeat for the Trump White House.

So what say you...temporary blip in the swamp draining process or is the Washington DC swamp simply "too big to drain"?

Federal Prisons Caught Bonusing Themselves Millions Despite Epic Abuse & Corruption

If mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and mandatory minimum sentencing were not enough of an affront to society, it was recently reported that top federal prison officials received millions in bonuses – despite that fact that federal prisons are mired in scandal and corruption.

USA Today reports:

“The U.S. Bureau of Prisons paid more than $2 million in bonuses to top administrators and wardens during the past three years while the agency was confronting persistent overcrowding, sub-par inmate medical care, chronic staffing shortages and a lurid sexual harassment lawsuit that engulfed its largest institution, according to government records and court documents.

The awards ranged from a $7,000 payment last year to a D.C. administrator, to $28,000 to the agency’s acting director Thomas Kane, and $25,500 for Deborah Schult, assistant director of the Health Services Division. The bulk of the payments, nearly $1 million, were approved last year and amounted to almost double the combined amounts in the previous two years.”

Prison staffers are outraged that their bosses – who did virtually nothing to stop pervasive sexual harassment from inmates over the course of 16 years – are receiving “performance awards,” even as their lawsuit is pending a settlement.

“These people got bonuses off the backs of people who were actually dealing with the predators,” said Sandra Parr, a vice president of the national union of prison workers. She went on to say that top agency officials “chose to ignore it,” which allowed the problem to spiral out of control.

In a private business setting, bonuses are effective incentives to encourage the highest quality work and the desire to improve the product or service. However, in a federal bureaucracy, it’s just a waste of taxpayer money to reward negligence and incompetence.

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None of the officials involved in the scandal has responded to an inquiry from USA Today, but a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons said the bonuses were given as a “strengthening of our (senior executive services).” But the rationale for each “performance award” will not be released.

Tamyra Jarvis, the warden at a Coleman, FL prison embroiled in the sexual harassment scandal, was given $34,500 over the past two years before retiring. The Coleman prison is a primary subject of the lawsuit brought by staffers.

“During the course of the case, which featured allegations that inmates routinely masturbated in front of female workers and threatened them with rape, victims’ attorneys and union officials argued that for years bureau managers and top administrators did little or nothing to intervene.

According to court documents, prison managers routinely either destroyed incident reports detailing the inmate conduct or disregarded the complaints altogether. In one case in which an inmate got close enough to ejaculate on a staffer’s leg, a manager acknowledged “shredding” the staffer’s complaint because the staffer could not positively identify the substance as semen since she was “not medical personnel.”

Besides the problem of rampant sexual harassment, federal prisons are plagued by inadequate medical care and “crisis level” staffing shortages. An Inspector General report found that some prisons had a 40 percent or more vacancy rate, citing the inability to compete with the private sector in recruiting medical staff.

But instead of using that $2 million to increase the salary for medical professionals, bonuses were given to corrupt prison officials sailing toward retirement while ignoring festering problems.

Unfortunately, this comes as no surprise to learn that a federal agency known as the Bureau of Prisons is the cause of needless suffering. The agency thrives on mass incarceration, throwing people in cages for victimless crimes.

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According to its own statistics, almost half (46.3%) of federal inmates are in prison for “drug offenses,” which is a product of federal government’s inhumane, archaic War on Drugs. The drug war, borne of racism and quelling antiwar dissent, helps no one except the agencies and law enforcement who profit from it.

Despite everything we know, the new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has promised to ramp up the drug war and pursue mandatory minimum sentencing, thus exacerbating the problem of mass incarceration and the injustice of locking people up for victimless crimes.