The federal workforce is under the knife—again. Layoffs, buyouts, and forced resignations are back. But we’ve tried this before and it just made things worse. New from me: a quick history lesson on how Al Gore accidentally broke government and how it's happening again. 🧵

This is why we have process and checks on executive power: the ability to unilaterally dismantle the government introduces a path dependency that limits future presidents. It’s not a machine, there are real people on the other end.

So true.

RT @RadWill_: Big thank you to @PrestonMui at @employamerica for his input throughout the process! This analysis was made stronger because….

I agree with them that we shouldn't be doing social policy via federal procurement. so why are we still fighting the culture war in FAR regulations?. Comments open for 60 days:

This is a good example of how the Admin risks losing its way on management: rather than stopping at slashing unneeded parts of the FAR (good), they are succumbing temptation to add back in a bunch of similarly bad stuff. This rule is a good example of a non-statutory FAR clause!

Hot off the presses! Pursuant to the "National Strategy to End the Use of Paper Straws," a proposed rule was published this morning to end the use of paper straws. Despite a desire to "fix procurement" and "increase efficiency" they've decided red tape for vendors is the answer:

And even in that case, you could just update the wording in Schedule C if you wanted to remedy that gap. Puzzling!.

Best guess I have is that some Administration lawyer cooked up an exotic legal reason why the words "policy-advocating" were necessary to work into the regulations despite that being squarely within the commonly-understood remit of Schedule C appointees today.

Gotta say, this one is a genuine headscratcher. This new category really does seem duplicative of Schedule C and any problem you had with that authority could just be solved internally. It's also not clear if this applies only to VA, which would make it doubly strange.

Congress, of course, could stop this circus at any time.

While SCOTUS didn’t explain itself here, I assume they would point to the extremely broad grants of authority over personal that Congress has given the President. Unfortunately, the way to fix this is political not legal: Congress needs to re-learn how to govern & take back power.

I think the media is appropriately focused on the dismantling of the modern administrative state by bad-faith actors carrying out Grover Norquist’s wildest dreams.

Party City’s closures were not a partisan plan to illegally ignore the public will in shrinking the *scope* of government. Labor solidarity is fine, but statements like this normalize the idea that the layoffs are about deficit, headcount or cost when they’re really about values.

Fun fact, we used to have citizens commissions that looked at federal executive compensation and made recommendations about how to reset rates. Congress last authorized this in 1989 w/ a requirement for a quadrennial reexamination but it never met after funding got cut in 1994.

When we say we believe in devolving responsibility to the lowest level, we’re not just waxing poetic: bureaucratic centralization in orgs as large as DHS is a performance killer. If we want a better government we need to let line managers and career execs actually manage!

The thing that keeps me up at night is a world where the federal government is an employer of last resort. Flying, retiring, eating, just living in that world would be terrifying.

But I think people need to start wrapping their heads around a possible future where no one wants to work at the feds for what we’re paying. If you can make more money in a warehouse than you can fighting wildfires and we’ve removed all the other incentives, who applies?.

We’ve long drawn on the most risk averse & civic minded segments of the labor pool. This worked: Congress got to underpay them a little bit, the public got no-drama bureaucrats, people who valued it got job stability. We had lines out the door for vacancies.

Agree with this but would point out that, for this to be possible, we will need to compensate federal employees much more competitively. Today’s model only makes sense if there’s a promise of stability and enabled us to keep labor costs low (esp at the very top end).