You're fired: Trump to rid 'worst' federal workers, automatic raises, fat bennies "President Trump plans to take the huge federal Civil Service off cruise control, ending automatic pay increases that go to 99.7 percent of the workforce, trimming fat benefit packages, and for the “worst,” rolling out his trademark phrase from The Apprentice, “You’re fired!” In his budget, set for release Monday, his administration is planning the biggest reform to the federal workforce in decades, using models from Amazon, Google, and a handful of well-operating agencies. Officials said the overall goal is to bring the 1950s-styled Civil Service into the digital age, introduce automation, reward “the best” with bonuses, make it easier to hire and fire, and provide “flexibility” by moving employees where they are needed and even rehiring skilled retirees. Gone would be the automatic reward of pay “step” increases of 3 percent to 5 percent which 99.7 percent of workers get, regardless of their performance. Also targeted, said the officials, are annual reviews that now give “everybody” a grade of four or five on a scale of five. And benefits, now 47 percent higher than in the private workforce, according to a congressional report, will be trimmed. “This is a subject that essentially people have ignored,” said a top Trump budget official at a background briefing. “The American people elected a president that promised dramatic change.'" More below. The changes we see now that Obama has been cleared from office are stunning. Obama was a throwback to the prior Boomer Spiritual awakening combined with the GenX unraveling cynicism. Obama and the Mortgage Crisis were the catalysts which triggered the current Crisis Change phase of American history. After the unraveling, society shifts to civic renewal, fiscal responsibility, conservative propriety, and morality, and rational, responsible public policy. Gone are the spendthrift ways, lack of civil life, and fiscal irresponsibility of the awakening and unraveling. Along with these changes we can expect that bankrupt welfare and social programs provided by the government will be reformulated and new policy promulgated. Reformation of these programs is likely to eliminate the entitlement aspect, perhaps shifting to means testing, or shifting to a vastly higher age for full retirement benefits. Similar changes will affect other welfare programs, including Medicare. I expect that in addition to means testing and increased starting ages, the work requirements will also be attached for those of younger ages, perhaps under 75, unless the individual has a medical reason he cannot work or be productive. These work requirements will look quite a bit like the work requirements which are already being implemented for welfare benefits in some states. Expect these changes to roll out quickly and to be adopted by nearly all jurisdictions. The changes we see from Trump concerning bringing fiscal responsibility and rationality to the federal employee pay and benefits system will be soon transferred to all other areas of government. I expect to see a tremendous amount of outsourcing, automation along with a general requirement for public employees to be more productive or face termination. Some of this will be achieved by allowing more federal employees to work from home in a gig economy setting. While the early phase of this will increase productivity, the later stage will marry computer algorithms which monitor the work for quality and pay more for high quality, on time work, and less for lower quality and untimely work. These changes will dramatically alter the productivity of the public workforce and will tend to bring in the highly productive people who would never have been interested in public work within a bureaucratic framework. Moving to the gig economy for work sourcing and payments will allow increased productivity but will also allow economic benefits when recessions hit. One problem in recessions is that wages are sticky meaning that people are unwilling to let their wages to decline during recessions and, so, force employers to resort to layoffs when it might be better to reduce pay by 5% or 10%. The gig economy allows the payment algorithm to lower pay based on productivity encouraging people to be more productive, timely, and to work a bit more during recessions. The result is a shortened recession and more prosperity. The worker morale is less likely to be affected by pay changes in a gig economy is because the worker has options to perform jobs for others if these jobs pay higher rates the worker can perform these jobs and maintain income. If all jobs are paying the lower price, the worker realizes that he will need to work more or more productively to keep his pay at the former level. Today the employee feels like his employer is singling him out, and that other workers and employees are not subject to this treatment, and so becomes angry and frustrated. Few people are willing yet to believe that we have entered a new historic dynamic in which these changes can occur. That is a mistake, we have. All around us, our basic understanding of the socio-economic agreement is changing. This change is permanent and is the signal that we have begun the new saecular transformation in earnest. While it is impossible to divine the various aspects of the saecular change on the fly, they can be determined in hindsight. It appears we engendered the Crisis Change in 2008, with the Obama election and the mortgage/economic meltdown. The election of President Trump seems to be the event which has triggered the regeneration of civic life, and the shift from the cynical unraveling period to the highly focused civic regeneration of the Crisis Change. I expect an additional cataclysmic event with will cement the crisis, lead to total war, and a denouement some years later. Sidebar: Obama was the wrong President at the wrong time. He would probably have been OK near the end of the unraveling, but he was elected at the beginning of the Crisis Change. Obama, as I said above, is a man straddling the end of the awakening and the beginning of the unraveling. His election was an entire cycle too late. As a result, Obama continued and rigidified the Culture Wars beyond their reasonable outcome. The long-declining friction in race, sex, gender, were all driven to new heights and new culture wars erupted in areas before unknown. The result was that Obama held over, inflamed, and exacerbated prior quiescent problems which were well on their way to resolution. The result is likely to be longer and harsher Crisis Change with much more draconian social and fiscal changes. The real causes of this need for a long and draconian saecular shift are the Boomer's awakening excesses. The Boomers are the worst generation in human history. Boomer excesses are well known and well documented. The problem is when any saecular period goes to excess, the following periods will also need to go to excess to forcefully push back. As a result, the unraveling went to excess, and that can be seen in the election of Obama, and in the heights of criminality experienced up through the mid-1990s. With the Obama throwback to the past Presidency over, we now appear to be ready to get down to brass tacks and begin to address the social, economic, emotional, spiritual, and policy excesses of the past 40+ years. The return to a more fiscally conservative, more civic-minded stand will drive the horrible Boomers mad but is entirely necessary. The spendthrift progressives whether Democrat or Republican will also be driven crazy by the new social, sexual, moral, and fiscal accountability. Many recent articles infer that there will be little or no accountability regarding the Obama administrations illegal FISA warrants on the Trump campaign and the likely leak of this information to the Hillary campaign. Some acknowledge that the lower level employees might be in some jeopardy. I believe this analysis is wrong. It is not yet clear whether the public mood will have shifted far enough to demand the charges for Obama, Hillary, and Cabinet-level officials, but I believe the rest will be hard pressed to avoid felony charges. It is entirely possible that the top levels of Obama, Hillary, and the Cabinet-level officials will also see charges. A changing wind is blowing in very quickly. Trump is highly attenuated to the public will. He seems to have a sixth sense for it. This bodes ill for Obama and his high-level officials. I also sense that the Crisis Change will be an end for the progressive movement. That does not mean an end to collectivist political thought, but the progressive movement is likely to not survive the next 30+ years. Nor does it appear that postmodernism will make the jump. Sadly, the jury is still out on neo-Marxism. I thought Marxism was dead in the late 1970s when I was studying at University. Then after I graduated in the early 1980s, I found it had morphed into something prettier but equally as destructive, neo-Marxism or Cultural Marxism depending upon your preference. "The proposed changes are part of a broader effort to modernize the government and integrate the types of innovation that the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is drafting. The officials, speaking on background, did not say how large or small they expect the bureaucracy to be after the three-year reform effort, but it was clear that many workers in jobs that private industry has automated will be out. And it was also clear that the workforce will be younger, mobile and more tech-savvy. Several times the officials noted that the Civil Services was created at a time when secretarial help was key and now higher-educated IT employees are needed. “We’re 18 years into the digital millennium. We need to look at a different way,” said a budget official. Among the changes proposed:
Comments
|
AuthorMaddog Categories
All
|