When the nation voted last November to elect Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States, we were asking for change in the way our federal government does business. Based on his first term in office, we all expected to see significant change. But I must admit that even with my lofty expectations, I totally underestimated him. He has truly come in as the proverbial bull in the china shop, and that is exactly what our federal government needs.
It is crystal clear that President Trump has not wasted the last four years. He came into this new term of office with a well thought out plan of action and he has not wasted a second. His reforms are being implemented at a lightning pace, and what he has done so far is nothing less than phenomenal.
Our federal government is broken. It is hard to comprehend how anyone can argue that it isn’t. It is a fat, bloated, insatiable beast that sucks up more and more of our tax dollars and produces fewer and fewer results. And it spends tremendous resources on things that the government simply has no business being involved in at all. We all know this, but the federal government ceased to care what “We, the People” think a long time ago. The entrenched federal bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own. Unelected government bureaucrats long ago decided that they are the ones in charge in our country, and they think that they can ignore the elected leaders, because the president will be gone in four years (maybe eight), and the bureaucrats will still be there. They just keep doing things the way that they always have and simply wait the president out. President Trump has set out to change that dynamic in this term.
There is not enough room go into everything that President Trump has done in less than two weeks since he was inaugurated. This column would be as bloated as the federal government if I were to attempt to do that. Suffice to say that if he were to do nothing else and coast through the rest of his first year in office, it would still be considered a wildly successful year. But there is no danger of that happening. We are seeing a man on a mission.
One of President Trump’s first actions was to visit the disasters in North Carolina and California. In that time frame, he suggested that abolishing FEMA may be the right thing to do. This was obviously something that he had thought out, not just a knee-jerk statement. He simply made the argument that the states could handle their own emergency responses, and the federal government could support them with funding. This seems like it has a great deal of merit. When has FEMA ever been applauded for their actions? They just waste money on slow, inefficient responses. That is all that they have ever done. Probably the best compliment FEMA has ever gotten for an emergency response is that it was better than the Katrina response.
Requiring all federal employees to return to the office is a huge step. Likely, many will choose to quit rather than report to an office every day. It was shocking to hear him mention that they may require proof that federal employees may have to prove that they did not have another job while working from home. One can’t help but wonder how many people have had full-time pay from our tax dollars while working another full-time job because they were never required to report to an office.
Offering buyout packages to 2 million federal employees is another master stroke that should thin the ranks of the federal workforce. USAfacts.org reports that there are over 3 million federal employees as of today. Does anyone really believe that we need 3 million people in the federal government? Almost half a million people work for the VA alone, and they don’t exactly have a stellar reputation for the quality of their services.
Trump’s efforts on DEI are another powerful reform. I am sure that we will never know how many billions of our tax dollars were spent on DEI offices that did nothing to make federal departments more efficient or productive.
But the most impressive acts of all are President Trump’s cabinet appointees. He has appointed true outsiders who will come in and upset the various apple carts of the federal government. It is obvious that President Trump is very aware that he made a mistake in his first term by appointing various lifelong D.C. swamp creatures to his cabinet. And they ultimately remained loyal to the swamp and the status quo. Trump learned from that mistake, and this cabinet looks very different from the last one.
It will still be an uphill struggle for sure, but President Trump appears much better prepared to take on the swamp and win this time around. Now it is up to “We, the People” to put men and women in Congress who will help him not play the obstructionist.
I, for one, can’t wait to see what else President Trump has up his sleeve…
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