The time since the inauguration has been a thrill ride for Americans. Even before Donald Trump took office, he already had made an impact on the restoration of American sovereignty and our place in the world, and since January 20th, it has been full speed ahead, and we’ve been reminded of what an America with real leadership is all about. In fact, things have moved so quickly that I’ve had a tough time settling on what to write about.
Joe Biden is gone, thank God, but the damage he’s done to the country largely remains. President Trump, who I had referred to as the “once and future President” in numerous columns I’ve written for both the Free Press and Chambersburg’s legacy newspaper, Public Opinion, over the last four years, has hit the ground running to remedy the Biden damage as fast as possible.
Nothing that he is doing is more important than his dismantling of the administrative state, or as many know it, the “Deep State”. If you don’t believe me, just pay attention to how those on the political left, especially among the Democrat Party, are all squealing like stuck pigs about the government house cleaning taking place under the auspices of Elon Musk and D.O.G.E. (the department of government efficiency). The amount of money wasted in one agency alone in the funding of leftwing nonsense, USAID (the US Agency for International Development), is mind-boggling, and could be criminal in some cases, and is especially disgusting considering the Biden Administration’s neglect of flood victims in North Carolina, many of whom are still without basic needs such as food, shelter and clean water.
Almost as bad is the ongoing scandal of thousands of government employees sitting on their butts at home and collecting fat paychecks for doing so. President Trump has given them a deadline, now extended to February 10th, to resign or report to the office. It’s no wonder that government has become so inefficient with no one reporting to their office for work. I can speak from personal experience on this subject, having faced two hour waits on the phone getting through to someone or waiting six months for getting a simple change made in your social security or government pension account with the Social Security Administration or the Office of Personnel Management, and only then getting results thanks to the help of Congressman John Joyce’s office (great work guys!).
I actually had an employee of the Interior Department, someone who had been going to the office only two days a week, tell me that he had just worked 15 hours of overtime over a recent weekend. This person doesn’t even have the internet, so how any of that is possible is anyone’s guess.
Now, you may have noticed that I mentioned working with the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) on a retirement pension change a couple of paragraphs back, so yes, I’ll admit that I am a federal retiree, but the federal service I worked in was much different than the one we have today, but I could see the rot starting to take place by the time I retired in 2002. Let me explain.
I started working for the Department of the Army in 1974, and my career took me all over the place; Europe, Asia and Central America, and I can say that in my first 16 years, the organizations and personnel that I worked with or supervised were hard-working and dedicated to serving their country. Many were veterans, and civilian employees worked side by side with military personnel to get the job done. In my ten years in Europe, myself and quite a few others were “emergency essential” and agreed to not be evacuated in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion. We had uniforms and field and MOPP (chemical) gear and were issued Geneva convention cards in the event of capture. We took part in exercises and often worked days on end without little or no rest. The word “overtime” wasn’t in our vocabulary.
Once the Soviet Union collapsed, things started to change. When returning to the USA in 1990 to work for Army 7th Signal Command at Fort Ritchie, I saw the gradual change in civil service. Gone was the dedication to performing a mission, and often there was really no mission to accomplish at all. The supervision was seemingly dedicated to one thing: preserving their paychecks and trying to jockey for organizational growth to get them their next promotion. It was truly “good ol’ boy” in every respect with “management” gaming the system to get perks for each other. Even when Ritchie closed, efforts by politicians preserved part of the workforce to move to places like Fort Detrick and Letterkenny. Functions were dreamed up to keep these workers nominally busy, and at my last duty station we had a number of people getting paid at GS-9 to GS-12 level literally spending their time doing data entry that could have been performed by trained monkeys. The data entry was into a system that no one had authorized but was mandated by a supervisor who could barely handle a light switch, let alone operate a computer. On top of that, this same supervisor hired contractors to build this illegal system to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I found out that this waste was being duplicated at one of our activities at Mechanicsburg as well.
All of this happened about 25 years ago, but I recount it here to document how government works, and it has gotten worse since then to the point where it has been one, big, self-perpetuating blob, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and that’s why President Trump and Elon Musk are correct in their approach of taking a meat axe to the whole rotten structure by proposing to eliminate entire departments, firing tens of thousands of employees, and forcing the rest to actually come to work. Getting rid of the Department of Education is a prime example. Since its founding in 1980 during Jimmy Carter’s expansion of government, US student grades and scores on standardized tests have gone down as the bureaucracy has grown. Its 2024 budget was $238 billion and it employs about 4000 people. The teachers’ unions love it, so that in itself is a good reason to axe it.
The Department of Education isn’t the only target. Today, Trump announced that the Department of Defense is under the microscope, and hopefully the type of waste I described in previous paragraphs will be uprooted.
The pushback from the Democrats and their bureaucrat allies has been predictable. President Trump is cutting off the supply chain of funds and personnel to the left, and they are reacting the same as an addict reacts to being deprived of their drug of choice.
The President’s whacking of the administrative state is long overdue because the uncontrolled growth of the federal bureaucracy has been like a cancer eating at the vitals of the nation. It’s time to remove this malignancy.
Dwight Weidman is a resident of Greene Township and is a graduate of Shepherd University. He is retired from the United States Department of Defense, where his career included assignments In Europe, Asia, and Central America. He has been in leadership roles for the Republican Party in two states, most recently serving two terms as Chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party. He has been an Amateur Radio Operator since 1988, getting his first license in Germany, a past volunteer with both Navy and Army MARS, Military Auxiliary Radio Service, and is also an NRA-certified firearms instructor. In his spare time, he dabbles in genealogy and learning new languages.
