Free Republic

Members of the American Federation of Government Employees turned their backs on Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue on Thursday, apparently over plans to relocate them from Washington to the Kansas City area. Perdue announced Thursday that two of the Department of Agriculture’s research agencies, the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, will be relocated to be closer to major farming regions. While Perdue has justified the relocation as a way to improve customer service and save taxpayers up to $20 million per year, some ERS employees have said it is a political move, according to...

House Democrats are proposing a 3.1 percent pay hike for federal workers in 2020. The raise was included in the draft appropriations bill covering financial services and general government, which is expected to advance through a subcommittee hearing on Monday and advance to the House floor later in the month. President Trump blocked a scheduled 2.1 percent increase in pay to federal workers last year, in an order that froze federal pay. He later agreed to a 1.9 percent increase in federal pay that was included in a spending package passed by Congress. The draft bill with the pay hike...

Over the past 40 years, the federal government has shut down 21 times due to political disagreements over funding. Most of America, including the government itself, goes largely unaffected by a government shutdown. But for federal workers who are furloughed or required to work without a paycheck, a lapse in government funding can cause financial problems, leading some to default on debt or miss rent payments. This can result in real hardships up to and including eviction. The blame for this rests squarely on the lawmakers who fail to fund the government. Remarkably, though, some Democrats in Congress believe that...

Most of the 800,000 federal workers, who were not paid during the partial government shutdown, are starting to receive back pay but there are potentially millions of government contractors who may never see a dime. For single mom Loniece Hamilton, the shutdown isn't over. "It's really hard," Hamilton said. "I'm definitely scared of being evicted … I'm scared of my car being repo'd. Scared of my lights getting turned off. Scared of my gas being turned off." And scared she won't see any back pay for four weeks of missed work at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum where she's...

If going weeks without pay wasn’t bad enough, furloughed federal workers will be on the hook to pay the premiums for their dental and vision benefits -- or lose coverage. Federal workers’ health insurance is separate from dental and vision coverage, and will remain intact throughout the shutdown. But after their second missed paycheck this week, the 800,000 furloughed federal workers will be billed directly for their dental and vision premiums, which are separate from their health plan, The Washington Post reports.

President Donald Trump is freezing pay for civilian federal workers, cancelling their automatic 2.1 percent raise for 2019. Disregard the howls from union bosses and Democratic politicians. It's the right decision. Federal workers already collect bigger salaries, on average, than private sector workers doing comparable jobs, and they get benefit packages a whopping 47 percent more expensive, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Not to mention up to 49 paid days off a year. And they never lose a night's sleep over getting canned. Firing them, no matter how outrageous their misconduct, is almost impossible. Then at age 55,...

A federal judge dealt a blow Saturday to President Donald Trump’s efforts to “promote more efficient” government, ruling that key provisions of three recent executive orders “undermine federal employees’ right to bargain collectively” under federal law. U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said Trump had “exceeded his authority” in issuing the orders.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. federal judge on Saturday rejected key elements of President Donald Trump’s May executive orders that would make it easier to fire federal employees and reduce their ability to bargain collectively. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in a court order that Trump’s orders, which also would reduce the amount of time low-performing employees had to improve their performance before being fired, “undermine federal employees’ right to bargain collectively.” Trump signed three executive orders in May that administration officials said would give government agencies greater ability to...

Donald Trump has gotten the rawest deal in the past 50 years. This observation comes from over 50 years of listening and observing, in an out of government. A quick trip through time should make that point—and others. Since 1968, I’ve worked for every president—that’s eight— except Obama & Trump. Alas, my labors—at least initially—were at such low levels, there were none lower. After service as an Army intelligence linguist and analyst in support of LBJ’s questionable geopolitical instincts, I worked as an investigator for the US Civil Service Commission, now OPM, the government’s central personnel agency. Working the...

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...

Paying federal workforce costs taxpayers $1.1M per minute, according to a pro-transparency group, Open The Books December 27, 2017 by Mark Tapscott James P. Cochrane earns $250,335 annually as chief marketing and sales officer for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), making him the highest paid public relations employee of the federal government. The USPS lost $5.1 billion in 2016. Right behind Cochrane is Stephen Katsanos, who pulls down $229,333 as a public affairs official for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). And the third highest-paid federal public relations employee is Titus Simmons, also of the FDIC, at $215,248, according to...

t’s not just the VA where we’re having trouble cutting out the deadwood, however. This report from the Washington Post has at least one real eye opener in it. The head of the Treasury has been made aware of problems at the Patent and Trademark Office. Over there, a number of workers were found to be falsifying their time reporting, billing the government for hundreds of thousands of dollars for time not worked. In some of the most severe cases, workers put in two hours of time, then had the audacity to charge the government for a full day plus...

They’re going to have to start laying some people off, and for much of Washington, DC, that’s a completely foreign concept. Agencies are “pretty certain” they will need to institute reductions in force as they aim to satisfy an executive order from President Trump and ensuing guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, said Leslie Pollack, deputy associate director of OPM’s HR Strategy and Evaluation Solutions, on WJLA’s “Government Matters” program. Those documents required executive branch agencies to reorganize themselves and, in the process, cut the size of their workforces. Pollack’s office, which provides human resources consulting to federal...

Budget delivers huge tax breaks to CEOs and wealthy on backs of federal workers, retirees WASHINGTON –A new video from the American Federation of Government Employees illustrates how President Trump’s proposed budget would cut wages for current federal workers and slash federal retirement benefits for current and future retirees.“It takes money out of your paycheck right now and cuts the benefits you were promised for retirement,” the narrator intones. “Most employees will be forced to pay nearly eight times more out of every paycheck for a worse pension benefit than you receive today.”Specifically, the budget would: Increase current workers’ out-of-pocket...

The Trump administration has made life miserable for yet another special-interest group: Porn-watching perverts "working" at federal agencies RT reports: A House committee on oversight has approved prohibiting federal employees from using government computers and devices to watch pornography on the job. On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee unanimously approved House Resolution 680, entitled the “Eliminating Pornography from Agencies Act.” The legislation, sponsored by Congressman Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina), would require the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to issue new guidelines within 90 days to “prohibit the access of a pornographic or other explicit web site from...

Conservative talk show host Mark Levin is fond of saying that when liberals win elections, they run the country, and when they lose elections, they also run the country. That's because liberals control much of the media, the judiciary, and especially the bureaucracy, regardless of who wins the election. Bureaucrats in the federal government, unhappy with the results of the election, feel they should be the ones to decide how America is run, and they are plotting their resistance to President Trump. At the Environmental Protection Agency, a group of scientists strategized this past week about how to slow-walk President...

Federal employees are working closely with former Obama administration officials to thwart future President Donald Trump’s policies and initiatives, according to a report published by The Washington Post. Federal workers regularly consult with Obama-era political appointees about ways they can push back and potentially stymie Trump’s initiatives, according to the report. Dozens of federal workers attended a support group last weekend for civil servants seeking a place to hash out their issues with the Trump administration. Nearly 200 or more federal employees, many of whom worked for the Obama administration, have signed up for workshops meant to train people in...

Federal employees are working closely with former Obama administration officials to thwart future President Donald Trump’s policies and initiatives, according to a report published by The Washington Post. Federal workers regularly consult with Obama-era political appointees about ways they can push back and potentially stymie Trump’s initiatives, according to the report. Dozens of federal workers attended a support group last weekend for civil servants seeking a place to hash out their issues with the Trump administration. Nearly 200 or more federal employees, many of whom worked for the Obama administration, have signed up for workshops meant to train

The Washington Post reported Tuesday evening https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-within-federal-workers-push-back-against-trump/2017/01/that there is “a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers charged with implementing” President Donald Trump’s agenda. What Breitbart News called the “coup of the bureaucrats” earlier this week is well under way, with apparent coordination by former Obama administration officials working on the outside: (snip) ..... As former Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Tevi Troy wrote recently, in recalling challenges George W. Bush faced in confronting the bureaucracy, firing is usually not an option: “Another thing we learned about early on was the lifetime tenure rules–technically known as ‘civil-service protections.’ These...

President Donald Trump surely realizes that most workers employed by the federal government diabolically oppose his views of America. According to a new report, at least 180 of those employees "have signed up for a workshop featuring expert advice on workers’ rights and expressing civil disobedience."  Also, dozens more federal workers have attended a support groups for discussing opposition to the Trump administration. As President Trump settles into the White House, he will have to start examining ways to expedite his transition from the top down.  His agenda is nothing more than words in the long term if the people working for him fail to...