Category: Government

Taxpayers vs. the Community Engagement Specialist

by philg

A heart-wrenching story from the NYT, “Government Workers Who Have Lost Their Jobs Worry About Their Housing”:

After losing his job at the U.S. Forest Service, Cameron McKenzie was worried about finding a new job. But first, he had a more immediate concern: How was he going to pay the mortgage?

He’s done the math — finding another job in the environmental sector could take months — and keeping up with the nearly $2,700 monthly payment on his three-bedroom home in Blairstown, N.J., will be a challenge, if not impossible. “Even on unemployment,” said Mr. McKenzie, 27, who worked as a community engagement specialist, “I’m not going to be able to make my mortgage payment.”

Mr. McKenzie’s termination was among thousands of federal job cuts, part of a purge of the work force under an executive order signed by President Trump.

It’s the New York Times, so it is important to stress that the “community engagement specialist” profiled happens to be a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:

Mr. McKenzie, who worked at the U.S. Forest Service, said he and his husband are planning to list their New Jersey home — which his husband first purchased in 2022 for $215,000 — in May, when there’s more greenery to make it more attractive to potential buyers. Though they used to split the mortgage payments, Mr. McKenzie took on the task when his husband started law school. He estimated that around half of his $87,000 salary was going toward the payments and a construction loan the couple took out to cover renovations.

Who else is profiled in the article? “a single mother with three children” working as a “a health insurance specialist” and “Nathan Barrera-Bunch, who was a management analyst at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs … staying in Washington might not be feasible. It all depends, he said, on whether his fiancé, who still works for the federal government, can keep his job and if Mr. Barrera-Bunch can find a new one.”

In other words, the NYT apparently couldn’t find a single fired federal employee who was in a heterosexual partnership of some sort. Nor could they find an example of children growing up in a two-parent household.

Let’s circle back to Mr. McKenzie. If his cash compensation was $87,000 per year it seems fair to assume that he was costing taxpayers $250,000 per year (salary, benefits, pension, office space, etc.). What does a “community engagement specialist” do that justifies 100 percent of the personal federal income tax of perhaps 20 median-income families being harvested (i.e., for those 20 families, not a penny of their tax dollars can be used to deliver other services to them)?

I tried to answer my own question and found these slides from the Forest Service that include contributions from two community engagement workers. Here are some samples:

The white male cares about social justice, but is hogging this position that pays 2-3X private sector wages and thereby preventing a Black trans female from enjoying it? Only a white male can understand “Recreation Equity”, apparently:

Taxpayers keep funding DEI and yet don’t get any diversity, equity, or inclusion. The folks who get paid to achieve DEI aren’t discouraged by their long track record of (paid) failure:

Whiteness is to blame, it seems, but the white people won’t give up their unearned jobs and fat government salaries:

Critical Race Theory is not being funded or applied by the government, except in the minds of paranoid MAGA:

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How’s the first month of Trump-Vance going? (and was every part of government devoted to 2SLGBTQQIA+ advocacy?)

by philg

Other than riling up Democrats into fits of hysteria, has the Trump-Vance administration accomplished anything so far? Or have all of their initiatives been thwarted by judges?

Here’s one where a judge forced the CDC to stick with its old web site (NYT):

A federal judge has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to temporarily restore the pages it has taken down from its website to comply with President Trump’s executive order barring any references to race, gender identity or sexual orientation.

Judge John D. Bates of the D.C. Federal District Court issued the temporary restraining order at the request of a left-leaning advocacy group, Doctors for America, saying the deletions put “everyday Americans and most acutely, underprivileged Americans” in jeopardy.

Let’s look at one that doesn’t seem to fall under the rubric of “race, gender identity, or sexual orientation” .. “Trump Is Starving the National Endowment for Democracy” (The Free Press, whose brand is skepticism):

what’s happening at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a very big deal, and has not been previously reported.

NED, a key U.S. instrument for supporting grassroots freedom movements around the world, is under siege from Elon Musk’s DOGE. An order from DOGE to the U.S. Treasury that blocked disbursement of NED funds has crippled the organization—which received $315 million for fiscal year 2025—and its affiliates, The Free Press has learned.

The third-of-a-$billion/year enterprise is all about “democracy”, right? What if we check its web site?

LGBTIQ+ communities in Africa are often on the frontlines of the struggle for human rights in the region,” says Dave Peterson, Senior Director of the Africa program at the National Endowment for Democracy(NED). “As one of the most marginalized groups in many countries, respect for the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons is a key indicator for the overall respect for human rights and democracy in a society. Attitudes towards the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons is gradually shifting throughout the continent, which bodes well for the prospects of greater tolerance and inclusion.

It actually is about gender identity and sexual orientation because there is no “democracy” unless Rainbow Flagism is the official state religion. Without this $315 million/year spend there will be no democracy in Africa.

How much is $315 million/year? Compared to the wired-in federal deficit, almost nothing. Compared to what is needed to start a Silicon Valley company, enormous. Let’s look instead, though, at what kind of work by private sector Americans is required to keep the NED desk workers and their NGO pals comfy. We start by assuming a male working class peasant earning $50,000/year. No female is going to want to marry him due to his low wages (she can gain more spending power by having sex with an already-married higher-income guy in Massachusetts or California) and, therefore, he is going to be a single filer. He’ll pay about $6,000/year in federal income tax (nerdwallet). More than 52,000 peasants, then, have 100 percent of their federal income tax spirited away by NED to proselytize for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. For those 52,000 peasants, not a penny of their tax money will be available to spend on roads, airports, border patrol, scientific research, etc.

How about the only American enterprises that make our government look efficient? The gravy train for university administrators cannot legally be slowed down (NYT):

(The NYT article headline says there are “Cuts to Medical Research” and only readers who dig into the article learn that “research” itself is not being cut, but only fees that universities tack on to keep a full slate of deans in central administration. As much of what universities do is promote DEI and 2SLGBTQQIA+, it seems fair to say that government paying overhead fees on research contract is another way that the government promotes Rainbow Flagism. See, for example, University of Michigan’s $250 million in spending on DEI (NYT) or MIT’s “Assistant Dean of LBGTQ+, Women and Gender Services”.)

Fair to say that those with entrenched interests in getting money from federal taxpayers are winning so far?

Loosely related… one area of success seems to be in changing minds at the New York Times. “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship” (Feb 15, 2025) is unthinkable heresy. Two constitutional law professors:

In Wong Kim Ark, the leading case on birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court explained that “jurisdiction” referred to being born “within the allegiance” of the sovereign. The court held that a child born of parents with a “permanent domicile and residence in the United States” was a birthright citizen. Wong Kim Ark’s parents, as persons who came in amity, had entered into the social compact and were entitled to all the benefits of that compact, including not only the protection of the laws but also the benefits of citizenship for their children. Under the common law, the court observed, “such allegiance and protection were mutual.”

This is also why, as prominent editions of Blackstone’s commentaries explained, invading armies were excluded. “It is not cœlum nec solum” — it is neither the climate nor the soil — that makes a natural-born subject, “but their being born within the allegiance and under the protection of the king.”

For Trump to prevail, all that a modern court needs to do, in other words, is find that undocumented migrants are “an invading army.”

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Trump listens to at least one African in shutting down USAID

by philg

Folks are upset that Trump and DOGE may shut down USAID and cut U.S. foreign aid spending (state-sponsored NPR). This is consistent with a classic 2005 interview “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”. Quotes below, but not in quote style for improved readability (my highlights in bold).

The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

SPIEGEL: … corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers …

Shikwati: … and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.

SPIEGEL: Would Africa actually be able to solve these problems on its own?

Shikwati: Of course. Hunger should not be a problem in most of the countries south of the Sahara. In addition, there are vast natural resources: oil, gold, diamonds. Africa is always only portrayed as a continent of suffering, but most figures are vastly exaggerated. In the industrial nations, there’s a sense that Africa would go under without development aid. But believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.

SPIEGEL: But AIDS didn’t exist at that time.

Shikwati: If one were to believe all the horrorifying reports, then all Kenyans should actually be dead by now. But now, tests are being carried out everywhere, and it turns out that the figures were vastly exaggerated. It’s not three million Kenyans that are infected. All of the sudden, it’s only about one million. Malaria is just as much of a problem, but people rarely talk about that.

SPIEGEL: And why’s that?

Shikwati: AIDS is big business, maybe Africa’s biggest business. There’s nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical.

Shikwati: Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They’re in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria’s textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.

Shikwati: … jobs that were created artificially in the first place and that distort reality. Jobs with foreign aid organizations are, of course, quite popular, and they can be very selective in choosing the best people. When an aid organization needs a driver, dozens apply for the job. And because it’s unacceptable that the aid worker’s chauffeur only speaks his own tribal language, an applicant is needed who also speaks English fluently — and, ideally, one who is also well mannered. So you end up with some African biochemist driving an aid worker around, distributing European food, and forcing local farmers out of their jobs. That’s just crazy!

A 2017 look at the interviewee:

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USAID pays an economist to learn Spanish…

by philg

Back around 1990, a federal government economist whom we knew applied for and obtained a job at USAID, currently in the news as a target for Elon Musk’s Efficiency Nazis (TM). USAID paid for a daily Spanish language class with a handful of other students and then, because he hadn’t developed the required proficiency in Spanish, USAID paid for one-on-one Spanish tutoring. (I remember this as 18 months of full-time pay with the sole goal of learning Spanish; he dug out his 1990 calendar and it shows just 6 months of language training while doing some other work for the agency (proof that every tale gets better with time?).)

USAID then deployed him… to Egypt.

The punchline to this story is that when we would laugh about the absurdity of taxpayers paying him to learn Spanish in prep for 3.5 years in Cairo, notoriously short on taco trucks, he would respond with a dry explanation that USAID had a foreign language proficiency requirement and it had to be met before anyone could be sent overseas and that there was no requirement that the language learn bear any relationship to the country of deployment. The whole episode seemed to make sense to him even if it seemed to the rest of us to involve a lot of costs and no benefit to taxpayers.

The costs of keeping a USAID employee in Egypt included at least the following:

  • paying a regular federal government salary
  • paying for housing in a high-end neighborhood of Cairo
  • paying for private English-language school for the kids
  • paying to ship a car over from the U.S. and then back, if desired
  • paying to fly food in from Philadelphia and Germany and then selling it at to the Americans in Cairo at whatever the average price was for the same item back in the U.S.

In other words, the cost was similar to what would be incurred for any other diplomat in the embassy.

He never told us that he had observed any benefit being delivered by the expenditure of USAID funds in Egypt, either to the average Egyptian or the average American.

From the Guardian:

From state-sponsored NPR:

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CDC updates the Science of language

by philg

One tends to think of government as slow-moving, but President Trump’s order to stop preaching the rainbow flag religion seems to have been implemented at near-Silicon Valley speed. As of Friday evening, all of the CDC pages that recognized gender as distinct from sex seem to have disappeared. All of the links below, for example, went to “Not Found”

As of the January 21, 2025 archive.org capture:

A treasured section on “Latinx” is now gone forever (except for all of the copies at archive.org and at universities).

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USPS is late to the party for worshipping health care providers

by philg

I was shopping for stamps back in December in order to send out our family’s Christmas/New Year’s/Kwanzakkuh cards. I discovered that the USPS is about 4.5 years late with the health care provider worship:

(The Greenspun Version of this stamp would be large enough for the following legend: “Thank you for hoovering up 20 percent of our GDP and can we please work two days per week instead of just one in order to fund you?”)

What else is going on in the USPS stamp design mill?

Compare the following holidays for fun factor:

(No mention of Maulana Karenga a.k.a. Ronald Everett on the Kwanzaa stamp?)

Perhaps because of the fun discrepancy, the Kwanzaa stamps were sold out at both post offices that I visited.

We’re invited to “celebrate the universal experience of love” with a Keith Haring design. (Haring’s experience of love was having sex with a lot of different guys and then dying of HIV/AIDS in 1990.)

(The USPS didn’t want to use Haring’s mural or a work from the Bad Boys series?)

If we’re done with love we can celebrate a typical migrant and remind the native-born that there would be no entertainment without open borders:

The 8×10 view camera has its moment in the unionized sun:

Separately, I had some difficulty convincing USPS workers on December 23, 2024 to handle a letter to a friend in Canada. They said that the Canadians weren’t accepting mail from the U.S. The Tequesta, Florida Post Office was more accommodating. The lady behind the counter there said that letters were okay, but packages wouldn’t be accepted. The unionized government workers who handle mail in Canada went on strike from November 15, 2024-December 17, 2024. Wikipedia says “On November 29, Canada Post asked the mail services of all other countries to stop accepting or sending mail to Canada, leaving all mail unprocessed in secure containers from November 15. This mail could not be delivered or even scanned due to the strike.”

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Working class taxpayers buy a laptop class Coloradan a free electric car

by philg

“How I Leased a New EV for $0 Down and $0 per Month” (Car and Driver, December 2024):

During my morning scroll, I came upon news of a Denver dealer offering a Fiat 500e lease for $0 down and $0 a month. The minimal fine print said lessees had to be Colorado residents, which I am, and just had to cover the tax on this wee EV. I had to check it out.

The magic of this deal comes down to incentives. Because it’s a leased EV with an MSRP below $55,000, the car qualifies for the full $7500 federal tax credit regardless of battery mineral content or origin. Or rather, the leasing company qualifies for that credit, so the lessee’s personal income is irrelevant. This is the so-called leasing loophole. Colorado adds its own spiffs in the form of $5000 for a new EV, plug-in, or hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle, plus $600 if the vehicle is being financed or leased and an additional $2500 for cars with a sub-$35,000 MSRP. (The model eligible for this deal limbos under that bar at $34,095.) The $5000 state tax break ratchets down to $3500 on January 1, which is why the deal has a deadline of December 31, 2024. Uncertainty about the next administration’s stance on (non-Tesla) EVs provides a push, too.

All together, that’s $16,100 in credits, knocking the capitalized cost of the lease down to $17,995. I’d be on the hook for 4.5 percent tax on the original $34,095, but additional dealer-side coupons from Stellantis brought that down to $1205.50. If I choose to buy the car at the end of the term, it will cost me $17,388.45. I don’t expect that to happen.

Our family is in the laptop class. Could we get the working class to buy us a free car for use in Florida? No.

Because of Colorado’s unique tax-credit situation, the store rounded up as many unsold 2024s as it could find from across the country and slapped the deal on them. The car I ended up with was, coincidentally, originally delivered to the Fiat dealer down the road from C/D HQ in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I used to live.

Maybe a working class person behind on his/her/zir/their rent could get this deal too? No. It’s restricted to the “reasonably elite”:

A funny formality: They still had to run a credit check to confirm my ability to (not) pay.

Was that the end of the river of cash for the happy journalist?

I get my choice between a free Level 2 home charging station or $600 in charging credits, either of which will offset about half of my initial outlay. I opted for the hardware since I don’t plan to stray too far from home with this little Italian job. There’s also the incremental cost of adding a car to insurance as well as registration and plates, but you can’t get around those. So all in all, I’m paying less than $50 per month in taxes. Not bad.

(The “taxes” described might be more properly considered a user fee for the roads on which the car will be driven.)

What about your range anxiety? Load up on Xanax! From the Fiat USA web site:

I.e., the taxpayer-funded deal makes sense only for those rich enough to already own a long-range electric or gasoline-powered car. It transfers money from people who can barely afford one car to those who can afford to keep at least two. Merry Christmas to the elites, indeed!

Donald Trump, 2014: “I hope we never find life on another planet because if we do there’s no doubt that the United States will start sending them money!”

Related:

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There is no quota and we have not met the quota (US Naval Academy’s race-based admissions system)

by philg

“Federal Judge Upholds Racial Preferences in Naval Academy Admissions” (New York Times, December 6, 2024):

A federal judge on Friday denied an effort to stop the U.S. Naval Academy from considering race and ethnicity in admissions, finding that the academy has a distinct interest in using affirmative action to achieve diversity in its student body, and that doing so is a matter of national security.

Judge Bennett said in his decision that 52 percent of enlisted Navy service members belong to racial minority groups, but only 31 percent of officers do. In 2020, only about 17 of the 218 admirals in the Navy were officers of color, he said.

In the Marine Corps, the least diverse branch of the armed services, minority service members make up 35 percent of enlisted Marines, and 29 percent of officers, the judge said.

“There is a significant deficiency in the number of officers of color in the officer corps of the Navy and Marine Corps,” he wrote.

Racial quotas are unconstitutional violations of the 14th Amendment, so there certainly wouldn’t be a quota for “officers of color”. On the other hand, it is clear that the quota hasn’t been met (“significant deficiency in the number”).

Related:

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Can we get a federal law to require call centers to have caller ID?

by philg

Here’s one for Brendan Carr, soon to be in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (nytimes)… a regulation that requires call centers to have caller ID so that they don’t hassle Americans with “What is your phone number?” questions. As far as I can tell, customer “service” call centers are the only users of the American telephone system that don’t have caller ID, thus leading to the annoying phenomenon of having to provide one’s phone number, the agent having to type it in, etc.

The worst offender in this regard seems to be General Electric. They have an automated system that has called me about 10 times regarding our fancy Monogram gas range. One of the things that we like about it is that LED rings behind each burner control knob light up to show that a burner is on. Or at least they did until the entire system failed. GE sent out a tech who, predictably, decided that parts were required. GE then began shipping out parts in dribs and drabs. After each shipment, the company’s automated system would tell me to schedule a return visit. Then I would press some buttons to talk to a human who would, after asking for my phone number (keep in mind that GE had actually placed the call and, apparently, no longer had the phone number that it had used) say, “We can’t schedule service until the parts are delivered“.

(I did ask “Why is your system programmed to make calls when a part is shipped and ask me to schedule with a live agent if you can’t schedule anything until after a part is delivered?” and, of course, the agents didn’t agree with me that there was anything suboptimal about GE’s system.)

I recognize that this would seem to be at odds with my general support for smaller government, but telecom is already heavily regulated, purportedly for our benefit.

Separately, I would love to know how roughly a dozen parts are required to fix what, in my humble engineer’s brain, must be attributable to the failure of a single component (none of the six burner controls has a working backlight and I think we have a full set of parts for each of the burner knobs, but I have to believe that the root cause is upstream from the knobs).

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Department of Government Accountability (DOGA): Silicon Valley Bank and the San Francisco Fed, 1.5 years later

by philg

Our stroll to the first morning of work in San Francisco included the usual sights, e.g., a homeless encampment in the same frame as a self-driving Waymo:

Also, a smashed office building glass door:

It also took us past a Silicon Valley Bank “Experience Center” and the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, notable for supervising SVB right until the bank was seized by regulators in March 2023.

According to ChatGPT, nobody at the San Francisco Fed was fired as a result of this spectacular immolation of taxpayer dollars (somewhere between $15 and $25 billion; the government pretends that didn’t do the bailout with peasant dollars because it made other banks pay, but of course the other banks are where peasants keep their money).

NYT, 2018:

[Mary C.] Daly, who is openly gay, will become the third woman among the 12 presidents of the Fed’s regional banks. As a senior executive at the San Francisco Fed, she has been a leading voice for addressing what she has described as a “diversity crisis” in the economics profession and at the Federal Reserve. At the San Francisco Fed, she pushed successfully to balance the hiring of male and female research assistants.

Her online biography was updated June 2024 and makes no mention of her role in the SVB collapse.

Incredibly, the bank still operates as SVB, though it is now a division of a North Carolina-based bank. SVB still has its DEI presentation online, updated a few months before the bank failed.

If not for the regulatory seizure they would have put 100 percent of employees through DEI training by now. The 5 percent quota for Black leaders didn’t go into effect until 2025:

Circling back to the life of an expert witness, here’s the view of the Ferry Building from the conference room where I was imprisoned:

In response to a reader question about whether ChatGPT can be trusted, Perplexity.ai’s answer:

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