Author: Redactor

Categories
budgets & spending cuts too much government

How Audits Work in Real Life

DOGE, panic, civil service, public servants, control

Corrupt politicians and bureaucrats are panicking. 

O, the prospect of any significant shrinking of the federal behemoth!

Any significant rooting out of the corruption that benefits them. . . .

Many combat this horror by flinging every fallacy in the book. Like the notion that Elon Musk and his team are unqualified. They ask, is Musk a certified public accountant? 

He’s only a mega-successful serial entrepreneur, not an accountant.

Monster Hunter Nation’s Correia45 answers a slew of the fallacies, not in the most genteel manner. Cover your ears if you click in.

First, there’s nothing odd about an internal audit, which “is what Donald Trump (the man in charge) is doing now, by having his people (DOGE) audit the executive branch he runs. CEOs and owners do this all the time.”

Nor need you be a CPA to contribute. That’s essential for only certain types of accounting, which “isn’t even close to what DOGE is doing.”

Correia45, an accountant, has been on teams that included programmers, lawyers, machinists. Machinists because, when auditing a factory, “I could count the parts, but I couldn’t tell you if the parts were b******t or not.”

Another thing: I can certainly think of reasons to have smart energetic young people on an auditing team. 

But, contra some assumptions (based on the fact that 20-somethings are “who got doxxed first”), young people are not the whole team. Newsweek’s list of known DOGE staff includes persons ranging in age from 19 to 67.

And so DOGE goes. Godspeed. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Mary McCarthy

The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning.

Mary McCarthy, The Oasis (1949).
Categories
Today

Amendment XXII!

The Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, which sets a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States, was ratified by the requisite 36 of the then-48 states of the union on February 27, 1951.

Congress had passed the amendment on March 21, 1947.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

Diversity versus Merit

quota, race, racism, sexism, hiring

Northwestern University is being sued for “consciously discriminating” in favor of women and racial minorities at the expense of obviously better qualified candidates.

The suit is brought by a group of white male professors that does not include Eugene Volokh, one of its examples of applicants summarily ignored under the alleged hiring practices.

“Northwestern University School of Law refuses,” the plaintiff’s complaint reads, “to even consider hiring white male faculty candidates with stellar credentials, while it eagerly hires candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records. . . .

“Professor Volokh’s candidacy was never even presented to the Northwestern faculty for a vote, while candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records were interviewed and received offers because of their preferred demographic characteristics.”

One of those with the requisite demographic characteristics is Destiny Peery, a black woman who graduated near the bottom of her class at Northwestern Law School.

The suit alleges that Dan Rodriguez, the dean in 2014, the year she was hired, threatened to penalize faculty members who voted against her. She would “never even have been considered” for the appointment but for her sex and race.

Rodriguez also ordered the faculty to abstain from discussing candidates on the faculty listserv and mentioned the risk of litigation as his reason for the ban. In other words, this administrator knew that his policy was illegal and sought to cover it up.

Now the feared lawsuit has arrived, brought against Northwestern by Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP).

Wobbly acronym, sure, but Federal law is clear in outlawing hiring discrimination based on race or sex.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Ursula K. Le Guin

The untold story mothers the lie.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994).
Categories
Today

Dominican Independence

February 26 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.

Categories
Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Fire or Promote the Best?

DOGE, government waste, corruption, spending, debt

Things looked bad recently for Leland Dudek, an employee of the Social Security Administration.

Dudek almost got fired for helping the DOGE team understand how SSA’s systems work so that DOGE could zero in on wasteful or fraudulent payments.

On social media, Dudek wrote: “At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation. They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE . . .

“I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. . . . I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team. . . . I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

An investigation? Administrative leave? For helping, as an executive-branch employee, the head of the executive branch to find and extirpate waste and fraud? SSA managers may have been confused about whether Donald Trump really is the president.

The suspense didn’t last long.

Dudek was not fired. Instead, the SSA commissioner was fired and Dudek became acting commissioner. 

“There are many good civil servants,” says Senator Mike Lee, “who have been quietly frustrated for years with politically motivated mismanagement [and] who possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems with their agencies. Put them in charge, hand them scalpels and flamethrowers.”

Could we have at long last found the cure for dimwitted obstructionism? A certain reality TV star had words for it: “You’re fired!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Joanna Russ

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble with women, too.

Joanna Russ, Existence (1975).

Categories
Today

Senator Revels

On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate.

Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Revels (pictured above) was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.

Categories
education and schooling national politics & policies Tenth Amendment federalism

Nixon & Trans Athletes

Trump, federalism, state's rights, Constitution

The President of the United States clashed with the governor of Maine over transgender participation in government-organized athletics. Quite a hoot.

Behind this fracas looms the legacy of . . . Richard M. Nixon.

First, the fracas: “In a tense exchange with Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, President Donald Trump threatened to strip Maine of its federal funding,” explains CNN, “if the state refuses to comply with his executive order banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports.”

The brief volley of promises (threats) between the governor and the president made other governors “uncomfortable.” Yes, that’s a news story.

“Is Maine here?” he wondered aloud. “The governor of Maine?”

“Yeah,” Gov. Janet Mills answered from across the room. “I’m here.”

And then came a testy political exchange, the kind you don’t often see, culminating in this from Trump: “You better comply, you better comply, because, otherwise, you’re not getting any federal funding.” 

“See you in court,” she promised.

“Good; I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

Trump may not be wrong. He may have the better legal case.

But doesn’t it seem weird that the president of the United States can extort compliance from the states on matters that are not enumerated in the Constitution?

Well, back in his first term Trump signed an executive order to direct a new devolution process of turning back education to the states. But the transgender issue is a big deal, and most Americans (around 80 percent) are against “biological” “men” competing with girls and women in sports, and since much of sports in America takes place in state-directed/taxpayer-funded contexts, Trump is leveraging federal bloc grants against states that balk at his agenda.

Thank Nixon and his “New Federalism.” While an attempt to give power back to the states, it also tied federal money to the devolution, which has effectively turned states into welfare queens begging big bucks off Washington, severely compromising the states’ . . . basic competence.

It’s this policy that Trump should be fighting.

But that would make governors even more uncomfortable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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