Petula Dvorak writes in her local column in the Washington Post:
“This workforce that’s supposedly as bloated and unwieldy as the Sta Puft Marshmallow Man? It was about the same size in 1950. (You know, around the time so many folks think America was great?)
It also has been slowly shrinking and is now a little smaller than it was under Ronald Reagan.
So let’s stop pretending that this hostility toward federal workers is about cost-cutting.
Trump already has promised a huge building up of the military — at least 500,000 more in the Army alone. So money is not something that the federal government is looking to save.
This new Washington (or New York on the Potomac) has plenty of plans for our taxpayer dollars.
Trump is promising lots of nonmilitary jobs.
There’s The Wall! Imagine the work that’s going to create.
Construction workers, managers to deal with thousands of miles of worksite along the U.S.-Mexico border, paper pushers to get all the materials sorted and the laborers paid. Of course, that money will probably wind up going to private contractors, the guys who command $500 billion in taxpayer money every year, but aren’t counted as part of the federal workforce.
Maybe The Wall isn’t going to cost U.S. taxpayers anything because the workers aren’t really going to get paid. Just ask the guys at Magnolia Plumbing D.C. or AES Electric in Laurel, Md.
There’s also the promised deportation of about 3 million to 4 million undocumented immigrants. Imagine the federal workers required for that effort, given the current backlog of 500,000 deportation cases.”
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I have previously blogged about the unprecedented (at least during my 43+ years in Washington) hostility toward Federal career civil servants being promised by the Trump Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress: http://wp.me/p8eeJm-5A
PWS
01/09/17