America Speaks
It’s official. Donald Trump defied all odds and became our 47th president in a landslide. He won the popular vote and gained a super majority of electoral votes as he created a working-class coalition that cut across racial, ethnic and gender lines. It was a red wave that gave the GOP control of the Congress, the Senate and the Oval Office. I wrote a couple weeks ago about how 2024 was a historic campaign on a number of fronts but winning the red wave election just capped things perfectly. Add that to a conservative Supreme Court, and American voters have delivered a mandate for change to the GOP. And exactly what is that mandate?
I think the answer to that question is simple. To unwind all the horrible policies the Barrack Obama, Joe Biden and the Democrats have inflicted on the country for years. This includes:
· High inflation induced by out-of-control federal spending that has hammered budgets of working-class voters
· Enabling 15 million illegal immigrants to stream across our southern border and overwhelming public services and schools in cities and towns across.
· A decline in real wage growth (after inflation) caused by the above two items.
· Policies, including immigration that have driven crime higher, especially in big cities.
· Toxic DEI policies that were forced into every aspect of government, the military, schools, the media and corporate America.
· Growing and protecting the unaccountable DC administrative state that for years has been lying to the public about Trump, Covid, Joe Biden’s mental acuity and his family’s corrupt activities trading money for influence with foreign governments, including our adversaries.
I have written about these issues for more than five years in these pages and in my book, Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government. When the Democrats are done with their grieving and finger pointing, they will get to the business of understanding how they became so out of touch with the American people. I will leave that to them. I am more interested in what happens next. How does Donald Trump and his administration undertake the monumental task of downsizing our bloated unsustainable federal government while making it more efficient and responsive for the citizens it serves?
With a behemoth as large as the federal government, and its 3 million employees controlling $6.5 trillion in spending, the task is not for the faint of heart. The good news is that he is appointing a cabinet full of passionate folks who will disrupt the status quo. While there may be a couple appointments I don’t agree with, by in large President Trump is moving fast so that he hits the ground running on day one. One of the coolest appointments is the greatest American genius since Thomas Edison to head up the new Department of Government Efficiency. Elon Musk single-handedly created the electric vehicle industry and has crushed the costs and production times of commercial space travel by more than an order of magnitude. He bought the money losing Twitter for $75 billion, in order expose government-coerced suppression of free speech. Our country owes him a huge debt of gratitude for just that. I like America’s chances with the world’s richest and one if its smartest humans focused on the problem. In fact, I am so stoked about this that I pinged his X account offering my skills to join the effort.
If you’re listening Elon, here’s my pitch.
I am a semi-retired serial entrepreneur with more than 35 years of P&L responsibility, software development, financial management and process improvement experience across a variety of industries. I share the distinction with you of hiring Jon McNeill in 2005 to be CEO of a company I founded. Elon, you hired him after we sold Enservio. I have built, restructured and sold companies across a broad spectrum of industries. I am a strategic thinker with strong analytical skills who can execute quickly and communicate effectively from the shop floor to the board of directors to C-suite customers. I am a passionate problem solver who loves distilling simplicity from complexity. I have long been a passionate advocate of conservative governance and reforming our dysfunctional and bloated federal government and wrote a book on the subject: Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government. I possess the skills and passion to join the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency to participate in the historic effort to reform our federal government and would be honored to do so.
Ok. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about some things I hope are on the Trump agenda beyond the previous list that basically amounts to stopping the bleeding. Once the bleeding is stopped, we need to focus addressing root cause problems and there is no root cause more important than reforming our schools. I’ve written extensively about this issue in my book and in blog articles, America is Only as Good as It’s Public Education System, and Teachers’ Unions Must Go. I encourage readers to visit these articles as a primer.
I am a big fan of the old adage, “killing two birds with one stone.” A perfect example of this is that by stopping illegal immigration, you also improve our public K-12 schools. Here’s an excerpt from my book:
“Immigrant families are flooding into many large metropolitan areas, and the language and culture barriers are putting great pressure on the public schools. Here are some sobering statistics from a 2017 study by the Center for Immigration Studies:
23 percent of public-school students in the United States came from an immigrant household in 2015, compared to 11 percent in 1990 and seven percent in 1980. About one-third of those public-school students from immigrant households came from illegal immigrant households.
Immigration has added disproportionately to the number of low-income students in public schools. In 2015, 28 percent of public-school students from immigrant households lived in poverty and they accounted for 30 percent of all students living below the poverty line.
Local schools struggle to deal with teaching students in multiple foreign languages, which creates enormous challenges. In 315 Census areas (combined enrollment of 6.7 million), 10 or more foreign languages are spoken by public school students.”
Another important reform that gets to the heart of making our government more accountable is eliminating unions for federal workers. Now I am all for private-sector unions because they are an important balance between labor and capital, but even FDR who signed the 1935 National Labor Relations Act providing the right for workers to bargain collectively, believed that this right should not extend to public sector workers because of the inherent conflict of interest between the taxpaying citizens and politicians who support public unions. Under political pressure, JFK issued the first executive order guaranteeing public sector bargaining. President Nixon’s executive order expanded those rights in 1969, and President Carter cemented these gains in legislation by signing the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.
As a result, public sector unions have grown rapidly even as private sector unions have shrunk just as fast. As of 2023, 48.6% of union members (7 million) were public sector employees. This is the essence of the Deep State DC swamp that President Trump has been railing against. Unelected bureaucrats often ignore policy directives for administrations they don’t like. We just saw this week, the firing of the FEMA official who directed her teams to not help citizens with Trump signs at the houses during the aftermath of Hurricane Milton in October. However, the FEMA official, Marn'i Washington, has said in subsequent interviews that her orders came from higher ranking administrators and that it was policy all over the country. Imagine that?
President Trump has been given a mandate to root out this kind of Deep State corruption and he should go after it with force. While he has majorities in the Senate and House for the next two years, he should advance legislation to repeal the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. All federal employees are meant to serve at the pleasure of the President and hindering this power is simply unconstitutional in my opinion. Federal workers should be paid for the value they deliver, not because of their tenure. Of course, there will be a major hue and cry from the establishment that benefits from the DC bureaucracy, but this is a feature of all major reform initiatives. This will go a long way to reducing waste fraud and abuse that represents 10-20% of all the federal dollars we spend. This is $600b – $1.2 trillion in savings per year for the American people.
These are just a couple big examples of root cause reforms, that if enacted, would have major downstream benefits for our country. I could go on but from what I have observed since the election, President Trump is on the right track, and he should not shrink under the inevitable resistance he will face. Grab your popcorn because this is gonna be an interesting next four years.