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Trump never promised mass federal layoffs, and they won't fulfill his agenda, either

Trump never promised mass federal layoffs, and they won't fulfill his agenda, either

The Hill5 days ago

Leading up to the November election, the one issue voters cared about most was the cost of living. For Republican voters, immigration was a close second.
Concerns about government inefficiency did not even make the list. Months into the new administration, however, one of its top priorities is improving government efficiency, and its basic approach is to reduce the size of government through mass layoffs. The assumption seems to be that the government can operate just as efficiently with fewer employees.
But what if that assumption is wrong? What if our government is inefficient not because it has too many employees, but has too many employees because it is so inefficient?
All of us interact with the government at different levels, and all of us know the feeling of being caught in a maze of dead ends.
Years ago, my company tried to purchase one-tenth of an acre of land from the New York State Thruway Authority to put up a sign. The parcel was completely landlocked, and the authority no longer needed it.
When we asked the authority how long it would take to buy the land, they said five years, which we found hard to imagine. It took over six.
From start to finish, we found the process unbelievably frustrating. But we didn't come away wishing the authority had fewer employees. We came away angry that the state legislature, which established the authority and sets rules for its operation, takes no interest in how it actually works.
For the federal government, Congress sets the rules. Congress may include specific rules for the executive branch to follow in carrying out its legislation, or it may delegate large areas of rule-making to the agencies themselves.
Either way, the number and complexity of agency rules are key factors in determining how many people government agencies employ and whether they can efficiently deliver results. Moreover, new regulations are often layered on top of old ones without any thought of how they will work together.
Another factor in making government work is the strength or weakness of its information systems. In 'Recoding America,' Jennifer Pahlka examines why high-minded policies so often fail to deliver on their goals.
Sometimes, bad results are front-page news, such as the crash of healthcare.gov when people tried to enroll in health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. More often, however, government systems deliver results in ways that are slow, confusing and frustrating, both for employees providing services and for people trying to use them.
Part of the problem, again, is 'layers of policy, regulation, procedure and process that have accrued over decades,' making any technology hard to use. But Pahlka found overlaps in technology as well, with some systems dating back to the 1980s.
Comparing new technologies to layers of paint, she writes that each new addition 'depends on everything that came before it, so each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies.' Over time, the layers become so complex and brittle that the paint finally cracks.
For people offering tech support to the federal government, overhauling this patchwork of systems would be a good place to start. After decades of deferred maintenance, however, fixing it will not save money in the short term.
Improvements will be costly, time-consuming, and will require hanging on to the few employees who still know how everything works, rather than offering blanket early retirement incentives and imposing mass layoffs.
A serious effort to make government work better would begin with these two steps: peeling back layers of complex regulations and updating the technologies needed to deliver better results.
Cutting jobs without taking these steps first won't create efficiencies. Instead, it will leave fewer people in place to do the same amount of work. Furthermore, sudden cuts to ongoing programs and capital projects create their own type of waste by disrupting supply chains, investment decisions and hiring commitments.
Devoting so much energy to layoffs and funding cuts also takes attention away from the issues that helped decide the 2024 election in the first place.
On immigration, the administration can take credit for the large drop in illegal crossings at the southern border. But on other issues, including employment-based immigration and the fate of more than 11 million people already living illegally in the U.S., public opinion is far more divided, and these problems cannot be fixed by executive orders alone because responsibility for immigration laws rests with Congress, not the executive branch.
Relying solely on executive orders will leave the administration liable to claims that it is both overreaching its authority and, in a grim sort of protection scheme, shielding Republican members of Congress from voting on difficult issues.
The prospects for curbing inflation are no better. Tariffs, tax cuts, reduced immigrant labor and pressures on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low all work against the promise to keep inflation in check.
Recognizing the trade-offs, a frustrated President Trump said in March that he 'couldn't care less' about higher car prices. Voters who were concerned about inflation last November may not agree.
Howard Konar is co-owner of a family real estate development company in Rochester, New York and author of 'Common Ground, An Alternative to Partisan Politics.'

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Seth Magaziner, one of the leading negotiators on the Democratic side of the effort to ban congressional stock trading who participates in regular meetings on the issue, similarly told CNN: 'We should eliminate the opportunity for members of Congress to engage in any sort of insider trading because the opportunity clearly exists.' The director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette told CNN, 'You occasionally have these moments where it really clarifies and distills down just how bad this is. And I think the tariff announcements and subsequent trades and transactions are a prime example of that.' March 3 — the day before Trump levied an additional 10% tariff on China and a 25% tariff on Mexican and Canadian imports with some exceptions — saw the highest number of lawmakers reporting stock trading in a single day through mid-April, according to CNN's analysis. Sixteen lawmakers, evenly split among Democrats and Republicans, reported hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of transactions that day — most of them purchases. The president had confirmed at an afternoon White House event on March 3 that the tariffs would take effect the next day, leading to a sharp selloff in stocks. At that point, March 3 had so far been the worst day for the market. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, who reported purchases between $50,000 and $100,000, was the only lawmaker to report having personally traded on March 3. McCormick did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Lawmakers reached by CNN sought to distance themselves from the transactions filed during those key dates around Trump's tariffs announcements. CNN reached out to the 16 lawmakers who reported transactions on March 3, and the 35 lawmakers, some of whom overlapped, who reported having transactions between March 31 and April 9. Those who responded to CNN said they were unaware of trades being made through various agreements with financial advisors. They said the filings did not reflect traditional stock trades and that they had no interactions with the administration around key announcements. Some told CNN the filings reflected trades or reinvestments through a joint account or by a spouse. Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer is waiting on congressional approval for a blind trust, a spokesman told CNN. GOP Rep. Bruce Westerman, meanwhile, has instructed his investment advisor to not invest in individual stocks and is in the process of putting his assets back into a fund, after receiving heat for recent investments, spokesperson Kinsey Featherston shared. Democratic Rep. Julie Johnson has begun the process of divesting her stocks, managed by an independent third party, into ETFs and mutual funds upon becoming a member of Congress, her spokesperson told CNN. Some said they supported efforts to ban lawmaker trading of individual stocks, even those with active portfolios, including Khanna and GOP Rep. Rob Bresnahan. The STOCK Act passed with overwhelming support in 2012 to increase transparency about lawmaker stock trading and made it illegal for lawmakers to use inside information for financial benefit. But lawmakers and experts argue problems persist with existing reporting structures and enforcement mechanisms. Along with only being required to report a monetary range of transactions, lawmakers also don't report the timing of a trade on a given day, which could be useful context for those determining whether seemingly well-timed trades could be based on non-public information. There is also currently no designated oversight body to determine whether lawmakers hold a conflict of interest in their trading practices. Legal experts say that even lawmakers who use financial advisors to trade on their behalf are not necessarily insulated from scrutiny, and it depends on the details of the agreement. The $200 fine for late filings is hardly a deterrent, experts argue. 'That doesn't pass the sniff test even a little bit because there is no guarantee that they're not talking to those people because there is no prohibition against them from talking to those financial advisors,' Hedtler-Gaudette said of the arrangements most lawmakers have with their financial advisors. As efforts to ban congressional stock trading have fallen short, scholars and ethics experts have argued that members of Congress are privy to more information than the average American and are often faced with legislative decisions that overlap with their investment portfolios. 'It is essentially completely legal for a congressman, congresswoman or senator to go to Goldman Sachs, Blackrock or Vanguard and be like, 'Hey I'm proposing this regulation, what do you think will be the impact on the market?' There is nothing to stop you from that,' said Dr. Jan Hanousek Jr., an assistant professor at the University of Memphis who has studied the patterns of lawmaker stock trading. 'This is an insane problem.' Beyond ethics concerns, a 2022 Fox News poll found that 70% of respondents supported banning members of Congress and their families from trading stock, while a January UC San Diego study found that even when lawmakers make their trading practices public, it 'erodes' the legitimacy of Congress. The push to ban lawmaker stock trading last peaked when dozens of federal officials and some lawmakers made lucrative stock and mutual fund trades as the government was preparing for the financial onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. The Department of Justice has since closed investigations into the moves. But in a sign this Congress' bipartisan group of lawmakers may be closer to finding the political will to ban the practice, House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the president himself have publicly supported the effort, following news of lawmaker stock trading activity around the tariff announcements. 'I have been working on this issue for years,' Roy told CNN. 'We can and should fix the problem during this term now that President Trump and the Speaker have signaled their support for the measure. We have the will and the mandate of the American people to do this. Let's deliver.' CNN's John Towfighi contributed to this report.

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