#civil servants

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Keith Edwards at No Lies Detected:

Fascism doesn’t come for every generation, but it has come for ours.  This is not a fight on the beaches of Normandy, but in our own country. This article begins a series on what opposing Donald Trump and his movement can look like. I hope you will join me as these progress.

[...]

Do not leave. Faced with the might of the United States government aligned against you, you might consider resigning preemptively to avoid the humiliation of inevitable termination. This is counterproductive for at least two reasons: If you leave, you save Trump Administration officials the time and effort of identifying you, which otherwise could have taken months or years. Second, your principled stand would likely only result in your replacement by an unprincipled Trump loyalist. By staying on, you may find yourself helping to implement policies you find hateful, but by refusing to leave, you can ensure that you have some influence on those policies, because then you can...

Delay. Delay. Delay. Waiting out the enemy until he moves on, gives up, or forgets is a time-honored strategy not just among civil servants but also history’s best generals. That email about a proposed rule change to healthcare protections? Bury it in everyone’s inbox by sending it late. A meeting on reviewing the U.S. government’s foreign aid commitments to a region you oversee? Oops, you’ll be out that day! That agency conference your political-appointee boss requested you arrange? Next month didn’t fit everyone’s schedule, so you had to push it to after the new year! Slow-walking is the classic tool in any bureaucrat’s toolbox, and in the next Trump Administration, you can use it in defense of the Constitution.

Be intentionally incompetent. As a career employee, you likely have always had the advantage of knowing your workplace better than your politically appointed overlords. This is perhaps your most potent weapon against Trump. Draft rules unlikely to survive judicial review. Favor lengthy rulemaking or review processes over expedited ones. Complete tasks sequentially rather than in parallel to draw out timelines. Add complexity, stakeholders, and process wherever possible. In short, exploit the knowledge gap you hold over your bosses to diminish, defuse, and defeat their plans.

Leak. Federal employees have the right to report what they believe to be illegal or abusive of authority to their agency’s inspector general (IG) without fear of retaliation. Trump however has singled out IGs for replacement after one played a pivotal role in his first impeachment, so the availability of this option may depend on how politically prominent your agency is. Fortunately, you can anonymously tip prominent news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post, which boast extensive investigative units and employ rigorous safeguards to protect sources’ identities. You can also seek out sympathetic elected officials, such as Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee, whose main function is investigation of the federal government. (If you choose disclosure, be sure that the information is not classified, the unauthorized disclosure of which carries stiff federal penalties.)

Disregard and refuse. When you have exhausted all other options, you may want selectively to resort to riskier behaviors. These include going behind political appointees’ backs to subvert their activities, say by picking up the phone and countermanding their directions. In extreme cases, you may have outright to refuse direct orders to the appointee’s face. Though such actions seem like a fasttrack to termination, you may still be protected by the fact that overwhelmed political appointees might hesitate to go through the onerous process of finding a politically reliable replacement. Remember, the longer you stay in, the harder you make it for Trump to do what he wants. Know your rights. If the worst happens and your agency moves to terminate you, you can still fight back. There are multiple avenues an employee designated for dismissal can pursue to delay, reduce, or reverse agency penalties against them.1 The beauty of these options is that they can take months or even years to resolve and may be appealed to higher bodies, further extending the process. All the while, you are collecting a salary and occupying a full-time equivalent (FTE) position that your agency can’t fill until you finally depart. (This is not legal advice. If you find yourself in this situation, please seek a lawyer.)

Keith Edwards writes in his No Lies Detected Substack on how civil servants can show resistance to the tyrannical Trump 2.0 Regime from within.

[allthegeopolitics]

A group of German civil servants have written to Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other senior ministers calling on the government to “cease arm deliveries to the Israeli government with immediate effect”. “Israel is committing crimes in Gaza that are in clear contradiction to international law and thus to the Constitution, which we are bound to as federal civil servants and public employees,” the statement says, citing the International Court of Justice’s ruling in January that Israel’s military actions are “plausible acts of genocide”. According to the organisers of the five-page statement, around 600 civil servants have voiced support for the initiative, which has slowly been gathering traction for months through professional networks and word-of-mouth across a range of ministries.

Continue Reading

[ttrpgcafe]

I've had a fascination recently with what I'm affectionately calling "office-horror", things like the Laundry Files, Triangle Agency, The Bureau for Liminal Horror, and, many years ago, the podcast SAYER. I don't know why this particular genre of horror calls to me, but I wonder if it isn't related to me wanting a job in civil service, which almost certainly entails working in an office. Like, I don't know what to expect, and that's manifesting as an anxiety about the work that has me fascinated with this genre of horror, I think. Idk, I'm mostly just rambling, but I thought I might see if there's a more concrete answer from the wider world for why people like this kind of horror.

[odinsblog]

800 US & European civil servants denounce western support for Israeli war on Gaza

More than 800 European and American officials have published an open letter on Friday condemning Israel’s war on Gaza as “one of the worst human catastrophes of this century.”

The statement – titled “It Is Our Duty To Speak Out When Our Governments Policies Are Wrong” – denounced policies that “weaken” their nations’ “moral standing” in the world.

“Israel has shown no boundaries in its military operations in Gaza, which has resulted in tens of thousands of preventable civilian deaths, and the deliberate blocking of aid by Israel has led to a humanitarian catastrophe, putting thousands of civilians at risk of starvation and slow death,” it said.

“Our governments current policies weaken their moral standing and undermine their ability to stand up for freedom, justice, and human rights globally and weaken our efforts to rally international support for Ukraine and to counter malign actions by Russia, China and Iran,” it added.

(continue reading)

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

General strike?

What are we saying the threshold for a general strike is? The famous general strike in 1926 was 1.7 million workers (yes, smaller population, etc etc).

So when can we call it a general strike?

[whats-in-a-sentence]

So long as we assume (as most people did) that composing poetry and quoting classical literature are the best guides to administrative talent, China can fairly be said to have developed the most rational selection processes for state service known to history.*

*When Britain reorganized its civil service in the 1880s it introduced self-consciously similar examinations, testing bright young men on their knowledge of Greek and Latin classics before sending them off to govern India, and even now British civil servants are still known as mandarins. Nineteenth-century conservatives saw exams as part of a sinister plot to "Chinesify" Britain.

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

[blackswaneuroparedux]

People enter politics or the Civil Service out of a desire to exert power and influence events; this, I maintain, is an illness. It's only when one realises that great administrators and leaders of men have all been at any rate slightly mad that one has a true understanding of history.

- Auberon Waugh

[shamballalin]

Project 2025 ~ IMPORTANT FACTS TO KNOW

Everyone needs to read and understand this post if you intend to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. Do not allow others to hide this information from you. On page 246 of the conservative mandate, it says that to support funding for PBS or other public funded news sources is “squandering” money on “leftist opinions” and should be stopped because, “as Jefferson put it, ‘To compel a man to…

[dr-archeville]

Trump’s Second Term: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]

"John Oliver discusses Donald Trump’s plans for a second term, why it could be much worse than his first term, and what Trump has in common with a hamster." [29 min 14 sec]

[kazifatagar]

Hindu civil servants get extra day leave for Deepavali

The Malaysian government has announced that Hindu civil servants can take a one-day unrecorded leave (CTR) for Deepavali either on the eve of the festival or the following day, starting this year. The Public Service Department stated that this policy applies to all state public servants, statutory authorities, and local authorities. Deepavali falls on Thursday, October 31, 2024, so civil servants…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Shuham at HuffPost:

Donald Trump has no greater enemy than the United States’ federal bureaucracy — what he calls the “deep state.” And he has a plan to bend it to his will if he’s elected in November. The plan, to create something called “Schedule F,” would make tens of thousands of civil servants easier to fire, fundamentally changing the nature of the federal government — and, some worry, paving the way for authoritarianism.

Schedule F is a new category, or schedule, of federal workers who are exempt from codified job protections, like being hired and fired based on merit and having the ability to appeal disciplinary action. The majority of federal civil service employees, from climate scientists to bank examiners to IT specialists, are covered by these protections; some positions, like postal workers and intelligence officers, are currently exempt. That system ensures that experience and skill, rather than political favoritism or personal connections, guide hiring and firing decisions within the federal government. But conservatives have long complained that the president should exercise more control over the federal bureaucracy, and Trump in particular has said it needs to be “brought to heel.” Trump created Schedule F in an October 2020 executive order. Under that order, federal workers involved in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making and policy-advocating positions” — a vague description that would include at least tens of thousands of people — would be stripped of their civil service protections and reclassified as “at-will” appointees, meaning they could be hired or fired for any reason, or none at all.

Because the order came so late in Trump’s presidency, only a handful of agencies created lists of specific jobs that would be eligible for conversion to Schedule F. And President Joe Biden reversed the order before any jobs could actually be converted. But Trump has explicitly said he’ll pursue Schedule F again if he’s elected. In a campaign video last year, Trump referred to Schedule F as an effort to “remove rogue bureaucrats.” “I will wield that power very aggressively,” he said.

Federal employees, political scientists, union leaders and watchdog groups told HuffPost that Schedule F could lead to a “chilling” effect. At-will employment, they said, would make it harder for government workers to raise concerns that go against their bosses’ political loyalties. That could lead to a degradation of public services like disaster relief, financial regulation and the administration of government benefits. “You can see where it can grind work to a halt, because even people who are trying to do the right thing [would] be afraid that if they do something wrong, they’ll be out of a job,” said Joe Spielberger, a policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight who has raised alarms over how the implementation of Schedule F would harm key welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Schedule F would be the “fundamental element of an authoritarian agenda,” he said, allowing Trump to take control of the vast federal bureaucracy and reverse generations of reforms.

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, signed on to an open letter in April arguing Schedule F would open the door to “politicization and patronage throughout the federal workforce.” He told HuffPost, “This feels like the biggest problem that the fewest people understand about a potential second Trump administration.”

[...]

The ‘Lightbulb Moment’

The push for Schedule F started with what one Trump staffer called a “lightbulb moment.” In 2019, James Sherk, a top White House adviser on civil service and labor policy, was frustrated by reports of federal workers pushing back against the Trump policy agenda. He started reading through existing U.S. law on federal labor rights, and realized that the language about exceptions from civil service protections could actually be interpreted quite broadly. Such a change in interpretation would be a break from decades of precedent. Presidents only bring around 4,000 political appointees with them at the start of a new term, and many additionally require Senate confirmation. These appointees are generally classified as “excepted” — they aren’t required to complete standardized competitive civil service exams, but they also aren’t afforded standard civil service protections. (The “excepted” portion of the federal workforce includes more than a million federal workers under various schedules, though the vast majority of them come from the United States Postal Service, the military, and Department of Veterans affairs.)

But Sherk argued that the “excepted” service should grow much larger, to include “the most important” federal workers — “the people who are telling all the rest of the bureaucracy what to do,” he said in a 2022 interview. In his view, the change would make the federal government more accountable to the White House, and therefore, the American people. “Nothing in [federal law] says that you can only take away the civil service protections of political appointees,” Sherk said. Sherk estimated that Schedule F would have applied to 1% to 3% of the federal workforce, or about 50,000 workers, had Biden not unwound it. But the number actually affected if Trump pursues Schedule F again could be much larger. A Government Accountability Office review of the few agencies that did start making Schedule F conversion lists found that agencies thought anywhere from 2% to 68% of their employees were eligible to be “rescheduled.”

[...]

Project 2025, the 900-page right-wing agenda-in-waiting for Trump cooked up by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other arch-conservative organizations, refers to plans to reintroduce Schedule F in several sections. And one member of the project’s three-person leadership team is Paul Dans, the former chief of staff at the OPM during the Trump administration. The Project 2025 team has signaled that potential staffers in a second Trump White House would need to be on board: A questionnaire for potential new hires in a Trump administration asks applicants if they agree that “the President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.”

HuffPost has a story on how Project 2025 and Schedule F could chill dissent against a potential 2nd Trump.

This is why Americans should vote Joe Biden to stop Project 2025 from taking effect!

Read the full article at HuffPost.

[footnotelovenote]

Sketches of "Costumes of China" (1805)

Drawings by William Alexander (English, 1767-1816) [all images © The Trustees of the British Museum]

Portrait sketch of the Purveyor to Lord Macartney's Embassy; three-quarter length to front, wearing a fur (?) coat and carrying a box with handle in his left hand [Graphite, with watercolour] (ca. 1816)

'A Soldier in an undress'; wearing a long coat with big sleeves, decorated with a golden eagle in a circle on the chest, a cap on his head, long braid over his shoulder, holding a long stick in his right hand; from an album of 82 drawings of China [Watercolour, ink and graphite] (dated 28 November 1793)

'A Peasant and his Child'; a man seated on the ground grasping a small child, whose hands are on his arm but who is twisting away from him, around the waist; from an album of 82 drawings of China [Watercolour, ink and graphite] (ca.1793-97)

'Tartar soldier in his common dress'; full-length, with a flag, bow and arrows; from an album of 82 drawings of China [Watercolour, ink and graphite] (ca.1793-96)

'A labourer'; facing right and pointing ahead with his left hand; wearing a cap on his head and with jacket unfastened, revealing his bare torso, holding a pipe in his left hand and a tobacco pouch suspended from his waist; from an album of 82 drawings of China [Watercolour, ink and graphite] (ca.1793-96)

Portrait of Qiao Renjie (喬人傑) [inscribed "Chou-tazhin, a Mandarin of the civil department; in his Dress of ceremony"]; full-length, wearing a hat with a peacock feather, a string of beads around his neck and with a scroll held aloft in his left hand, standing by a large block of masonry to the left, boat on a body of water and mountain in the right far distance; from an album of 82 drawings of China [Watercolour, ink and graphite] (ca.1793-96)

More info about Qiao Renjie ("Tianjin daotai" at the time this portrait was made) and how "'the eight different classes of mandarin could be distinguished by the style and colour of the buttons on the top of their caps, which ranged from smooth red coral for the first order to engraved gilt brass for the eighth' (Legouix, 1980, p. 54)" at the BM page.

[tenth-sentence]

Most came from landowning families, and tended to be remarkably good at finding reasons to not do things that landowners found distasteful (like raising money for wars).

"Why the West Rules – For Now: The patterns of history and what they reveal about the future" - Ian Morris

[eaglesnick]

“Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.” ― Bruce Coville

The statutory guidance document, "The Civil Service Code" states that as a civil servant you are:

 "...appointed on merit on the basis of fair and open competition and are expected to carry out your role with dedication and a commitment to the Civil Service and its core values: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality."  (The Civil Service Code: GOVUK: 16/03/2015)

Under the expanded heading “Objectivity" the code states:

“You must:

provide information and advice, including advice to ministers, on the basis of the evidence, and accurately present the options and facts

take decisions on the merits of the case

take due account of expert and professional advice."

Not so this Tory government with its right wing, anti-democratic agenda.

The Financial Times reported in 2022 that civil servants were to be protected from views and opinions from anyone who did not agree with government policy.

”UK civil servants have been ordered to trawl through the social media accounts of guest speakers at one government ministry, including going back up to five years to see if they have ever criticised government policy, as part of a new vetting process. The new Cabinet Office rules cover the vetting of outsiders coming into the department to take part in “learning and development” events and urge managers to carefully check the backgrounds of such guests.”  (Financial Times: 14/08/22)

So much for "Objectivity"   How can civil servants "take due account of expert and professional advice" or “present options and facts"  if they are not allowed to be exposed to those who have a different view to the government? 

One year on, and we find that 15 government departments are now actively  monitoring  the social media activity of anyone likely to influence civil servants and government policy.

“Under the guidelines issued in each department, including the departments of health, culture, media and sport, and environment, food and rural affairs, officials are advised to check experts’ Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts. They are also told to conduct Google searches on those individuals, using specific terms such as “criticism of government or prime minister”. (Guardian: 18/11/23)

Needles to say the hypocritical Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced with much heralding of the event that he was appointing a “free speech" tsar to tackle the phenomenon of cancel culture.

“Sunak To Appoint Free Speech Tsar To Tackle Cancel Culture” (richieallen.co.uk: 16/01/23)

But opposition to cancel culture is strictly limited. Apparently “free speech” is not to be allowed within the civil service. Here it is government policy that civil servants be shielded from ANYONE who has criticised the government or who holds a contrary view to perceived Tory wisdom.  While others might be condemned (usually correctly) for censoring alternative views to their own this is not a principle encouraged among those who run the country. For them there is only one view, one set of believes that matter, those of their Tory masters.

[ososperezosos]

October 11, 2023.