Monday Mood: Speaking Only When It Counts

I am doing surprisingly well.  DC continues to be in chaos. The push back is starting to gain momentum.  Judges are issuing injunctions against the clearly unconstitutional orders.  Appeals will follow, and enforcement of those orders will likely be the breaking point. The legal answer at that point, if HWSNBN refuses to comply is impeachment and removal.  There are cracks appearing in the majority in the House and Senate. It could happen this time.  Mitch confirmed that he will not run for reelection in 2027, making him less beholden to HWSNBN. He has a lot of sway in the Senate. 

It is important to remember, that an Executive Order, is a direction to a Federal Administrative body, on how to do the business of government. And Executive Order is not a law, it can't overturn a statute.  It can, suspend work on something created by law. But that does not change the law. 

When the dust settles, and it will sooner or later.  We will rebuild. And in rebuilding, maybe we can do better.  There are some entrenched inefficiencies in the system.  There are some long time staff with hardened attitudes that resist change.  Many of them are retiring or being forced out. This is a brutal way to bring change. Some of them have been obstacles to improvements. (Though I never worked for the Federal government, I include myself among those with a hardening of the attitudes that needed to let the next generation lead into the future.) 

This is not the way to manage change. 

Think of it this way. We have an old bridge over the inlet to an bay.  Everyone knows the bridge is out of date, rusting, and failing slowly.  What we should do is start the planning and engineering process and build a new better bridge. What we often do, is wait for a catastrophic failure, a ship bumps a pier and the bridge collapses like a house of cards into the bay. Then we start planning for the new bridge we should have planned for, long before people died. (Yes I am thinking of Baltimore here. Maryland has a couple of major bridges that need to be replaced, this was just one of them.) What the administration is doing is knocking those bridges down. The sensible thing to do would be to start the planning process to find what needs to be changed and change it in an orderly fashion. 

This past week there was a claim that Social Security had a bunch of people 150 years old drawing retirement benefits.  This was based on bad data. And the professionals that worked at SSA, knew that the data was wrong and how to work with it. No one asked them, before making outrageous claims. To fix the data they needed to replace a massive database, that was written 40 years ago in a nearly dead computer language that lacked coding for dates outside of limited ranges. The cost of the fix was estimated at $9-million (more than editing the code, my oldest brother could do that for a-couple-hundred-grand, replacing it with a modern database.) It was decided to live with the error, rather than spend the money. If we had logically talked through the issues, this would have been fixed in a rational way.  It should have been fixed 25 years ago. Maybe now it will be. 

My strategy, 

Stay calm.

Understand this is ugly, and when it is over we will rebuild.

Speak up, rationally and logically when appropriate. 

Let the legal and political process do it's thing. 

Understand that much of what HWSNBN wants to do, he can't do, unless we stand back silently and let it happen. 

The toes he is stepping on today, are at the end of the legs, that go up to the butts he will need to kiss someday.