February 16, 2025
Week Four: No Rest for the Grifters
By Clarice Feldman
In the 1960s when my husband and I first worked in Washington, D.C., according to the Office of Personnel Management, there were about 1,808,000 (which includes military; non-Department of Defense was 761,000) federal employees. At the start of President Trump’s second term there were 2.3 million, of which about 775,000 were military and Department of Defense employees. This astonishing bloat in the federal bureaucracy is even more inexplicable when you consider that in this same period so many of the jobs being performed by these people have been made strikingly more efficient with the creation and improvement of computers and the internet, requiring fewer personnel to accomplish more.
A rough estimate is that about 10% or 275,000 federal employees are no longer on the payroll. 75,000 took the payout option and there were about 200,000 probationary employees who were laid off. There may be more as agencies are lopping off components. It’s possible not every probationary employee was riffed, but I think this is a fair estimate.
The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency has exposed the often-archaic bookkeeping and computer systems and the enormous waste and grifting in the operation of the federal government. I will deal below with some of the things DOGE has uncovered, but the big news is the President has signed a new executive order this week that empowers DOGE to spearhead the complete reorganization of the federal workforce. Among other things, it gives DOGE hiring approval for all positions; reduces the number of new hires (one for every four departing employees) with exceptions for those performing jobs relating to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement. Agency heads must make plans for reductions in force. The head of the Office of Personnel Management must initiate rulemaking to revise suitability standards, including requiring timely compliance with federal law (a large number of IRS employees are themselves tax delinquents), along with barring those without citizenship status or who are guilty of theft or negligent use of government resources and equipment. Agency heads must submit within 30 days reorganization plans, including which agencies or subcomponents should be eliminated or consolidated.
This reorganization is absolutely essential. We are 36 trillion dollars in debt. A trillion (if all these zeroes are hard to grasp) is 1000 billion. By last count I saw, in a matter of weeks, DOGE has already eliminated about 60 billion dollars of waste and fraud.
As the legacy press doesn’t seem to be giving this the attention it deserves, let me give you a sampling of the cuts and diversions which caught my attention this week.
“SHOCK: The U.S. Army has diverted over $151 million meant for soldiers’ food, according to the Military Times. Financial records show that more than half of the money collected from junior enlisted troops was spent elsewhere. Food fund allocations at select Army bases: • Fort Stewart, Georgia: $17 million collected, $2.1 million spent on food • Fort Drum, New York: $18.2 million collected, $3.9 million spent on food • Fort Carson, Colorado: $22 million collected, $5 million spent on food • Fort Riley, Kansas: $19.1 million collected, $5.1 million spent on food • Fort Bliss, Texas: $22 million collected, $11 million spent on food • Fort Cavazos, Texas: $42.5 million collected, $11.7 million spent on food • Fort Bragg, North Carolina: $34.6 million collected, $16.6 million spent on food • Fort Campbell, Kentucky: $18 million collected, $5.1 million spent on food. Army officials refused to disclose where the missing funds went, despite growing concerns about food shortages on bases. Soldiers require sufficient meals with adequate caloric intake and nutrition. Meanwhile, taxpayers demand that their funds are spent on what the U.S. government claims they are being spent on. The Pentagon continues to be in need of reform. The DOGE's audit of the Department of Defense should be an informative one, since it has failed seven audits in a row.”
A $50 MILLION Biden-era environmental justice grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, which believes “climate justice travels through a Free Palestine” was cancelled by Lee Zeldin.
”The US government sent $2.7 TRILLION in Medicare & Medicaid money overseas to people who were NOT eligible to receive it. That’s 8% of our national debt. Medicare isn't going broke. The money is being stolen.”
The U.S. State Dept. Accidentally Gave $239 Million to Taliban Since Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal.
As you must know, everyone whose rice bowl was emptied ran to copasetic judges whom they expected to issue injunctive relief. Margot Cleveland has a running list of all these cases and their present status.
A number of temporary restraining orders were issued, which as a general matter are not appealable, but once that is followed by preliminary injunctive relief they are, so some will be heading up the judicial ladder soon, and in my view most will be reversed. Bill Shipley who posts on X as “Shipwreckedcrew” offers clear and reliable commentary as these cases proceed. He also has a Substack and last week offered some worthwhile observations on the FBI and DoJ. He argues the reporting on the firing of the J6 prosecutors and higher-level FBI officials, for example, is in error:
FBI Director Christopher Wray resigned his position on January 19, 2025. Deputy Director Paul Abbate resigned his position on January 20, 2025. Acting Attorney General James McHenry, the appointed a Special Agent In Charge of the New York Counterterrorism Section to the position of Acting Director.
It has been reported that at the same time McHenry took these steps he also communicated to eight of the most senior FBI managers -- presumably those hold the position of “Assistant Directors” -- that they should retire or face termination by a specific date. The Assistant Director who oversaw the Washington Field Office, David Sundberg, was one of the eight forced out.
In addition to those eight, it has been rumored that approximately one-half of all the Special-Agents-in-Charge of the FBI’s 54 Field Offices will also be forced to retire or face termination.
FIRING OF PROSECUTORS WHO HANDLED JANUARY 6 CASES.
This move has been the most mis-reported over the past 48 hours. To understand what steps were taken on Friday afternoon (January 31) it is necessary to understand the changes made to the staffing of January 6 prosecutions going back to the beginning.
When the prosecutions began in early 2021, the cases numbered in the dozens and were handled by parceling them out among the AUSAs who worked full-time in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. As the number of cases climbed past 100 and then 200, that was beyond the ability of D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office to handle alone and still handle the other cases that existed prior to January 6.
That led DOJ to “detail” AUSAs from other offices around the country to handle January 6 cases. When I first became involved as a defense attorney I had prosecutors assigned to cases from California, New Mexico, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, etc. [snip]
All of that largely ended in early 2024, and I began to encounter new faces among prosecutors assigned to the “Capitol Siege Unit” [snip] hired under a 2 year contract to do one thing, prosecute January 6 cases.
The announcement this past Friday regarding the firing January 6 prosecutors only concerned this relatively small number of “term hires” estimated to be 25-30. There was one interesting aspect of the letter that was made public — it referenced the fact that since the election, some unspecified number of these term employees were moved into permanent positions that came open because of resignations by regular AUSAs after the victory by Pres. Trump.
In three of the most recent efforts to hamstring DOGE, the plaintiffs failed in two of them.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has succeeded in a major court battle. Judge John Bates determined DOGE qualifies as an agency and thus ruled that it could access records from key agencies. "For the reasons explained above, on the record as it currently stands and with limited briefing on the issue, the case law defining agencies indicates that plaintiffs have not shown a substantial likelihood that [DOGE] is not an agency," he wrote. "If that is so, [DOGE] may detail its employees to other agencies consistent with the Economy Act," he added. Musk celebrated the decision and called for further judicial accountability. Despite opposition, DOGE’s mission to streamline the federal government moves forward. The American people gain hope for more government transparency, accountability and efficiency.
A suit for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) brought by fired inspectors general was rejected by Judge Anna Reyes, who “tore into the lawyers for waiting three weeks to file a lawsuit and then demanding an emergency, same-day TRO.
“The judge forced the lawyers to withdraw their TRO motion and then threatened them with sanctions.”
And Judge Tanya Chutkan, no friend of this administration, appeared skeptical of the request by a number of blue-state attorneys general that she issue a TRO against DOGE because it was appointed in violation of the Constitution’s appointment clause. Subsequently, however, she ordered the plaintiffs to file a proposed order which suggests she may enter a TRO after all, The proposed order is sweeping in scope. It appears to be the most sweeping restriction of all on removing personnel or accessing data. The government has responded asking her to wait until Monday and hold a hearing before entering any order and challenges the representations of the plaintiffs as lacking any merit
In any event the notion of a district court’s having the power to issue nationwide injunctions seems to grant them extraordinary powers not envisioned in the Constitution. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have already questioned their legality, and a case set to be heard soon at the Supreme Court McHenry v. Texas Top Cop Shop Inc. raises the issue directly.
