11-11-25 - 10am - Waste of Federal Money

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning Dragon and YouTube Michael.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
I guess yeah, whatever. It's so great.

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hearing you guys on K zero A A fifty. It
was a good show yesterday, although I do miss hearing
you on k H zero W. Looking forward to this
morning show that Scott the RN goober O six one two.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
And I approved this message.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
You know, I really I just despise them. I just
utterly despise them. You see, it's k as in the
letter K, and it's oh is in the letter O,
and A is in the letter a apple, you know,
so it's uh kilo oscar alpha, got it. There you go,

(00:51):
So that's what it is. The zero is in the
text line like three three one zero three. If you
didn't have missus Spinner for your you know, your English teacher.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Then you wouldn't understand the difference.

Speaker 4 (01:06):
Yes, opens, make sure you get it right.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
Yeah, clean out your earballs and get it right. You know,
probably not today, but maybe tomorrow. I was listening to
how Roach does the intro and thank your Roach for
doing the intro, and heyj for putting it all together.
But maybe I should sometimes explain to you who those
voices are that you hear that. Yeah, they are saying
my name, because those are particular people that have either

(01:34):
interviewed me or talked about me that I use in
that intro. And I'd be curious if you can guess
who they all are. So if you want to text
me who you think they are, uh, we'll look at that,
and then tomorrow maybe I'll explain to you who you
are who they are, and then I'll I'll let you
in on a little because yesterday I had a had

(01:55):
a nasty text message. Well, I can't stand listening to
your voice, and it's the way you talk and topics
you do. It kind of reminds me of Rush Limbaugh,
and I thought, oh, okay, all right, we'll take that.
Takes that, Yeah, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
Speaking of some text message here Michael and Dragon, I
am moving and have an L shaped desk. Does Michael
want that for the studio?

Speaker 2 (02:15):
No?

Speaker 4 (02:15):
I want this moved over there. Yea, that makes perfect sense.
Which and then this one, Michael, how is your birth?

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (02:22):
Wait, no, I did Michael. If you stop complaining, I'm
going to move over to I Heart Christmas.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
If I stopped complaining, they'll probably send somebody in to have.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
A like a welfare check.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
A mental health check to make sure that I'm okay
if I actually stopped complaining. So we'll, I mean, we'll
keep looking well, you know there will be things that
we will complain about.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
And one more here, Michael. This goes to the previous show.
For those who didn't know, Michael's birthday was this past
weekend and he was having a real hard time trying
to go to a very fancy restaurant and didn't want
his friends who were going with him to pay, so
he was going to try and slip his card to
the mad trote so that they wouldn't have to pay.
So this tech message is in reference to that. Michael,

(03:06):
how was your birthday dinner? Were you successful at paying
for part of the dinner?

Speaker 3 (03:11):
I was successful in paying for the entirety of the
dinner because as everyone was getting seated, I spotted whom
I thought was going to be our server and asked,
are you serving this table over here? And she said,
and her name was dev and she said, yes, I
am sir. So I entered my credit card and I said,
now I want you to put the entire tab on
this card, and you're going to get blowback from those

(03:35):
other three people because it's my birthday. And she goes, oh,
I know, they already told me it was your birthday.
I said, we'll see, so I'm just telling you this
is the deal. And then what happened is one of
the managers came by since they knew it was a
birthday party and wanted to make sure everything was okay.
But he had he laid the bill down on the

(03:58):
table and I said, no, no, no, no, no, no no,
Dev already has my credit card. This is unacceptable. Of course,
then Tamera and Carolol you know their.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Ultimately, I won, as I always do, as I always do.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
So back to this, this consideration of the shutdown and
what nobody really wants to talk about, and that's the
human dimension that got revealed during the shutdown. And of
course the cabal wants you to have all this simpathy
for everybody. Yet when they tell you the stories, the
stories don't really do that. The story's actually kind of

(04:35):
elicit the opposite reaction, which shows just some sometimes how
stupid the cabal is. They'll give you an example. One
internal revenue service attorney earns a six figure salary, spent
the furlough investing twelve thousand dollars in a hot dog
stand that he dubbed Shysters. He sold about six the

(05:00):
hot dogs a day, grossing I'm guessing six hundred dollars,
and he admitted that he had not turned a profit. Now,
I don't think that's the behavior of somebody's on the
brink of financial collapse. I think that's somebody that was
trying to make a point or just wanted to have fun.

(05:23):
You know, when I was in New York with my
granddaughter a couple of weeks ago, first thing she did,
ten thirty at night. We land, We get into Midtown
and get checked in the hotel. She wants to go
walk around. First thing she does she sees a hot
dog stand. She's never been to New York before. I
would will grandpook?

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Can we get it?

Speaker 3 (05:38):
Can we get hot dogs? It's damn right, we can
get hot dogs. Of course, maybe that's who I bought
it from.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Another story, there's an IT specialist that spent her furloughed
time self publishing cat fantasy novels. She netted less than
a hundred bucks. Now that's your creative pursuit. But you
know what, it suggests to me that federal employment insulates

(06:05):
people from market realities because in a robust economy where
skilled coders analysts are actually in very high demand right now,
you might expect rapid re entry into the private work sector.
Into the private sector, yeah, a lot of those furloughed
employees choose not to pursue those opportunities, either because they

(06:26):
already had ample savings or because their government specific expertise
was not easily transferable. Now, both of those possibilities, I
think point to structural and efficiency. Either compensation so generous
that it do it dolls the initiative of the individual,

(06:48):
or it's a skill that is so specialized and so
narrow that it lacks relevance outside the bureaucracy. And those
anecdotes that pattern aligned with broader data. The Government Accountability Office,
they they have for decades now, but Congress isn't pay

(07:09):
any attention to it. They have long identified overlapping programs,
redundant offices, misaligned missions, overlapping missions going all the way
back fourteen years, probably longer. Those recommendations, when they are followed,
has saved or recovered more than seven hundred billion dollars,

(07:31):
but there are still billions more there's still at least
another seven hundred billion dollars. You know, let's think I'm
not very good at math. You'll soon learn that seven
hundred billion. If you could replicate that for the say,
the next ten years, oh seven hundred that's one point
for trillion dollars. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget,

(07:53):
that's a website that you ought to follow and you
ought to get to know. They estimate that reducing the
billion workforce by just ten percent could save three hundred
and fifty billion dollars a decade, even when you account
for exceptions in revenue collecting or enforcement roles. So if
the workforce was trammed by a quarter, nearly a trillion

(08:14):
dollars could be saved. Now that's not an abstract figure.
That's a real life figure from the Government Accountability Office.
It re represents hospitals, unbuilt, schools, unfunded, national debt, unpaid
because resources are absorbed by the bureaucracy and they're not
directed toward outcomes. For those of you who listened to

(08:36):
me for years, I've tried to give a very simplified explanation.
You pay a dollar in federal income tax. That dollar
by the time it gets to its ultimate end result.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Let's say it's a dollar. It's going to the Department.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
Of Education, one of my favorite organizations that absolutely does
nothing to improve education in this country. So you pay
a dollar, that dollar has to get collected, so you
have to pay the bureaucrats at the IRS to collect
your dollar. Once that dollar gets collected, that dollar goes
into the US Treasury. Treasury bureaucrats have to account for that.

(09:12):
Then Congress and all of their staffers on the appropriations committees,
all of them have to appropriate appropriate that one dollar.
So that one dollar, by the time it gets appropriated,
which means it only gets authorized to be spent by
the Department of Education, has probably been reduced by five cents,
so now it's ninety five cents. Now that appropriate a

(09:35):
dollar gets into the Office of Management and Budget in
the Office of in the Executive Office of the President.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Once it goes there, then.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
They send it to the Department of Education, so they
eat up some of that dollar. Then it gets to
the bureaucracy or the Department of Education, the black hole
of education, and that dollar probably gets eaten up by
I don't know, twenty five cents. Because it's a huge bureaucracy.
You have their salaries, you have their overhead, you have

(10:06):
their benefits, you have all of the per diem, you
have everything that costs to employ that bureaucrat in the
Department of Education.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
But you know what that bureaucrat does.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
That bureaucrat does not send that seventy five cents it's
remaining of your dollar to say the Douglas.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
County school Board.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
No, it goes to the Colorado Department of Education, where bureaucrats. Again,
because a salary overhead costs eight up part of that
seventy five cents, that gets sent to the state of Colorado.
So now it gets reduced by and let's just be conservative,
it gets reduced by fifteen cents.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
So now you got sixty cents.

Speaker 3 (10:45):
So barely not even two thirds of your dollar that
you paid an income taxes. By the time it gets
to the Colorado Department of Education has been reduced to
sixty cents. And then it gets sent to a local
school board and the local school board has to administer it.
So by the time it gives to oh, I don't know,
material in a classroom salary for a teacher, whatever it

(11:07):
might be, it's now being reduced to say, fifty cents.
That's how inefficient the federal government is. Now, if you're
a critic of reform, your argument is going to be
the federal workers are underpaid compared to the private sector counterparts.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Guess what the evidence says otherwise.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
When you go to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the
average average here, so I'm acknowledge it is an average.
The average federal civilian worker earned about one hundred and
fifty seven thousand dollars in combined wages and benefits for
the year twenty twenty three, the last year I could
find numbers.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Now, how's that compared to your salary? One hundred and.

Speaker 3 (11:51):
Fifty seven thousand combined wages and benefits. And by the way,
I can tell you, as the former undersecretary, I can
tell you that those benefits they're.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
Pretty damn good.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
So while the private sector average was around what one
hundred and fifty seven thousand for the average federal civilian worker,
while the private sector average is ninety four thousand dollars,
So we're paying a sixty seven percent premium to hire
a federal bureaucrat. And what drives that difference? What drives

(12:24):
that delta well, largely by benefits defined pensions, paid leave,
health coverage that is far more generous than what you're getting.
I promise you that the Congressional Budget Office, the CBOs
that's referred to controlling for education and job type still
finds the federal benefits outstripped private equivalents by nearly fifty

(12:47):
percent on average. So whether you take the sixty seven
percent premium or the fifty percent premium, either way, we're
still overpaying for federal bureaucrats. And these advantages come with
near total job security. You've probably for new listeners on
this program. When I first went to d C back

(13:08):
with the inauguration of George W. Bush Bush forty three,
my first job as General counsel and what was then
FEMA was at personnel issues, and they came to me
with some people that we needed to fire. During my
almost six years in DC, it took me for one bureaucrat.

(13:30):
It took me almost three years to fire one bureaucrat.
Thought he was doing. He was clocking in every morning
at eight am. He was always on time, and then
he would spend the entire day until noon watching porn
on a government computer. He'd take a lunch break for
an hour. He was very prompt. Then he't come back
at one o'clock. In between one and five o'clock, he'd

(13:52):
watch porn. And they came to me with rings of
those old green print out IBM sh showing all of
the all of the IP addresses that he had been
visiting for the past like several years. I mean, we're
talking reams and reams of paper. Took me forever to
fire this guy for not doing anything. Why well, when

(14:16):
he's a member of one or two unions too, I
got to go through all the OPM procedural processes. Then
of course we get to go through litigation, we go
through It takes me forever to fire one individual. So
if you're happy doing that, if you're happy paying that
premium while you're sloving off to work today or while
you're doing whatever you're doing, while they, on average are

(14:37):
making anywhere between fifteen and sixty seven percent more than you,
and you're happy about that, well, then that's just some
kind of stupid. I mean, that really is just some
kind of stupid. And as I say, it comes with
near total job security. Do you tell me or what
percent of federal employees are fired in a given year.
What do you think the number is? Just take a

(14:58):
whild ass guest, I don't care you get a number
in your head. You're thinking, what twenty five percent? That
seems really unreasonable, doesn't it? Ten percent? One percent? How
about zero point two five percent of federal employees are
fired in any given year. In fact, in most agencies,

(15:20):
a worker is statistically more likely to die of natural
causes than he years to be dismissed for bad performance.
In the private sector, you could never sustain a private
sector enterprise that way. And what happens nobody ever goes
to the next level of thought on these issues. That

(15:41):
creates insulation. And when you're insulated from accountability, that breeds inertia.
The quit rate.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
What do you what do you think quit rate is
in the federal government? It's rough.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
It's roughly one fourth out of the private sector, and
once inside, they often never leave. In fact, when when
I became the undersecretary, there are people who they're called deeks,
double income, no kids. They live in Northern Virginia. They
vote predominantly Democrat, and they stay there for their entire lives.

(16:15):
And why wouldn't you the likely you have getting terminated
is very remote. You progress your way through the GSA
schedule in terms of your pay, you eventually make the
senior executive service. So now you're you have even further
He had even better protections, and so now you just
stay until you retire. It breeds absolutely breeds inertia because

(16:40):
they very rarely leave.

Speaker 5 (16:42):
Michael, how do other countries handle situations like our shutdown?
Or are we the only ones that have this wonder
of stupidity? Just curious?

Speaker 2 (16:56):
It's funny.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
It's funny you need that top back because as Cad
was giving that news and I was, you know, normally here,
it's kind of interesting dragon over there, you know, over
there on the dark side, we.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
Never really listened to the news.

Speaker 4 (17:08):
Correct.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
We'd have to have people point out to us some
dumbassy that had been said during the news. Yeah, so
we had to go back and listen to it, and
we make fun of it. Well, I actually found myself
because Chad's sitting there, actually found myself listening to Chad
and I thought, oh, I hadn't thought about that. This
only goes through like sometime in January. So we'll take

(17:30):
up when we find out it closes down, we'll just
take all of these shows and rerun them as best
of So, you know, I'll just go on vacation for
a while because it'll be the same old crap over again, exactly,
just the same old crap over again, just a different day.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
That's all.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
That's all it's going to be. Then, the other thing
I got to thinking about as I listened to that
Live news was Jonathan giving the traffic report. We need
to train as we got to train the audience, we
need to train them too. Since Colorado has surpassed California
in dumbassory, they have to learn that it is not
the Valley Highway anymore. It is the twenty five. It

(18:08):
is not to seventy, it's the two seventy. It's not
I seventy, it's not the mouse trap. We need a name, nick,
a new name for the mouse trap, and it's the seventy.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
So how long do you think we can them to.

Speaker 3 (18:22):
Switch that the pothole the pothole, Yeah, the pothole, just
the pothole.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
That will be the new name for the interchange the pothole.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
Then let me just encourage you before I start throwing
a fit. If you want me to read your text
message on air, because there are a couple of good
text messages, but you just much to the wrong number.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
So yes, I'm.

Speaker 4 (18:50):
Confessing that you still had the old window open.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Well, I came in and it's and it's open because
the guy before me, whatever his name is, left it open.
The dirty leg guy. Yeah, the dirty leg guy. The
guy doesn't shower his legs. But I just remember, I
don't understand. So if if you want me to read
some of your text messages, you've got to transform over

(19:13):
to three three one zero three keyword Micha or Michael,
all right, Mike or Michael yes, or Michael and Michael
or Michael and Mike.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
Or.

Speaker 4 (19:28):
That doesn't roll off the tongue so much, or just dumbs.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
What if we should get him to change that's trying
to get him to change it to that we're just stupid, dumb, stupid,
just a change stupid, they stupid. I'll reach out to
Tracy so we can't get that changed. Let's go back
to this imbalance for a moment. Now you may think
I'm being a jerk.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
That wouldn't be new.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
But you think I'm being a jerk, Well, guess what
I think that most of the American public senses this imbalance,
and you intuitively know it, but you don't want to
admit it.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
Polls consistently show that.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
Majorities described the federal government as wasteful and inefficient, which
gives me some hope of the American publics not as
stupid sometimes I think they are this shutdown. Far from
dispelling that perception, I think actually reinforce that perception when
you think about all those departments and agencies just sitting idle,

(20:26):
and there was no catastrophic consequence. The world didn't come
to an end. McDonald's continued to serve me in my diet,
coke in the morning when I drove through. My internet
at home continued to work. The televisions in the studio
are still working. They're even working at home, my car ran.

(20:47):
Everything seems to be going just as it's supposed to.
In the private sector, competition will ensure that if you're inefficient,
you're going to get in the marketplace. When you're in
the government, inefficiency is often rewarded by well, you get
a bigger budget, you can hire more people, you get

(21:09):
new layers of management, and every layer brings costs to
get compounded. Just like compound interests, it just ads to
the ads, to the ads to the ads. I witnessed
that myself when we did that stupid creation of the
Department of Homeland Security. It was unbelievable the amount of
bureaucracy they got piled on top of me.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
And I was the freaking.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Undersecretary of Homeland Security in a department of at that
time only one hundred and eighty thousand. Look at the
numbers now, so I'm one of four. You get the
secretary of the deputy secretary and a couple of undersecretaries,
and yet they still managed to pile on bureaucracy on

(21:52):
top of bureaucracy. Now, I want to make clear now
I'm not trying to diminish the dedication of truly essential
personnel vater agents, air traffic controllers, law enforcement officers, active
duty military. They continue, as I said, to serve without pay,
and they are the backbone of national competence, truly competent.

(22:14):
But the problem is when I make that comparison, that
contrast underscores what the problem is, because the workers most
vital to this country's functioning are often paid less and
treated worse than those whose jobs can be suspended indefinitely
without pay. So we now have a system that rewards

(22:34):
administrative proliferation and restrain the essential jobs. That's stupid, it's
really stupid. The goal, then, is not cruelly toward public servants,
is we need to be clear in our thinking about
public purpose. So we ought to be thinking about right

(22:57):
sizing the government. And that means a resources with necessity,
not with political ideology. It means you got to distinguish
between what must be done by government and what can
be better handled by the markets, by communities, or by automation.
Take TSA one of my favorite favorite government bureaucracies. They

(23:21):
keep me so safe when I travel on by air
it's freaking unbelievable. You don't understand scar sarcasm. Yet you're
gonna have to learn to understand sarcasm to get through
this program. You knew who was handling security prior to
nine to eleven. That's right, the airlines. And you can't
fault the airlines for nine to eleven because we had

(23:44):
no idea, oh they're going to do that. Well, some
people did, but we failed to communicate that with each other.
So there's there's that problem. But that's a government problem.
Who has the greatest vested interest in making certain that
planes aren't eyes or used as weapons the airlines. They

(24:04):
don't want to lose billions of dollars in equipment. They
don't want to pay up billions of dollars in wrongful
death lawsuits. They don't want to do that. So put
them in charge of airport security and you'll find it'll
be more efficient, more effective. You'll get through quicker, it'll
be easier, they'll use the most modern technology, and it
won't be intrusive, and you won't get a protology examination

(24:26):
every time you go through. Mark my words, Michael. Just
because you have changed stations and.

Speaker 6 (24:35):
Moved over to KOA and have garnered a few new
listeners from the KOA listeners does not give them cart
blanche to get on the airwaves and quite frankly, bring
this show down to the dumps Why do you think

(24:55):
they brought you in?

Speaker 2 (24:57):
Stay off the.

Speaker 4 (24:58):
Air I'm just as confused as you are. As I
said all the time across the hall, I don't leave them,
I just play them. I'm not sure if he's complaining
about us being the dumpster and we need to stay
off of the air, or whether or not he's complaining

(25:18):
about that the new goobers are getting on the air
with these talkbacks and the text messages prior to.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
Him getting on the air with God.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
I don't know, but he goes to prove my tell
you my theorem anymore. It's my it's a law of physics.
You can't please everybody all the time, and if you try,
you're gonna fail.

Speaker 4 (25:39):
So you can piss everybody off.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
But you can piss everybody else. Yeah, you can't do that.

Speaker 4 (25:44):
And a further reminder that text message to the text
message line is three three one zero three. Text Mike
or Michael or Mike or Michael first so it gets
over to us. And of course leave talkbacks. When you're
listening live to KOA on the iHeart app, hit that
little red microphone button in the top corner and you
can you have thirty seconds to leave us whatever you
want like that, or.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
Who knows, Maybe maybe we're the nonsense and we don't
get it.

Speaker 4 (26:09):
I'm sure it may.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
Sometimes we don't even get it alone get it?

Speaker 3 (26:14):
So And I've already been called the sea word by
somebody on the text line too.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Wow, Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
Have we think I've used the name Donald Trump today
and apparently I'm a Trump seaword. So yeah, huh, that's
that's pretty impressive day too. And I'm already I'm already
a Trump seaword. Wow, pretty good, all right. In the
final analysis, I know we've tried it before, but less
government could actually mean better government. The private sector, they've

(26:42):
known for years that lean operations always outperform a voted operation. Well,
that same logic applies to the public sector. When you
have the department or an agency that grows for the
sake of just growing.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
That means that you and.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
Haze taxpayers pay twice. We pay once in the taxes
that we pay, and then we pay in the lost
agility or the loss productivity, or the actual loss of
even meeting what your mission is in the in that
department or agency. So the longest shutdown in the history
of this country is revealed the size of the opportunity

(27:17):
that is actually before us. Now, we've flirted with this
concept when Elon Musk and Doge tried to tried to
streamize the federal government. That work was met by a
buzzsaw from Republicans and Democrats alike. Yet the shutdown has

(27:39):
once again proven that we can do more with less.
But that's going to require Republicans to step up.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Now, this debate is not new.

Speaker 3 (27:51):
Every administration always talks about how I'm going to, you know,
make government more efficient. I'm sick of hearing it. I
want to see the actual civil service reform. And I know,
don't get me wrong, I've been in the belly of
the beast. You have not, so I know the hurdles
it's gonna take to overcome that idea of well, it's

(28:13):
just pure political inertia that keeps it from happening. That
political inertia is by designed created by public sector employee unions,
is designed by the personnel policies that protect anybody from
being demoted or terminated. It's designed, those hurdles are designed
by an outsized salary formula. It's designed because of the

(28:41):
outsized benefits that they get.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
We ran on half power.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
We ran on half power throughout this shutdown, and the
country didn't crash. That fact alone out of guide reform
far more than any sort of sentimental defense of the
status quo. It's got to change, and Republicans and Democrats
alike are both responsible for getting us to where we
are today. So if we're going to accomplish anything, it's

(29:10):
going to require some sort of fire in the belly
of taxpayers to finally revolt and say, you know, enough
is enough. We're just we just can't do it anymore.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
And that means that.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
Individually, every single one of us is going to have
to start calling out all the lies in the bull
craft that Democrats feed us, all the lies in the
bull craft that Republicans feed us, and we're going to
have to say stop it, to stop it, let's see
some real reform introduced. And then if you get into
a shouting match when you shut down the government over that,

(29:44):
at least we're shutting it down over something that matters.
And I'd ask you right now to think about and
tell me what was this last shutdown about?

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Anyway, m do you know