11-15-25 The Weekend Hour 2: What did you miss during the government shutdown?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fo Night. Michael Brown joins me here, the former FEMA
director of talk show.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Host Michael Brown. Brownie, no, Brownie, You're doing a heck
of a job The Weekend with Michael Brown broadcasting life
from Denver, Colorado.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
You've joined the Weekend with Michael Brown. I'm glad to
have you joining the program today. A couple of rules
of engagement. If you want to tell me anything or
ask me anything, tm A or AMA. The text line
numbers three three one zero three three three one zero three,
keyword micro Michael, go follow me on X at Michael
Brown USA. Let's get started. Along with what I just
said in the last hour about disparity and about we

(00:36):
tend to focus on the wrong things. I want to
give a broad overview now. This this is part I
did this earlier this week on the local program, so
it may sound a little familiar to you, although I'm
going to I've fine tuned my notes a little bit
and added some things and taking some things away. But
I want to talk about what the government shut down

(00:59):
taught us. I would say the first thing that we
ought to learn is it cost us a lot of money. Now,
what do you mean money, Michael? The government shut down
and people weren't getting paid. It cost us in productivity.
The most easy, the easiest thing to notice would be

(01:20):
the cutback in airlines, the cut back in flights that
has such a ripple effect through the economy that it's
it's freaking unbelievable to me that the Democrats would go
so long that it got to the point where with
and look, my wife at one time thought, when she

(01:42):
was in high school, because her dad flew a private
plane and she learned to be a pilot while she
was in high school, that she always thought she wanted
to be an air traffic controller. And since we lived
in Oklahoma, she thought, oh, I can I can go
to the air traffic to the FAA he's training center
in Oklahoma City. And she studied it and really thought

(02:05):
about it, and then decided, Eh, I don't think I
want that job because the pressure is absolutely tremendous. I
would I would equate. I'm not a pediatric neurologist and
don't even pretend to be one. But I have a
friend I went to high school with who is a
pediatric neurologist. He's sent retired. He's since retired because well,

(02:32):
you operate those little baby brains for so long, and
it's so intense that you wear out pretty quickly. I
compare the two to be the same, and both of
them wised up. They were I think tamor bit of
wonderful air traffic controller. She's meticulous, she's got a little
bit of OCD in her two, so she's gonna be very,
very careful. But when she looked at the intensity of it. Now,

(02:55):
maybe in a small airport, maybe not quite as bad,
but it's only not quite as bad simply because you
might have fewer flights. But still, even that five flights
a day are incredibly important because there's you know how
many sola five hundred souls or more on board those
five different airplanes, and you got to make sure that

(03:16):
they don't run into each other. Can you imagine if
Elon Musk actually invents the flying car, Yeah, get out
of my way, don't cut off in front of me.
Instead of road rage, will have air rage. Oh, I
can't wait for that. That'll be fun, won't it. But
when you have to slow down the flow of air

(03:37):
traffic between airports, that means that maybe some really important
meetings or some deals got postponed, Some transactions didn't take place.
It means that not as many pilots earned as much money,
not as many people went on vacation or got delayed,

(03:58):
and they had to spend extra money on a hotel room,
and they didn't get to spend the money they were
going to spend, you know, on on their vacation to
Aspen or wherever. I don't know, but it ripples through
the economy. And what we don't realize is when we
get the GDP numbers if we do, because the governments
has been shut down, so those numbers are going to

(04:18):
be sketchy at best for the fourth quarter. But even
when we do get some numbers, I'll bet you that
our GDP, which would have been somewhere maybe between three
and four percent, isn't going to be that high. So
there was a loss to our gross domestic product. There
was a loss to the economy, but it's beyond that too.

(04:39):
We also learned, oh wait a minute, the longest government
shut down in US history, and how many of us
really missed anything? What did you miss? Serious question if
there's and I'm not looking for smart ass answers, I'm
looking for serious answers, which good luck on that right

(05:03):
if you truly missed something for I'll give you an example.
You had just turned sixty five, sixty seven, whatever the
age is for to start taking Social Security, and you
couldn't get an appointment, or you couldn't get something done.
You had a permit, let's say, some federal permit that

(05:25):
you needed to get and you couldn't get that done.
I'd like to hear some examples three three, one zero
three keyword Mike or Michael. But there was also things
that maybe didn't get done in the government. But from
my perspective, again, your mileage may vary. I didn't miss anything.
The planes did fly, albeit not as many. My mail

(05:49):
showed up, the same book mail that I tend to
just throw away that showed up. We seem to survived. Now.
I know that if you're a federal worker that you
were really upset and worried because well, your paycheck didn't
come through. You may have gotten a deposit notice, but

(06:12):
it was zero point zero zero. The bad the good
news for you, The bad news for the rest of
us is you're not like the private sector, because if
we get riffed, oh there might be a little tiny severance,
or there might be a little tiny you know something,

(06:33):
but you just don't get paid until they call you back,
so you got to go do something else. You as
a federal work on the other hand, are going to
get your back pay. Yes, you're going to get your
back pay. See, there's a huge difference between the public
sector and the private sector. But I what you think
about it in terms of this, what does it mean

(06:58):
when and these numbers are variable? What does it mean
when you have six hundred seventy thousand workers that get furloughed,
but another seven hundred and thirty thousand operate the essential
part of the government, and so we don't really miss anything.

(07:20):
What are we paying for? What are we paying for?
Six hundred seventy thousand almost three quarters of a million
workers get furloughed, and in so far as my life
is concerned, I didn't miss a beat. So one of
my Michael and I were talking to me to break
about how much I pay intact, well not how much,

(07:40):
but just the amount of taxes that I pay every
year is just obscene. And I'm sure compared to you
it may not be obscene at all, because maybe you
pay ten times what I do, or maybe you pay
half what I do, But what are we paying for?
Ask yourself? What are we paying for? And then I

(08:01):
kept hearing this term non essential. Wait a minute, no essential,
that's not a political label, that is an actual government classification.
So every department, agent, the department and agency, their personnel office,
their chief personnel officer has to decide who's essential, who's

(08:25):
non essential, what can we get rid of, who can
we send home without pay? And who do we have
to keep. Well, we obviously kept air traffic controllers, we
kept the border patrol, and we kept military personnel working.
Although my understanding is the military deal a lot of
these people kept working, but because they were essential, so

(08:47):
they kept working but without pay, albeit they knew they
would get paid eventually. So all the other government crap
that goes on, you know, all of the paper pushing,
all that went on back, continue to go on. No
it didn't. It did not. That's my point. It did
not go on, and we did not miss it, and

(09:09):
the Republic survived. Wow, that experiment may have shown us
things that perhaps the Democrats really didn't want us to know.
It's the weekend with Michael Brown. Text line three three
one zero three keyword micha Rol Michael what else did
we learn next? Welcome back to the Weekend with Michael Brown.

(09:37):
Glad to have you with me on your podcast app.
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five days of the weekday program and the weekend program.
So think about this. Think about it this way. The

(10:01):
government operated for virtually a month with half the workforce IDOL.
The only conclusion you can draw from that is that
we can get by with your employees and more efficient
business mechanisms, more efficient ways of doing business. In fact,

(10:24):
it happens in the private sector all the time. How
many of you work for a company that has been
downsized and maybe a few people have been laid off,
and then someone's come to you and said, by the way,
lucky you you still have a job, and by the way,
you got these five extra jobs to do too. So, yes,

(10:45):
it happens all of the time, but not in the government. No,
it just grows. It is like a metastatic cancer, and
it just grows and grows and grows. And the bureaucrats
know that as they make their way up through the
GSA levels and they finally get to the Senior Executive
Service level, that now they're set for life. They're really

(11:07):
set for life. And one reason is they're called dinks,
double income, no kids, and these dinks are dominant in
Northern Virginia, Maryland and DC. And so you think about
a couple that are in the Senior Executive Service, each
pulling down let's just say conservatively, I under seventy five

(11:28):
thousand dollars apiece, So double income no kids are pulling down,
you know, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.
So of course everything's expensive in DC because of that.
But what if half of them to be gone and
we can still get stuff done. There were two stories
that I used last week, and I'll share them with

(11:49):
you too. One internal revenue service lawyer earning a six
figure salary, spent the furlough investing twelve thousand dollars in
hot dog stand that he called shysters. I thought was
pretty clever, right. He sold about sixty hot dogs a
day grossing I'm guessing I am still guessing on this,

(12:11):
perhaps six hundred dollars, and he admitted that he didn't
turn a profit. Wait a minute, but you were claiming
that you were on the edge of financial brink. Yet
that's what you did. You found twelve thousand dollars to
invest in a hot dog stand. You called it shysters,
you spent or you sold about sixty dogs a day,

(12:34):
and you may have grossed six hundred dollars and you
didn't turn a profit. That is not the behavior of
somebody on the financial brink. That was the first story.
First the second story, I found a federal IT specialist
spent her downtime self publishing cat fantasy novels. Cat fantasies

(12:55):
netted less than a hundred bucks. Now it's a cree
any pursuit, but it suggests that federal employment does what
it insulates them from the market reality. You think about
a robust economy where someone skilled in coding, where analysts

(13:16):
are in high demand, quite frankly, where workers trade workers
are in high demand, earning six figures or more. Hmm,
you would think that you could have rapid re entry
into the private sector. But those furloughed employees chose not
to do that, And I think they didn't do it

(13:38):
because they a probably had ample savings, or they knew
they were going to get reimbursed, so they were going
to get they were going to get caught up, so
they went to a credit union. Many credit unions offered
zero percent interest loans. They took a lean on their
salary so they had first claim on that back pay

(13:59):
when it came in, so they it was good marketing
for a for a credit union to do that. I
know they did it in Colorado, but here's what it
really exposed. Their expertise was not easily transferable. Now, it
may be gonna get me wrong. It may be that

(14:20):
they've been through this before. So you know, you've got
twelve thousand dollars to spent on the hot dog stand.
You could have just lived off the twelve thousand dollars
because you knew we're going to get reimbursed, or you thought, oh,
I'll just write cat novels, fantasy cat novels. But you
made it less than a hundred bucks. Okay, So what

(14:41):
skills did you have that were transferable? It causes me
to question the transferability if you will, of their particular
job description, of their particular skill set. So if they
weren't transferable, and they weren't able to go out in
an economy where there are indeed job openings, then their

(15:07):
skills weren't transferable. That points to structural inefficiencies. Either compensation
so generous that you have no initiative to go out
and get one of those jobs, or your skill specialization
is so narrow that outside the bureaucracy it's not transferable.

(15:30):
The Government Accountability Office, the GAO has for as long
as I can remember, even when I look, it's been
twenty years since I was under Secretary of Home Land Security,
and the GAO would often give us a report and
so with the Inspector General, in which they would identify
overlapping programs, or they would question the efficacy of a

(15:54):
particular office, or they might question the efficiency of an office.
You know, you're you're not doing anything very efficiently. I
always took those reports very seriously because I always thought
those reports gave me the opportunity to say to the boss,
the president or the director of OMB, Hey, you know what,
I could cut this and this and this, and I
could say the taxpayers twenty million dollars, and I would

(16:17):
often do that and they would be call, let's try
to do that, and then Congress, of course, would rebuff us.
But let me give you an overall example. The GAO
since twenty eleven, their recommendations have saved or recovered more
than seven hundred billion dollars. And there's even more billions

(16:37):
of dollars in potential deficiencies I'm sorry, potential efficiencies that
have yet to be implemented. We're talking more than no
trillion dollars. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates
they're reducing the civilian workforce by only ten percent could
save three hundred and fifty billion dollars over ten years,

(17:00):
thirty five billion dollars a year. Yes, so if the
workforce were trimmed by a quarter, nearly one trillion dollars
could be saved. Those are real numbers from the GAO
and from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. You
see the government shuts down. That's what I learned. Now,

(17:25):
the question becomes in a country where we the people
are in charge, and we elect these five hundred and
thirty five yahoo's plus a president to go represent us
inside the Beltway at the federal level, you ought to
take those figures and you ought to ask your congressman,

(17:45):
your senator, why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you
doing it? And then try to figure out why. Maybe
I'll tell you a little hint next. I'll be right
back tonight. Michael Brown joins me here, the former FEMA director.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
Of talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie, no, Brownie, You're
doing a heck of a job the Weekend with Michael Brown.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
Hey, welcome back to the Weekend with Michael Brown. Glad
to have you joining the program. If you like what
we do on Saturdays on the weekends, you might like
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(18:39):
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FM nine to noon on KOA, And so you can

(18:59):
get days of that and you give them listen on
your app go do that. One of the issues that
comes about during the government shutdown. And I'm going to
give you two sets of numbers just so that you
should you can. You'll see that I'm trying to be
objective here. The general contention is that federal workers are
underpaid compared to private sector counterpoint, they're counterparts. Generally, that

(19:23):
is true. I mean generally that is that is that
is not true except in certain areas. I'm gonna explain
in just a minute. When you go to the Bureau
of Economic Analysis, the average now I'm just talking about
averages here. 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 private sector

(19:47):
average was around ninety four thousand dollars. So federal workers
are getting paid about a sixty seven percent premium. Now,
a lot of that, I want to be very specif
the care A lot of that delta between the average
one hundred and fifty seven thousand for a federal worker,
and the ninety four thousand dollars for a private sector

(20:09):
worker is driven by the federal benefits, which I was
a I had those benefits for a while. Gee, I
wish I still had them because they're amazing. Federal worker
benefits are amazing. You have a defined pension, paid leave,
health coverage that is simply far more generous than what

(20:32):
you and I get in the private sector. It's just incredible.
The Congression, the Congressional Budget Office, when you control for
education and job type, they still find that federal benefits
federal benefits, not wages. Right now, federal benefits outstrip the
benefits in the private sector by nearly fifty percent. The

(20:56):
other thing that I would add, based on my own
personal experience, is the near total job security that comes
not with someone like me who is a presidential appointee,
but for the person who comes up through the ranks
gets hired. You know, as a GS one makes their
way up to a GSA to GS ten what I
forget what the action of GS twelve or something just

(21:16):
fifteen I think, and then you enter into the Senior
Executive service. And once you get into the Senior Executive service,
the benefits are even greater. It all comes with near
job total job security. How what percent of federal employees

(21:39):
are fired in a given year? Less than a quarter
of one percent, less than a quarter of a percent,
now most of the agencies at the federal level, a
worker is statistically more likely to die of natural causes
than to be fired for poor performance. You think the

(22:03):
private sector could ever operate that way? Think about your
own particular situation, your own job. I think about just
my own company. iHeart, really zero point two five percent
of federal employees are fired in a given year. Sometimes

(22:23):
it's like twenty five percent. In iHeart, I'm exaggerating, but
it's a big number. Sometimes you're more likely to die
from natural causes if you're a federal worker, than you
are to be dismissed for poor performance. You apply it.
If you're a small business owner, apply that kind of
rationale to your business. How long would you last? That

(22:48):
is almost total insulation from reality. And when you're insulated
from reality, do you not think that me sitting here
right now, this very moment, that I know I'm being
judged by my employer, and that's based on listener interactions, ratings, sponsorships,

(23:11):
and quite frankly, just how I do my program? Am
I entertaining? Am I interesting? Do I cause people to think?
Do I cause people to come back and listen for more?
Do they subscribe to my podcast? Do they stream? Do
they do all all of these metrics by which I'm
judged every single day. Federal workers not so much, unless,

(23:32):
of course, you're you know, you're working for the TSA,
or you're working for CBP, or you're an air traffic controller.
Oh gee, I missed that plane. Yeah, well, I guess what.
You're out of here. We can't have you missing planes.
But there's another problem with that, and that is that
a federal worker becomes that they live in a bubble.

(23:55):
They're insulated from reality. And if you live in a
bubble and your insulation from the reality of what it's
like to work in the private sector, that causes you
to be in ert, just happy in doing what it
requires to get by day by day. Now, I know
that's a generalization, that's probably an overly broad indictment, but
the fact remains that that's what it does. Breed. The

(24:19):
quit rate is rough. The quit rate for federal workers
is about one fourth what it is in the private sector.
And so once you get inside. I remember when I
first went to work for President Bush, I had a
small staff that I could put together of my own. Now,

(24:39):
most of them were political appointings, but I had four
or five openings for people on my staff that were
going to be career civil servants. So we went through
the process, and there was a person in particular who
had worked for me in the past, and I really
wanted her to come and work for me again because
she was very good at scheduling, very good at putting

(25:02):
schedules together. She never worked in the government before she
retired from the federal government last year. Why wouldn't she
because lifetime benefits, low dismissal risk. She was very good
at what she did. She probably outperformed all of her
peers once she got into the system, and so she

(25:23):
stayed forever. You know, and I know that this is
an imbalance that is just wrong. I'm not saying that,
you know, these federal workers are unskilled or lazy, but
they are detached from the real world. They're detached from
the market forces that cause you and I in the

(25:46):
private sector to perform at peak as often as we can.
And in government, boy, this is the one that bugs
me the most. Inefficiency is usually rewarded with larger budgets,
more personnel, and that means even more layers of management.

(26:06):
You get more and more layers of management. As people
progress into management roles, you have to backfill what they
were doing because the meal they were pushing one folder
of paper. Now they're a manager, and now you've got
to fill somebody else to push that paper while they
manage that person pushing that paper. It's insanity. It's utter insanity.

(26:28):
Each layer brings costs, and those costs get compounded year
after year after year. So the workers that I would
say are most vital to national functioning generally get paid less.
They're treated worse than those whose tasks can be suspended indefinitely.

(26:50):
So we now have a system that rewards administrative growth
while straining to do their essential core mission. And in
the real world, and I think in the government world,
that's not sustainable. So we're not trying to be cruel
toward public servants. What we're trying to do is bring

(27:13):
clarity to what the real world is in terms of
federal employment, and we need to write size the federal government,
aligning the resources with necessity distinguishing between what must be
done and what could be better handled by the private sector,

(27:33):
by the markets, by a community, or even by automation.
And this shutdown revealed that that dividing line is a
lot bigger than I think most people realize. Because if
half the workforcemn disappear for weeks and there's no impending disaster, well,

(27:53):
if that's half, then maybe twenty five percent could disappear
permanently and actually prove the functioning of the government. Put
that in your pipe, Smoke that for a while, and
then savings, the savings we get from it could either
reduce taxes or be redirected toward debt reduction, redirected toward

(28:18):
you know, something that we actually do need to do
that we're not doing, but nonetheless it would be more efficient,
and then we could all sing Hallelujah. I'll be right back.
Welcome back to the weekend with Michael Brown. Now that

(28:40):
I've told you the general overall numbers, let me play
with your mind for a moment. Federal workers are underpaid
compared to private sector counterparts. True or false? Well, it depends.
None of the numbers that I gave you in the
last hour and the last segment are incorrect. But now

(29:04):
I want to fine tune them a little bit, just
because I know somebody out there will do it if
I don't do. When you judge total compensation, it's mostly
faults based on total compensation, and it's mixed if you
judge on wages alone, and then it is yes if

(29:24):
you base it on total compensation plus benefits to mean
truly total compensation. What the CBO finds in twenty twenty two,
total compensation for federal workers with a high school diploma
or less exceeded private sector peers, while federal workers with

(29:44):
masters or professional degrees earn less than private sector counterparts.
That illustrates that there is a crossover by education level. Now,
the aggregate gap in total compensation shrank markedly between twenty
fifteen and two twenty twenty two, because the CBO estimates
during that period the previous seventeen percent federal advantage fell

(30:06):
to only five percent in twenty twenty two because of
faster private sector wage growth and smaller federal raises, so
slower federal salary salary not benefits, but just salary. Slower
federal salary growth also suppressed growth and benefit costs, So

(30:27):
your pension was slightly less, your paid leave was slightly
less because those costs are tied to salaries, and that
contributed to a narrowing gap between the private sector and
the public sector. But when you count in the total
amount of benefits, the total value of the benefits. Remnd
mentioned that healthcare program and the thrust savings plan, the

(30:52):
time off plan, and then the union benefits. I think
I think I had like eighteen different bargaining units that
I had to deal with when I was the undersecretary,
Eighteen different unions within my kind of vertical of the
Department of Homeland Security, and so they each had their

(31:13):
own set of benefits. That's how convoluted this personnel system
is within the federal government. So wages versus total compensation,
the Congressional Budget Office's Human capital approach shows that federal
wages are relatively lower for highly educated workers and just

(31:37):
slightly higher for less educated workers. More generous federal benefits
offset wag shortfalls at some education levels, but not for
those with advanced degrees. But overall, when you take the
total compensation package as a whole, they still outperform the
private sector. It shows that there is there are efficiencies

(32:02):
to be gained, but there is a human capital cost
to it. And I think that is the biggest barrier
to ever reforming the civil service system because now who's
going to ultimately make that decision Congress. Congress would have

(32:24):
to reform the civil service system. And if Congress again,
remember when we talked about teachers and how teachers at
the local level, the teacher unions in particular, will start
advancing candidates to run for state legislatures. And when they do,
they really I mean nationwide. They pour the money in

(32:47):
because they want that former teacher or that teacher union
official to be elected to the state legislature. Because when
you get enough of them in, that means the teacher
unions are negotiating with themselves. It's even worse at the
federal level because now you have particularly along ideological lines.

(33:09):
You take that fault line between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats,
you take that fault line. Even some conservative Republicans will
be loathed to try to reduce the size of the
federal bureaucracy because they don't know, I'm there'll be accused
of everything you don't care about, the kids, you don't

(33:29):
care about children. You don't care if people are put
out on the street. No, I want them to care
more about me as a taxpayer than they do about
the bureaucrats that are doing the jobs for them. And
one place I would start if I were going to
reform the federal civil service system would be the amount
of staffers in the legislative branch alone, hundreds of thousands

(33:52):
that work for them. I mean, you're huge numbers. You
don't what the one of the several creation bills that
they passed to get the government reopened was to cover
the cost of the legislative branch. Yes, they take care
of themselves. They don't want to lose staffers. Those staffers
make their jobs easier. In fact, those staffers do virtually

(34:15):
everything for them. They write their speeches, they analyze the legislation.
They virtually tell them how to vote yes or no.
Now they'll give them options, but ultimately they do get
the side. But the staff will persuade them one way
or another. They get all the political advice they need.
They get all of the benefits that you can possibly imagine.
You think they make one hundred and eighty four thousand

(34:37):
dollars add in the benefits and then add in being
able to spend some campaign money on things that indirectly
benefit them, and they're getting paid a boatload of money,
so they're very reluctant to upset the apple cart. And
when all of those people inside the Beltway that work

(34:58):
for the federal government start screaming about, oh I had
to go open a hot dog stand, Oh I had
to write a novel to try to survive, and I
couldn't do it. The blowback from the special interest the
blowback from all of those bargaining units, all of those
unions will come down hard on that congressman's district or

(35:18):
that senator's state, and they'll put political pressure on them
to keep the status quo. You want my proof, think
about now. I think e Long Musk made a few
mistakes and how he approached trying to reduce federal spending

(35:40):
and improve federal efficiencies. He over promised and under delivered,
and running a chainsaw around waving in the air probably
didn't send the right signal. And that caused that political
machine inside the belt Way to rise up and demonize
him and demonize everything that doze was trying to do.

(36:03):
It even caused some of the president's cabinet members to say, oh,
back off, wait a minute, you're cutting way too much.
Let's do this with a scalpel. Let's not do it
with an axe. So at some point, at some point,
there has to be enough political pressure put by you
and me as taxpayers, on these members of Congress that say,
we're tired of paying for all of this, we're tired

(36:24):
of the inefficiencies. And if we don't change it, if
we don't actually put enough pressure on members of the
House in the Senate to make the federal government more efficient, leaner, meaner,
and get the proof is the past month, then the
debt will continue to implode on us to where we

(36:46):
just won't survive. It's that simple. It is that simple.
It's the weekend with Michael Brown. Text lines open three
to three, one zero three, keyword Micha or Michael. I'll
be right back.