Government Downsizing

 Cambridge Day February 2025

When will they ever learn: Downsizing?

In the 1990’s there was a major wave of downsizing in North America. Students of organization studied this process in some detail and came up with a series of recommendations about whether to downsize and the best way of doing so.

Downsizing alone was rarely successful in terms of achieving an organization’s long-term goals of competitiveness and profitability, though short-term cost savings were sometimes achieved.

There were two bedrock principles that were found to be essential if downsizing were to be pursued effectively. First, downsizing must be guided by a clear strategic plan that refocuses the organization on its core activities. Secondly, there must be a sharing of the pain by the senior management of the organization.

The call by Elon Musk, supported by the so–called President, Donald Trump, is the worst possible way of implementing layoffs.

They called for millions of employees to resign their offices in exchange for a few months extra salary. Any one can take it: no analysis of which parts of government needed to contract or which need to be reinforced. There was little constraint on who might or might not take the buyout. And, in the background, there was the implicit threat that people might be fired in the future; hopefully after an analysis of where the needs were. 

In this form of reducing payroll, the people who are going to take up the offer are the best and the brightest. They are the people who have deep connections with the environment in which they work and with the clients that their departments work. They are the people that can immediately move into decent jobs.

Departments will be hollowed out. The tacit knowledge based on their experience in the agency will be lost. The remaining officials will be handicapped in performing the work that needs to be done.

I would have expected Mr Musk, an experienced business man, and his advisors would have known this. Mr. Trump not so much.

It is time to pause, to engage in sensible analysis, and not to ride rough-shod over the Congress, and the laws, and the Constitution of the United States.

Oh, and I do not see Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump sharing the pain.

Strategy for blockig Trump

 It is time for the Democrats to adopt devious tactics in the Senate and the House of Represetatives.

There are enough upright Republicans willing to vote secretly against Trump’s nominees and plans. However, they are not willing to take a public stand against him because they fear retribution through being primaried by a Trumpish MAGA opponent.

Democrats should make deals with these Republicans that, if they vote against Trump, the Democrats will not put up a Democratic candidate at the next General Election. In this case, even if primaried, the current incumbent could run as an Independent and pick up the centrist and moderate left voter and might even get Democratic support and votes.

Democrats and centrist Republicans could push for a change in the rules of the House and Senate so as to require that nominees and bills be voted on with secret ballots. This would reduce the fears of centrist Republican senators and Representatives that they might be primaried. I realize that this is a longshot given the leakiness of their offices.

Finally, we, the public, must continue what we are doing, especially in red states and districts, contact our senators, contact our representative and insist that they grow spines and vote to block or undo Trump’s most outrageous actions.

America’s survival depends upon it. 

Lies and Policies

 After the hurricane hit North Carolina, Mr. Trump lied about FEMA. He claimed that FEMA was unfair in allocating its help. His lies were so destructive that some victims refused to accept  FEMA's help.

Trump seems now to believe those lies. He is contemplating closing down and abolishing FEMA (Trump says states should manage disasters and weighs shuttering FEMA, New York Times, January 24, 2025). That would be a big mistake.

President Trump muses about letting each state be independent and stand on its own two feet. Does that mean no more Massachusetts money going to red states? Perhaps Massachusetts would like that; but I don't think so: from John Adams on down, Massachusetts has always believed in the United States of America.

 Senator Graham believes it was wrong for President Trump to pardon the January 6th rioters. I agree.

In that case, why on earth did he vote for Mr. Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, the unqualified Secretary Hegseth?

Doesn't he know that the "tit for tat" strategy (i.e., a vote against the nominee) is the best way to stop someone from doing the nation harm?

Maybe next time.

Trump's punishment

 

I think the appropriate sentence for soon-to-be President Trump is community service  (A New York Judge Upholds Trump's Conviction, New York Times, January 4th., 2025: A1, A15).

For one day each week of his Presidency he should help clean the streets of New York or Washington, DC. This would substitute for his golf-playing or entertaining tech moguls.

Dr. Bhattacharya, Covid, Sweden, and the Future

 The nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head up NIH reminds me that there was one country, Sweden, that tried to follow the principles outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration. That is, it tried to protect the elderly while allowing most other people to carry out their day to day activities unimpeded.

How did that work out? I think the results were mixed. Early in the pandemic, 2020, Sweden had over 1½ times the number of excess deaths(that is, deaths from all causes, including Covid) proportionate to the population than did other Scandinavia countries (Denmark, Finland, and Norway).  This is to be expected, as few measures were taken in Sweden to reduce the incidence of the disease in the general population.

However in 2022 with the introduction of vaccination, Sweden’s excess death rate was about ½ the rate in the remaining Scandinavian countries. Sweden reduced its excess death rate while the rate in the other Scandinavian countries increased. This is what the Great Barrington Declaration predicted: that lock-downs and other restrictions at the front end of the epidemic would result in additional excess deaths when the epidemic was over. It is too early to judge whether this long tail will continue.

 Finally, Covid deaths in Sweden, as opposed to excess deaths from all causes, over the whole course of the epidemic from 2020 to November 2024 showed Sweden doing badly: over 1½  times as many Covid deaths, proportionate to the population, as in the other Scandinavian countries.

We should note that Scandinavia as a whole, including Sweden, did better than many other European countries and much, much better than the USA where Covid death rates were higher than those in Scandinavia (leaving out Sweden). At the height of the pandemic, states controlled by Republicans had higher excess death rates than those controlled by Democrats.

As the threat of a new pandemic (a bird flu crossover to humans) approaches, we need to decide carefully which restriction over our behavior are necessary and which can be ignored. We must follow the data painfully gained from the recent Covid pandemic.

Appeared in Cambridge Day, Jan 2025

Trump's Bureaucracy

 This was in Cambridge DAY