Earlier this afternoon, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA11) was on WAMU’s The Politics Hour, where he and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) discused “how a second Trump term could impact the thousands of federal workers in the region.” See below for audio and highlights:
- “…a nonpartisan, non-politicized civil service that serves the American people – we should not do anything that jeopardizes that. Schedule F, which is a cornerstone of Project 2025, absolutely would threaten the nonpartisan, nonpolitical nature of the civil service. So my view is if you want to amend the Civil Service you need to do it by statute – you need to come to Congress and ask the Senate and the House to approve that new schedule… I think you can’t do this by executive order, that is not a prerogative of the executive, it is a prerogative of the legislative branch working with the executive…I think it’s an uphill battle [to get legislation on this] because all too many of my friends on the other side of the aisle, in the House anyhow, have swallowed the Kool-Aid, and it’s almost like dealing with a cult.”
- “[If] it’s not a civil servant, it’s a political hack who is processing your disability claim at Social Security or your veterans benefits for VA medical care and you are of the wrong political persuasion, your application goes to the bottom of the pile. So this isn’t just about protecting federal employees and civil servants, it is ultimately about protecting the needs of our constituents and shielding them from political interference and cronyism.”
- “…and then there’s mindless disruption, and I believe that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have both engaged in the latter – mindless disruption. Musk called for cutting $2 trillion of federal spending – that is the federal budget!…he clearly doesn’t understand how the federal government works or what it does and that learning curve is going to be very steep, and I hope he spend some time on the learning curve before he creates not only disruption for federal civil servants but for our constituents.”
- “I’ve spent 16 years in the United States Congress trying to make government more efficient, I’m not trying to protect anybody, I’m trying to make sure that the government works for the people we serve. And that ought to be the guiding star for President Trump, President Biden, Chris Van Hollen and Gerry Connolly. And I do want to inject something here that never gets talked about and needs to be. Elon Musk runs a company, let’s take Tesla. Does Elon Musk say to his management team, we’re never going to ever raise revenue…whatever the price of a Tesla is, it’s frozen forever? We’re only going to look at the spending side of the company and rein that in? Well of course he doesn’t do that. Well if you want government run as a business, you’ve got to look at the revenue side as well as the spending side. And that’s part of the real false premise of DOGE itself, that we’re only going to look at spending like that’s out of control. And the fact of the matter is, if you look at federal employees, the ratio of federal employees to population has been stagnant. The growth has been in outsourcing federal contracts, and that started really under Ronald Reagan, a Republican president.”
- “I agree with your characterization, we’re going back to the spoils system, pre 1883, and that is not a good idea in the 21st century and it’s certainly not a good idea for average Americans who when they need government benefits count on them, count on them to be processed in a fair nonpolitical, non-politicized way. And that’s the kind of government we want to make sure is more efficient. And as Chris said, we’re all in if you want to make it more efficient. Obviously there are savings to be had. I’ve got plenty of categories I could talk about in terms of where we could save money and where we can find common ground as a matter of fact. But starting out by saying we’re going to replace 100,000 workers with political hacks is a non-starter for us and I hope it will be a non-starter for the US Congress.”
- “I think President Trump has a very different agenda than we have. I mean both Chris and I would agree FBI needs a new headquarters and it’s got to be secure. It’s got to have setbacks that are not urban to protect it. It needs to have space to grow because it’s a living organism…So we both agree it needs a new headquarters. We don’t agree on where it should be. And I respectfully disagree with Chris about the process – the decision was made unilaterally by one individual who was brought in and she unilaterally overturned a unanimous decision by the award panel that found in Virginia Springfield site…I don’t know her and I don’t know what she was thinking. But that’s why our committee, not just Virginia, our committee has formally requested the IG to examine this process. It’s been a year now and we’re looking forward as Chris is to seeing what those results are. If the Inspector General says you know, it was a fair process, she had her reasons for what she did, we’re going to accept that. But right now we’re not pleased with the process, given the fact that we unanimously won even after the criteria were weighted in Maryland’s favor.”
- “There is a difference between universal remote working in a pandemic and a structured architecture for telework. which by the way we had before the pandemic and it worked fine...there weren’t empty offices, there weren’t empty retail outlets and restaurants. And so we need to make that distinction, we can’t conflate the two. If you want to recruit the next generation of workers, you’ve got to have a telework program that’s structured and overseen and managed in place. If you don’t, you’re going to lose those workers to the private sector. And we have hundreds of thousands of federal jobs that are going to be available as people retire…they’re catering to Trump on that, but most major employers I can tell you in my district are not insisting on 5 days a week, they have a structured work program that works for them.”
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