Friday, February 22, 2013

REP. DESANTIS ON BUREAUCRATIC BONUSES, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, GOVERNMENT WASTE

Rep. DESANTIS is investigating federal agencies that give most of their fat bonsuses to employees working in Washington, D.C.   He told his Flagler County "Town Hall" meeting about it February 19, 2013.  Great!

Long a favored perk of federal agencies, agency heads, subagency heads and their cronies divvy up huge "performance" bonuses, typically as much as $60,000, rewarding what?  Being a crony of an agency head in Washington, D.C.  Many of the worst managers in government have gotten bonuses.   For decades, our civil service system has favored sloth and rewarded incompetent managers who retaliate against whistleblowers.

Rep. DESANTIS is right to raise this bonus issue.   My mentor, the Chief Judge of the U.S. Department of Labor, called this bonus scandal to my attention in the 1980s:  it transcends presidential administrations and political parties.   The simply palpitating truth of the matter is that Cabinet officers use them to reward top appointees, rather than able scientists, FBI or CIA agents.  At some agencies,  the statistical probabability of anyone outside Washington, D.C. ever getting a bonus approaches zero.  This waste is bad for morale.

Go for it, Rep. DESANTIS -- keep on investigating the bureaucracy's flummery, dupery and nincompoopery.  One of my heroes, the late Iowa U.S. Republican Rep. H.R. Gross, made his mark by challenging government waste, fraud and abuse.  If that's what Rep. DESANTIS is about, I concur.

In Palm Coast, Rep. Rep. DESANTIS skewered the U.S. Department of Energy a/k/a "Denier of Everything." Rep. DESANTIS and I agree: I've watched DOE since it was created in 1977. Over the years, I exposed its environmental crimes and represented its victims: it is irrefragable that DOE is as crooked as a barrel full of snakes -- our DOE nuclear weapons complex is a national scandal deserving of full Congressional oversight hearings. 

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