OK, you want to know. The end of what? Well, I’,m not sure. But the way of life, political life anyway, which affects many other aspects of living is already changed by the Trump Administration. There may be a pulling back from the recent harebrained extremes but I doubt if it will be full. Even if it is it may takde a long time.

One hardly knows where to begin. OK, I’ll begin with domestic policy and I won’t weigh this down with a lot of statistics. Maybe a few to make my points, The Administration has, using Elon Musk as its instrument, began a whole sale assult on the federal goernment and the assumptions we have had about its role in our country for near on a hundred years now, that is going back to about the New Deal. Some of them go back further than that. Then there’s foreign policy, but wait a minute. What’s Musk doing here at home?

The trouble is that much of what Musk has done, at the behest of Trump or at least beacuse Trump told him to tackle the feds and then gave him his head, is likely illegal/unconstitutional, at least about to be. The biggest single thing, which has to be broken down into smaller parts to grasp fully, is the fantastic reduction in the number of employees of the federal government.

Now like a lot of mistakes and excessive actions, this began with a slight modicum of truth. Likely the government is somewhat bloated and needs in ways to be reformed. I was a federal worker for 28 years before I retired(sometime ago now)and I remember that. But I remember other things as well. Like that most federal employees I knew gave a dollar’s worth(or more)of effort for a dollar’s pay. Like the dead-end nature of many of these jobs–relatively secure, to be sure, but easy to get stuck in. And I remember that at least where I worked, with the Social Security Administration, a bloated workforce was not part of the trouble.

The trouble was that we did not have, in my opinion ENOUGH people to do the job correctly and quickly. So nearly everyone felt behind in their work and was constantly hassled by this fact, regardless of whether the management pointed it out(which they frequently did, actually) So this is not a simple matter. If they were going to put people out of jobs, why didn’t they at least take a few weeks to have someone study the issue? Maybe have some people go to the offices or laboratories, or banks or wherever and learn something of the jobs, the work flow, the issues–the troubles and possible fixes for them. But they didn’t– they simply took an axe and started chopping.

This was done at first by offering functionally every federal employee a “buyout” opportunity. The deal was to stop work but get paid another 8 months without working and presumably still being on the payroll. Not enough people–not very close to enough–took this offer to come close to the Muskite requirements. So they proceeded with firings, just getting rid of people. Now there are two or three things to say about that.

First of all, it appears that for the most part, they went after people still in their probationary period, the year or two that a federal employee man be dismissed without cause, though presumably because they didn’t fit the job. But they MAY have wandered into the ranks of long employed people in some cases and as far as I’m concerned most of these firings WOULD BE simply illegal. Some such dismissals may have already occurred.

This is immensley irresponsible, particularly when you look at what happened with the NNSA(National Nuclear Security Administration)late last week. First of all, the NNSA is a smaller government entity and a lesser known one. But it is extremely important. It is part of the Dept of Energy and it is tasked with the job of overseeing and maintaining US nuclear power. I guess you could say that they have two overall responsibilities. One is to guarantee that US nuclear weapons and other working nuclear power are kept in order and are able to do their job–that is, to defend the country from potential adversaries, hopefully by intimidating them into never doing anything so stupid as launching an all out attack on the US.

It ‘s second duty is protect us from ourselvs in a sense. That is, they are to make certain nuclear materials are correctly stored and handled. They are to protect us from our defensive weapons becoming a danger to the homeland or to US personnel or materials anywhere.

The story I read on this was from the BBC which is not known for getting things wrong. Based on US media and perhaps other stories, the BBC concluded that approximately 300 probationary employees had been fired. The Energy Department claimed it was in the vicinity of 50. Eventually, the actual number may come clear.

But, whatever, the Trump Administration reversed itself within a day or two. It became apparent(or maybe was pointed out to them by someone)that they were imperiling national security. Without these employees the agency wouldn’t be able to keep track of and control its nuclear power. So the agerncy began, frantically, I imagine, to get back in touch with these people and tell them, “Hey, wait a minute–you’re not fired–come back to work!” But, the agency said, they were having trouble finding them.

Now I wish to raise three fairly simple but fascinating and likely important questions, after which I’ll be quiet for awhile. First, why does this most important agency have so few employees? And how many were there, really. who were dismissed? Secondly, who’s watching the nukes today? And finally, why can’t they find them? How about starting with the address, email, snail mail or whatever, to which they sent the termination notices? Oh, yes, and didn’t the personnel files have phone numbers in them? How about giving them a call.? Hey, maybe they all went to Greenland or Panama–still, it’s worth a try?

That’s all for now–think I’ll go stew awhile. I may have some foreign relations questions later.