Transcript of the above video: 

I thought of making this video after recently reading an article where they were talking about 15,000 IRS agents are poised to be laid off this week which I don't know that you are going to see any working Americans that are going to shed any tears over that. I get into that more deeply in another video I made contemporaneously with this one, but with regard to this video, I'm asking the question, 'should we repeal the US Civil Service Act', and really go back to the bedrock of our Constitution and how our Government serves us, and I think this is worth getting into. 

I thought of making this video actually while reading an article for another video, but I'm going to go ahead and cite it so you see the context. The article is titled: IRS could lay off 15,000 staff this week during peak tax season, coming from CPA Practice Advisor, that is cpapracticeadvisor.com, quoting directly: "According to ABC News and the Associated Press, up to 15,000 workers at the Internal Revenue Service could be laid off from their positions in the next week. Tax season has just begun but it may be about to get more difficult for taxpayers and tax preparers such as CPAs and Accountants." I always love how this is framed as like, "oh we're going to have less tax collectors, but it's worse for you." Quoting further: "The move could also delay income tax refunds." Another one, I think this is all being framed to try to poise some of the more populous elements that have elected the current Administration against the current Administration, kind of pit them against them. But I think most people are nuanced enough now to recognize that what's going on here. Okay it might be a couple of months I get delayed in getting my refund but getting our tax service in line so they are not on us like a bunch of parasites and they are not spending money on, I don't know, Transgender Fish Research in the Arctic or whatever it is that they are doing. The quicker we get this stuff in line the better it's going to be for everybody, basically. And I think most people get that. I think the vast majority of average people get like they want their refunds sure, and they think the IRS should go ahead and get on it. My question is why can't you have your tenured workers handle these matters? Which I'll get into here in a minute. That said, quoting further: "According to the Associated Press and ABC News, up to 15,000 workers at the Internal Revenue Service could be laid off from their positions in the next week. These are workers who have been recently hired and are most likely to be in lower-level positions such as taxpayer response," - so again the people that are actually paying in the money to people that are talking to those people, no, no, we'll cut that. Quoting further: "..phone centres and junior audit positions who are all on probationary status and lack civil service employment protections." So the point they are making here is they are saying okay he's going to lay off all the people that aren't protected by "civil service employment protections" which I'll get into here in a minute, but he's going to lay off all those people that don't have that. Which in my opinion, fine. But whatever you clear out of the IRS and you make it worse for them to operate, the better it is for the average person, the average American, who just wants to get on with their lives and make a living and not be hassled by a bunch of stamp-pimps and tax collectors, and just general parasites just trying to you suck off of them, leech off of them while they are trying to make a living. Again, not to go deep too deep into that side of it, but I'm okay with these layoffs generally, but what they're saying is 15,000 of these people are all coming from sort of the junior ranks that aren't sort of “locked into” their tenure, okay? Well my question is what's the point of that tenure, if not to be stepping up at exactly these moments and doing the job? I would think that would be the purpose, but I doubt that's going to be the case.

Which brings me to the issue of should we just seriously consider repealing the entire Civil Service Act? Which brings me over to www.gsa.gov that's gsa.gov under the title: Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building History. Civil Service Commission. Quoting directly: "In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Civil Service Act marking the first time that any Government jobs were awarded based solely upon merit." and sort of everything that we dealt with in the Civil Service has sort of emanated from those early 1870s promulgations of laws around this Civil Service Act. And then the question posed is, what was it before that? Was it good or bad or whatever? If you are sort of an aficionado if you will of High School history you will remember from High School that they used to talk about "oh under Jackson's days they had the Spoil System, to the victor goes the spoils. Whoever would win the presidency but basically just appoint the entire Federal Government effectively, and he said, "oh that is a terrible system, we have got to create something where there's “merit based." “Merit based”. I always loved that. Based solely upon “merit”. Just as an aside, my father back home in Kansas is a Judge, he's an elected Judge and he always jokingly refers to himself as a meritless Judge because Kansas has this weird like patchwork system where some of the judges are elected and some are appointed but the appointed ones are always referred to as merit-based where it's like shouldn't the person that was actually elected by the people they will be dealing with, isn't that person actually arguably more meritorious because they actually reflect the popular will. That's kind of what I've always thought. Generally speaking, I am not a huge fan of appointments into the federal government because it leads to these sinecures and these situations where people sitting their little fiefdoms and their little perches and just kind of operate with impunity. It is in many ways the roots of the “so-called” deep state because these people get in there and they are sort of ensconced and there's nothing that can be done about them. And you know, politics come, politics go, and here they are.

I think in this Administration we're seeing a massive sea change. One, they have the tech to see who is who; they have the tech to see where the funding and things are all going and I think there's a popular will against all of this entrenched bureaucracy just telling us what to do all the time with a "because I say so" attitude. We saw that at the heights of Covid; we're still seeing some reverberation to that now, and I think Trump represents if nothing else, I think he objectively represents a pushback against that notion and I'm hoping we see serious reform within the American Civil Service if not the outright just abolishment of that Act and let's just start again and try something new.