Allison Gill (25:31)
It's. It's horrifying. And wow. That. Yeah, I just got chills. The little hairs in the back of my neck when. When you read that quote from our good friend. Man. Thank you for sharing that. All right, we're going to be right back. I'm going to go over an update on what I'm finding out from federal workers, plus this smear campaign from the Trump administration against the general workforce. And then after that, we'll read the good news. Everybody stick around. We'll be right back after these messages. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody, it's ag. And for 2025, I've decided to focus on making manageable, lasting changes to my routine. I like to call them intentions instead of resolutions. And that's why AG1 is one of the most important parts of my mornings. It's one habit I can commit to every day. Simple to pick up helps me feel energized, supported, and ready to take on my goals without added stress. AG1 is perfect for those of us who get overwhelmed by complicated health routines. 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As you know, I've opened up my DMs and I've set up now a protonmail Fed Oathm me so that people can send in their stories and screenshots of the emails they're getting and the memos and links and things like that. And I just wanted to give a brief update about this and to talk a little bit about something insidious that's going on in the Trump administration and that's the smear campaign against the federal workforce. In order to get people behind find him in firing all these incredible people, he has to make sure that nobody likes them and thinks that they're terrible. So I'm going to just read to you from the article that I posted in my substack, which is free to subscribe. You can do it by going to Muller she wrote dot com. It takes you right to my substack and I write for the past week, hundreds and hundreds of federal workers have reached out to me to share their stories about what's happening within their federal agencies. And as patterns emerge, the bigger picture of Trump's Project 2025 is starting to become clear. I want to share with you what I've seen so far and where I believe this is going. Federal workers usually enjoy a great deal of job security through civil service protection law, union contracts and merit board due process protections. During Trump's first administration, he ran into trouble trying to rid our federal agencies of those he deemed disloyal. He is prepared this time, but still seems to be running afoul of laws and policy. This time, however, he doesn't care. He's learned through years of avoiding accountability that his quote what are you going to do about it? Attitude has proven successful, especially with the corrupt Supreme Court in his pocket. His acolytes are also more prepared. And it's not like we didn't know this was coming. It was all laid out in Project 2025. And despite Trump trying to distance himself because of the project's wild unpopularity, the federal workforce is deep in the thick of the promises made by the Heritage foundation and Project 2025 authors. On day one, the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, began sending out a series of memoranda attacking the low hanging fruit in the federal workforce, beginning with OPM itself. The administration installed a low level yes man by the name of Chuck Azell. According to a post on social media from a self described OPM employee, quote Let me say this in no uncertain terms, OPM has been compromised and taken over the very backbone of American government, the HR of all HR in the US Government has been taken over by outside political in just five days they managed to push aside dozens of non political career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the President's henchmen. Once the administration had their yes man in place, OPM went after three distinct groups of federal workers. First, agencies were required to provide a list of probationary employees. This classification of employees doesn't enjoy the protections of the Merit Board and can be fired at will for basically any reason. The usual probationary period is one year, but in some cases it can be two years. The administration has instructed department heads to review these employees and remove those that are not necessary. They have not instructed the agencies to blanket fire these workers yet. Second, OPM sent out a memo ordering all DEIA programs and their employees to be put on paid administrative leave. The multitude of workers that reached out to me described scenarios in which they were given only hours to access their important documents such as SF 50s federal resumes, performance evaluations and employee actions before they were summarily locked out of their systems. Some agencies changed the language of the DEIA memo, taking out the political rhetoric about DEIA programs dividing Americans. That is what likely prompted the OPM to start testing a government wide email address they could use to reach frontline employees. Instead of relying on agency heads to disseminate their orders, they effectively cut out the mid level folks that might be trying to protect their employees. The DEI memo also threatened frontline workers that they could face punishment if they didn't rat out their colleagues who might be working for units that once used DEIA language but amended it after the election. Trump sees these folks as deep state disloyal people who are trying to hide from him. Third, OPM recalled all telework and remote work employees and ordered agencies to recall all work from home employees that live within 50 miles of an office to report to that duty station. This is nothing more than an effort to get people to quit so they don't have to fire them. There are some exemptions to this directive, including those with reasonable accommodations or medical telework, that is Those who work from home because they are disabled in some way. Fourth, the administration initiated a hiring freeze and rescinded all job offers to those who hadn't yet started work or didn't yet have a start date. There must have been a lot of pushback on this, especially at the Department of Veterans affairs, which made up about 25% of the new hires and were mostly essential clinical jobs such as nurses and other health providers Shortly after the job offers were rescinded, OPM exempted those jobs and have been reissuing the offer letters. This was just round one. Round two came this morning with the issuance of a memo regarding the new Schedule F executive Order. It reads in part, schedule F creates a new schedule policy career in the accepted service for positions that are confidential, policy determining, policy making, or policy advocating, meaning policy influencing positions and filled by individuals not normally subject to replacement or change. As a result of a presidential transition, such career positions will be rescheduled into scheduled policy career, that's Schedule F, and thereby exempted from the adverse action procedures set forth in Chapter 75 of Title V of the United States Code. Okay, so one might think, oh good, my job isn't confidential policy influencing policymaking or policy advocating, so I should be okay. But then comes this instruction. The terms confidential policy determining, policymaking and policy advocating in the Executive order are drawn from five US Code section 7511 and five US Code section 2302 A2BI. Neither the US Code nor the judicial precedents precisely define these terms in the context of their statutory usage. So in other words, these are squishy terms subject to the whims of the President and opm. And even if you think you have a good argument that your job still doesn't fit these descriptions, OPM throws in this nugget quote duties that the Director of the Office of Personnel Management otherwise indicates may be appropriate for inclusion in Schedule F. So basically, Trump and the OPM will decide what's appropriate to include in Schedule F. OPM gave agency heads 90 days to submit all the positions they think fall into schedule fold and an additional 120 days to add any positions they may have forgotten. After that, agency heads are directed to submit positions on a rolling basis. And then I have a link to the Schedule F memo. Once these workers are moved to Schedule F, they can be fired at will for any reason without due process. There are several statutes and Biden executive orders that go against this policy and I imagine there will be lawsuits to try to stop Schedule F from taking effect. This is actually addressed in the OPM Schedule F memo. It says that during Biden's term, OPM issued policy under presidential authority that the phrases confidential policy determining, policy making or policy advocating, and confidential or policy determining to refer to only non career political appointees and have no application to career positions. But Trump says he is now using his presidential authority to nullify that regulation. I imagine the lawyers that penned the Biden Executive Order will fight this in court. I will keep you posted, but I imagine the Supreme Court will back Trump on this one. The administration has also taken several steps to prevent agencies from fighting back. He's co opted whistleblower offices with yes men. He's fired independent inspectors general illegally and as I touched on before, he's testing OPM direct email to employees government wide to circumvent agency heads and mid level management. He's also shuttered EEO offices and revoked access to HR in many cases leaving workers in the dark about their due process rights. Those due process rights however, could be rendered meaningless by Schedule F. In addition to all this, the Trump administration has begun a nasty smear campaign against federal workers so that people will support gutting our agencies. The right wing noise machine has begun attacking federal workers as lazy, overpaid hangers on. Let me be very clear about something. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need to push back on this rhetoric and forcefully. Federal employees are there because they want to be of service to others. They're the helpers Mr. Rogers taught us about. Taking a job in the federal government means you work for pittance compared to what you could earn in the private sector and usually you work longer hours for that lower pay. Further, the data shows unequivocally that remote and telework employees are as productive and in some cases more productive than their in office counterparts. That's not to mention the millions of dollars taxpayers save by not having to lease office space for these employees. Nearly every single person who's reached out to me is frightened and angry and frankly disgusted at these mischaracterizations. By and large, federal workers are the hardest working service jobs out there. In all my time working for the federal government, I only ran across two people who weren't working their asses off in a thankless job for low pay because they wanted to help others. Two out of hundreds and thousands that either worked directly for me or or worked for folks that I worked with closely. And that was such an anomaly that I could name those two people for you, but I won't. I remember them as outliers because the overwhelming majority of federal workers are dedicated and talented experts who take the pay cut to do a job that feeds their souls. Truly salt of the earth. And this administration is trying to get people to believe that these folks are somehow the bad guys. Call that lie out every time you hear it. Those who work for the government or know someone who does can attest to the incredible dedication and reverence to the oath that they have. It's no wonder that someone like Trump, who is transactional in nature and desecrates his oath would denigrate those who embody the antithesis of his lack of empathy and understanding of what it means to be of service to others. I have some thoughts about where this is all headed. I envision after testing the OPM government wide email and moving as many people as he can to schedule fast, Trump will start asking the frontline employees directly to report disloyal non MAGA workers to OPM as he did with the DEIA snitch email. I fear there will be loyalty interviews like the ones Doge conducted at the National Security Council. He'll fire anyone that could be seen as disloyal. They will empty out our institutions until the only people that left are bigoted maga yes, men willing to help destroy the very institutions they swore an oath to protect. Attacked. Why? Well, to me the answer is obvious. He intends to sow chaos and break the agencies so he can privatize them, lining the pockets of his rich pals with the tax revenue savings through tax cuts for the wealthy and driving the business of government into the arms of the CEOs and oligarchs. Private schools, private police, private prisons, private veterans, health care, private post office, private Social Security. The list goes on and on. An effective resistance is a focused resistance. Choose an institution and defend it with all of your might. Institutions don't defend themselves, they fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. That's from Timothy Snyder from his book on tyranny. Thanks for listening again. You can sign up for my newsletter for free by going to mullershererote.com and subscribing everybody, stick around. We'll be right back with the good news. Everybody, welcome back. It's time for the good news. Who likes good news? Everyone. Then good news everyone. And boy, do we need your good news now more than ever. If you've ever been on the fence about sending in a good news story or just given a shout out to somebody, whether it's a loved one or family member or a small business in your area or yourself or a government program that's helped you or a family, whether anything from the packed act to SNAP, WIC, Head Start, Section 8, Affordable Care Act, $35 insulin, student debt relief, and of course, any other good news stories, please send them to us. And all you got to do to get your submission in is pay your POD pet tax. Which means attach a photo of your pet and if you don't have a pet. You can send an adoptable pet in your area and if you don't have that, that photo of any animal is fine counts. And of course you can also send your baby pictures. That also gets your good news submission into the door. And of course if you don't have any of that, but you do have a bird watching photo, whether it's an actual bird or it's you and your family and friends flipping off Trump properties, we would like to see that too. That counts as pod pet tax. Send it all to us dailybeanspod.com and click on Contact. Our first submission is from Anonymous Pronouns he and Him I am a current transgender military service member and to avoid risking identifying myself by mistake in my very narrow job, I will leave it there. I served through the last trans ban and was able to hit the timing right to be grandfathered into remaining on active duty. I was scared then, and even though I'm in a objectively better position to land on my feet if I'm involuntarily separated at this time, I would be lying to say I'm not more scared now in these dark times, I'm trying to take the glimmers of hope that I can One bright spot is that a collection of stories I contributed to has been released digitally, with the physical edition coming soon. It's called Valor and the Next Chapter of Transgender Military Service. It chronicles many stories of trans people living through the roller coaster that has shaped the last decade of being trans in uniform. While there are much larger communities under threat in this new administration, I hope that mine is not forgotten. Trans people have and continue to serve at a much higher rate than our CIS counterparts, and I for one would be a waste of more than a million dollars in training if I were kicked out now when I'm committed to serve past the end of this decade. Even by their own purported logic, it's a waste, and by any outside logic, it's cruel. For my pod pet tax, I'm sharing a picture of Loki black and white with the lap cattiest lap cat to ever lap cat and Hermes black. Or is it Hermes? I can't tell if it's the scarves or if it's the God, a skittish kitty who is a snuggle muffin if you catch him in the right mood. Anonymous I'm so sorry.
