Talmage Boston considers himself a full-time lawyer and a full-time historian.
His latest book is called How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents.
He chose the first four of eight off the face of Mount Rushmore, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
In addition, Mr. Boston chose 24 distinct leadership traits he says were exhibited by these presidents.
The other four presidents, by the way, included in his best leadership category, are FDR, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.
71-year-old Talmadge Boston lives in Dallas, Texas.
Lawyer and historian Talmage Boston with his book, How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Everett Kelly.
He is the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees here to talk about the incoming Trump administration, the future of the federal workforce.
Mr. Kelly, good morning.
Good morning, Pedro.
Who do you represent?
Well, I represent about 800,000 federal and D.C. government employees.
And to what range do they do?
What kind of things are they involved in?
Well, we're virtually in almost every occupation, anywhere from scientists, doctors, nurses, DOD workers, FEMA, Department of Education, Bureau of Prisons, Border Patrol.
I mean, you name it.
Any array, in every occupation you can think of, we represent those employees.
And fair to say, you're their union, so to speak.
That's correct.
And so as the organization that you had and the people that you represent, when they hear of efforts of the incoming administration when it comes to possibly future impacts on the workforce, what goes through your mind and those you represent?
Well, of course, there's a lot of uncertainty, okay?
We know from the last administration when President-elect Trump was president, we know that we had tough times, okay?
We know that people were fired for no apparent reason.
We know that as union representatives, we wasn't able to represent the employees that we represented.
We was kicked out of our offices.
You know, a lot of things just came directly at us.
This time around, though, a whole new organization looking directly at this idea of cutting costs and cutting size of government, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, when you heard about this effort, what went through your mind?
Well, you know, I think it's a little asinine to even think of the possibility of cutting 75% of the federal workforce.
I see it as a direct attack against the veterans, of which I am a veteran myself, because of the workforce, about 642,000 of that workforce are veterans.
So when you say you're going to cut 75%, you know, that means that there's a direct attack on veterans itself.
And I'm appalled by that.
Would you say that every federal employee is a necessary employee?
Absolutely.
Why so?
Well, think about it.
Think about the people that we represent, okay?
We represent the people at the VA, okay?
These are the people that we provide a service to the veterans that are returning home from war, okay?
That's a necessary job.
When you think about Social Security, you know, they're the people that take care of, in my opinion, the most prized possession of this nation.
And that's our elders, making sure that they get their social security checks on time.
When you think of FEMA, okay, they're not running away from disaster.
They're running to disaster to provide a service to the American people.
When you think about the Bureau of Prisons, these guys are out there making sure that our community is safe every single day.
We sleep easy at night because criminals are behind bars.
So, and any array of these organizations of these agencies, rather, you know, we make sure that we are servicing the American people.
If the recommendations are made by the two gentlemen and the staff that they're going to use, and if cuts are made to either employee size or departments itself, what's the potential impact on those services that you talked about?
Well, I mean, it will be a drastic impact because, like I said, you know, we are the ones that's making sure that social security checks are out on time, okay?
You start cutting 75% of that, you know, it's not going to happen.
When we're making sure that veterans are taken care of, you start cutting 75% of that, you know, it's not going to happen.
But the truth of the matter, okay, it's not that they're trying to make the government more efficient.
What they're trying to do, really, in all essence, is contract out these jobs so that, you know, when they do this, you know, then it's a matter of not the patriotism that the people that I represent display, but it's about the bottom line.
It's about making a dollar, okay?
And that's what it's all about.
You know, and, you know, I remember, and I'm a retired Department of Defense employee.
And I remember the saga when I was employed with the Department of Defense when contractors was bidding on our jobs, bidding on various portions of our jobs, right?
And the sad thing that I remember is contractors were charging the government $600 for a hammer, okay?
This is the type of thing you get into when you start contracting out jobs, you know, and things like that.
It's not a cost savings at all, okay?
But I would enjoy the opportunity to sit down with the administration to talk about how we make the government more efficient.
Okay, we're not saying that it shouldn't be.
We're saying we should sit down and have those conversations.
For instance, if you really want to talk about making the government more efficient, let's look at Medicare, okay?
Okay, I think that there's an opportunity that we could save about $60 billion there.
When you look at the RS, you know, let's look at that.
Let's have this conversation because there's about a trillion dollar savings when you start looking at those that will evade taxes just this year.
You know, so let's have those conversations and talk about how we can be more efficient.
Everet Kelly joining us, and if you want to ask him questions, it's 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, and Independents 202-748-8002.
If you're a federal employee and you want to give your perspective on this, 202-748-8003, you can use that same number to text us.
Earlier this week, it was Vivek Ramaswamy on the Sunday shows talking about this effort.
I want to play a little bit of what he had to say about it, get your response.
Okay.
Washington, D.C., here's the dirty little secret in the federal bureaucracy today.
Most people don't even show up to work.
So if you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won't want to do that.
And by the way, that creates a logic for many of those agencies being outside of D.C. in the first place.
So these are, again, examples.
It's a great point you just brought up.
So would you sweeping changes were able to make that?
You could move the energy department to Texas or to Pennsylvania.
You could move agriculture somewhere else.
Is that what you're thinking?
Well, look, I think that, yes, absolutely.
But I think even bigger picture than that, many of these agencies should be downsized wherever they are.
And for whatever does remain, move many of them out to be where they're more accountable to the people.
And by the way, if you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great.
That's a good side effect of those policies as well.
And so our goal is not to be cruel, by the way, to the individual federal employees.
Most of them, I do want to say this, are individually good people, and we want to be compassionate and generous in how we handle this transition.
But the real issue is there's just too many of them.
We don't need 4 million, and we shouldn't have 4 million civil servants who can't be elected, or aren't even elected or can't be removed from their positions.
Mr. Kelly, that was him from earlier this week.
What's your response?
Well, I think that, first of all, he should educate himself on federal employees because to call federal employees bureaucrats, to call federal employees deep state, you know, in my opinion, is an indictment against federal employees.
Now, as I said before, the federal employees that you're calling bureaucrats are the nurses that take care of the veterans that's wounded.
They are the social security workers.
They are the BOP employees.
They are the TSA workers that make sure that our skies are safe.
They are the meat inspectors to make sure that the food we eat is safe.
So to say you're going to cut them, you know, without first of all analyzing, you know, and see what the federal government really needs, I think it's misguided.
Okay.
And, you know, so I welcome the opportunity to have a sit-down to talk about how do we make the government more efficient, you know, and to think that you can take the federal employees and D.C. workers inside of D.C. and send them out into the states to work, well, guess what?
Only 15% of the federal employees work inside of D.C. They're already dispersed throughout the United States.
Okay?
So I just think that they need to educate themselves on what federal employees really do and where they are located.
We have a call lined up for you.
Let's hear from some of them.
This is Eric in West Virginia Republican line for our guest, Everett Kelly.
He's the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees.
Good morning.
Good morning.
You know, I worked around that city for 27 years.
I lived in College Park.
I know about the liberal working conditions of the federal government.
I do know if a federal worker woke up and looked out and seen it snowing, they went back to bed.
Now, my question is: all these federal employees working from home now, if they wake up and it's snowing, can they turn their computer off and go back to bed and still get paid for it?
You're asking me, you know, that's really so far away from the truth.
You know, only about 20% of the federal workforce has ever even worked remotely.
You know, the unguided truth, you know, that are being pushed out to the American public is just so untrue.
Only about 20% maybe has even worked remotely.
So many of our employees, most of them, that job won't even allow them to work remotely.
So to think that it's just not true.
What's the policy work from home policy generally in the federal government as of today?
Well, it's a negotiation between the union and the agency.
And, you know, whatever that negotiation, and it varies between agencies and whatever that negotiated agreement is, we just expect to adhere to that, right?
Is it an average of you showing up once or twice a week?
I've heard once a month.
What's the truth there?
Good.
That's far away from the truth.
And again, it varies.
It's anywhere from a lot of times people are working remotely, two days out of the pay period, which is two weeks, okay?
You know, the fact of the matter is Of the hours that federal employees have to work on site, over 80% of that time is on site.
Of the 2,080 hours, okay, that an employee has to work, 80% of that time is right there on site.
And so to have these misnormers to go out like this, I think that is an indictment against federal employees and it shouldn't happen.
And people that's making those comments, you know, about federal employees, you know, in my opinion, should not be leaders anywhere because federal employees are being threatened.
You know, they're called names.
You know, and the idea, based on what I'm hearing, is to threaten federal employees so that they'll just quit and go home, right?
You know, that's not a leadership person to me.
Let's go to Meryl and Andrew.
Independent Line, you're on with our guests.
Good morning.
Hell Heather, as an independent, I just feel like I can, you know, see criticism on both your guests.
Like your first guest thought he brought up such a great point that Fauchi uh had a fifteen million dollar security uh cost.