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Feb. 24, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:39
What Five Things Did You Accomplish This Week?

Federal workers are having a major meltdown over receiving an email from the Office of Personnel Management (by way of Elon Musk's DOGE) asking them to reply with five things they accomplished in the previous week. Will the rest of America sympathize with their panic over having to justify their "jobs for life"?

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Time Text
Why Weeding Out Government Waste? 00:12:17
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Some Monday hiccups today on the live stream.
So we'll take care of that.
We'll come through with reporting and explaining the whole world process.
You know, it's very simple.
There's too much government.
And when you do get to government, you don't know what they're doing.
And I think Trump and Musk decided that we need to know what do you do here?
And some asking employees to tell us what they do there.
So that's what's in the news right now, because some people objected to that.
They don't want to ask that question.
That's embarrassing.
It reminds me of how I talked with a lot of my grandkids as they would come home from school or something.
I use the word, I would use the word productive because I believe people should be productive and creative.
I said, what did you do productive today?
And they knew I'd ask that question.
So they'd always have to have something.
So I guess they're looking in the government, but Musk group, they want to talk about accomplishment.
Now, that's a bigger job for the government, what is accomplishment.
And that's why I imagine a few just didn't bother coming and telling us what they didn't do.
So anyway, this is now meeting some pushback and just how much it is and what it means.
But some of Bush's own groups of people are saying, hey, we better hold off here.
Let's delay this.
Let's not answer all these questions because I think they're supposed to, this is supposed to be done really quickly and come up with this and report just to get to get a handle on it.
So if you take over a big business, you'd want to know, what do you do here?
And do we need you?
But this is a little different because there's a lot of people that oversees government that think that they can't have anything looked into.
And governments like to be private and they like to go secret and they don't want to be, you know, audited, this sort of thing.
But the new administration, our administration wants to find out, you know, who's doing what.
Maybe we can do without a lot of their activity.
It certainly is well known by the general population that U.S. SAAID is something that most people are like, what in the world are they doing?
So I think the consensus of the people must be very supportive.
Although people are now popping up and filing lawsuits and everything else, they can't do that to us.
And they're breaking the rules and they don't have any authority to do this.
So it gets a little more complex.
But we'll find out this week how far along the Trump administration gets with rooting out the lazy ones and the ones that deserve to be fired.
Yeah, it was a total meltdown, Dr. Paul, because I think it was over the weekend or Friday, Musk, with the authority of President Trump, decided through the Office of Personnel Management to send out an email to federal employees.
It was actually quite a simple email.
We can call it up here on the screen.
The subject was, what did you do last week?
And then the content said, please reply to this email with approximately five bullets of what you accomplished last week and CC your manager.
Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.
Deadline is this Monday at 1159 p.m. EST.
Now, this came through the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, to try to find out what people do.
But I would propose, actually, if we could look at the second clip, this is from Elon himself.
I think this was twofold.
The reasons for this were twofold.
Now, let's read what Musk had to say.
The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they're not checking their email at all.
In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks.
In other words, there is outright fraud.
So, on the one hand, you have people who just aren't working at all.
In fact, they don't even bother to check their government emails from which they are collecting a very juicy paycheck.
But on the other hand, you have something different, which is out and out fraud, where you're collecting that big, juicy paycheck, but it's not you.
It's your aunt Millie who's dead.
So he's rooting out the fraud, but he's also rooting out people who just don't give a darn, who don't want to work and who don't care.
Death never cancels out the checks going out.
So, no, it is a mess.
I think some of this is going to be resolved, but it's not going to be easy because the forces are so powerful and they'll come up with a scare tactic.
But I think the administration is determined.
And if at all, they are going to have some changes made.
The big question is, can we change the attitude and reintroduce the notion of what the responsibility should be in the relationship of the people with the government?
You know, the founders tried to tell us what that relation should be, but it hasn't followed through because so much of the government has become secret.
And we talk about audits, audit the Fed and audit the Pentagon, audit the various agencies.
And it's very resentful.
So this is a modest audit, you know, what we're talking about.
And people are resisting it because they say only 10% of them are outright cheaters.
They're probably very, very nervous.
But others, I don't know, maybe that would be a low number of people.
I think it's the atmosphere.
You know, it's not so much that they're committing outright fraud and they're committing this.
It's just the system.
The system doesn't, you know, encourage, you know, productive efforts.
You know, that's that's the problem.
It's the whole problem of the of the inefficiency of government.
And that's why the word efficient is very important.
But I keep saying you better be prepared because by its very natures, governments are not efficient.
And that's what is the biggest challenge.
But that doesn't mean you have to give up 100%.
But, you know, if 80 or 90% is very inefficient, I think we ought to look at it.
Yes.
You know, and I think this is, again, I think sort of like with USAID, this is low-hanging fruit.
They're basically trying to get people to self-report that they are doing nothing by ignoring the email, by having a conniption fit, by not being dead.
And so I think that's what happening.
But the other thing that it's doing, Dr. Paul, is just challenging this notion because I was looking over X over all the weekend, and it's an absolute freak out because public employees sort of enjoy this exalted status.
We are public servants, you know, and then the question is, okay, well, why don't you serve us by doing something?
How dare you ask me to create something?
So, of course, there are federal employees who are dedicated to the job and who do a good job.
In fact, I was going to call it up, but it's too long, but there was a really interesting clip over the weekend of a woman who worked for the Army Corps of Engineers as a civilian employee for a while.
And I would encourage people to look it up.
But she was talking about how, yes, there are some dedicated workers, but those dedicated workers are oppressed, are suppressed, are terrified because the vast majority just don't bother to show up.
And so if they actually start performing above standard, then they're targeted because they're making everyone else look bad who's sitting at home in their slippers.
So you've got a big problem out there.
You know, they talk about public service and these are service, but I think what has happened, they've gotten a little bit mixed up when they were hired on, or they learned it after they got there.
The service is to themselves.
They're not serving the people.
Oh, though, yes, the government has, they individuals have to serve the government and send them their paycheck.
And if they don't do it, we'll take care of them.
It's almost like who's in charge?
And it's and the current administration wants to shift that attitude that somebody else should be in charge.
And of course, being in charge and operating this, the smaller the operation, the better.
And government should not ever be as complex as this.
You know, even the worst authoritarian government gets smaller because they use a lot of guns to make it limited.
But it's just a growth of government.
People have known this for a long time.
I remember when I started listening to the politician was Barry Goldwater.
He talked about it.
And of course, we limped by ever since then, but the government keeps growing and growing.
And most people know that it is going to come to an end.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think if I'm reading your mind correctly, I mean, I think this is a tactical victory.
You're weeding out the people that are just so obviously not doing what they should do.
But if I'm guessing, if I'm putting on my, you know, my clairvoyant hat, you would say this is good, but it's kind of missing the point because the real question is not how many lazy people they are, but how much should government be doing at all?
And that's not being addressed.
Maybe it will be the philosophical approach.
Why do we have a Department of Education?
We don't necessarily want a bunch of efficient people in there.
You know, we want them gone.
You know, I listened carefully to the Eisenhower period of time.
And I remember the discussion about the post office.
And he was going to appoint somebody that came from private business and may run it like a business.
But the post office still runs debt.
The debt is bigger than ever.
But there's something about the nature of government that prevents it from being used.
And I don't think that is complex because if you're running a business, you don't exist if you don't have a profit and pay your own salary or pay your employees and satisfy your customers, the whole work.
But when government provides the services, there's no pressure to do that.
And then when it gets out of hand, then people put their foot down.
Over the years, there's been token improvements.
There would be announcements.
There will be periods of time where they would shrink the size of government a little bit.
But I think this time, the size and scope of government is so big that the people are really panicking.
And well, how are they going to do it?
We all belong to it.
And also, I think is why they're facing a real problem is cutting this debt has to be dealt with.
And you can work and pay and have all these regulations and start paying the debt off.
But the whole thing is it doesn't happen, but the debt will be liquidated.
And all this interference, all this uselessness gets interfered.
So the system and even the system of our noble republic, you know, may be endangered.
And there's a lot of our republic that has been already destroyed.
You know, on the hill in August is traditionally the time of recess.
The house isn't in session.
And notoriously, there's not a lot to do.
So even though legislative branch is not affected by this, I sort of made a joke on X when it first came out, like, wow, I'd kind of hate to justify my five things in August when there's not much happening as a joke.
But then I kind of sit down and thought.
It's really not that hard to come up with five accomplishments, even in a really slow week on the hill.
You know, I mean, I could name easily five things that I accomplished, even if you were feeling lazy.
So I just don't see this as a really big ask for people.
Why They Left 00:13:15
I just think they're insulted that someone had the gall to actually ask them what they're up to.
You know, sometimes their goals, I remember early on in my career, we were having a meeting.
I was on a foreign policy committee, and it was an introductory committee.
It wasn't anything official.
It was get to know the staff and the people.
And the leader, whoever was chairman, had to leave the room.
And the new people, especially the other one, got together and started gossiping.
You know what was the top subject?
What country were they replenished their trips?
Oh, geez.
I can believe that.
Yeah.
I can believe that.
Just leave me out.
Well, now here's somewhere the pushback is coming from.
This is the federal government employees union.
We can skip Kash Patel.
We'll go back to him later.
But the union is furious, Dr. Paul.
And just look at the tone of this response.
They said it is cruel and disrespectful for federal employees to be forced to justify their job duties to this out of touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed a single hour of honest public service in his life.
They're saying that, of course, about Musk.
How dare he?
How dare he require this?
He's not elected.
Well, I did include in here an audio and video clip of Stephen Miller, who I believe is the deputy chief of staff.
This is a little bit longer than we usually put up.
It's about a minute and a half.
But I really think it will benefit any of our viewers or listeners who have not seen it to listen to Stephen Miller explain this idea.
Well, Musk isn't elected.
How dare he tell people what to do?
If we can queue up that video and let's listen to it.
It is true that many of the people in this room for four years failed to cover the fact that Joe Biden was mentally incompetent and was not running the country.
It is also true that many people in this room who have used this talking point that Elon is not elected fail to understand how government works.
So I'm glad for the opportunity for a brief civics lesson.
A president is elected by the whole American people.
He's the only official in the entire government that is elected by the entire nation, right?
Judges are appointed, members of Congress are elected at the district or state level, just one man.
And the Constitution, Article 2, has a clause known as the Vesting Clause, and it says the executive power shall be vested in a president, singular.
The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.
That president then appoints staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government.
The threat to democracy, indeed, the existential threat to democracy, is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime tenured civil servants who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for.
So Americans vote for radical FBI reform and FBI agents say they don't want to change.
Or Americans vote for radical reform under energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don't want to change.
Or Americans vote to end DEI, racist DEI policies, and lawyers in the Department of Justice say they don't want to change.
What President Trump is doing is he is removing federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people.
It is true.
Now, obviously, there are some slight quibbles, but he makes a great point.
What are you talking about?
He's not elected.
He's appointed by the person who is elected.
You know, there's this criticism that they're elected and what have they done.
But when you think about it, if they're thinking about jobs to protect their jobs, what about Musk and a few other people that get rich and then they end up politics?
How many jobs have they created?
How much technology have they promoted?
You know, and it's look, if you're looking for productivity improvement, it's quite a bit different than the people that can't figure out this last week.
What did I do?
Oh, yeah, I drove my car over there.
I didn't crash in anybody and parked in the garage and everything.
So it's a thing.
But the whole thing about describing Musk as somebody because he was not elected, that he wasn't ever creative.
But these people who aren't, you know, what have they done?
What most of them have done outside of it?
Because it's pretty hard to work in an administration.
What if they were upfront and decided to tell the truth and they've been working with the USAID?
What would they list as an accomplishment and tell the truth?
Wouldn't that be that would be horrible?
Now we're hearing about the truth.
And not only do they have, they've done a lot of things, but when you hear what they've done, it has nothing to do with providing security and helping our government, helping the people.
It's not even related to that.
And what we're going to get in the mainstream media are millions of sob stories.
And obviously, everyone feels bad for someone who loses a job.
And go to the next one.
This is what CNN has got going up here.
You're going to get a lot of sob stories that they're going to put up here.
And here's one particular one.
CNN is, this is crazy vibes, is the person posting on X. CNN is running nonstop stories about the stress and trauma of federal employees being laid off.
And then he goes on to say, Meta just laid off 3,600 employees.
HSBC fired 70% of their investment bank.
Welcome to the real world.
To which we would say, yes.
I mean, I was let go from a job and it is traumatic and it's not very much fun, but it does happen.
If you're not doing what your boss thinks you should be doing, or if they change directions, which is what I was told, whatever, what have you.
I've actually had it happen twice and both times were extremely traumatic.
And it's not fun, but that's the way the ball bounces.
And when politicians lose an election, they're very distraught.
They're distraught.
They lose all the good.
They're breaking up the system.
Should we move on to AID or you want to talk about the workers going, must be forcing to go to work?
I think the one on the workers.
This is related.
I'm sorry.
That's weird.
That's really weird to just to return to the office.
But you know what?
My instincts at the beginning, I like the personal contact.
So I never thought it would work.
And there are a lot of people in business where they have more freedom of choice.
They're going back to it for special reason.
I have somebody in the family that works for a large company.
And he was demanding you're going back to work because he saw some things that you don't know about.
Know just the interpersonal relationship, just the you know, talking at lunch or something with people, but never leaving your house and looking at email.
There's something comes up short on that.
Yeah, I mean, all the time in your office making crude junior high-level jokes in the back room, anyway.
Um, yeah, I saw a clip over the week on On X. There was, and I don't remember the exact details, but they showed a cafeteria completely empty.
No one had been in it for years.
The taxpayer was paying millions and millions of dollars a year because the people just don't go to work, you know.
And so, if you put it up, actually, now this is the other thing that Musk is going on, which is you got to go back to work or you're going to paste on leave.
Musk warns Fed workers to return to the office or be placed on leave.
Um, he said, starting this week, federal workers who fail to return office will be placed on administrative leave.
And Musk wrote, Those who ignore President Trump's executive order to return to work have now received over a month's warning.
Starting this week, those of you who still fail to return to the office will be placed on administrative leave.
So, I also think that a lot of America is not going to be too sympathetic with workers, federal workers being distraught over having to actually show up to the job.
Yeah, you alluded to it.
There are some fundamentals that if you don't address them eventually, you don't accomplish anything.
Because if you get rid of, if you have an agency of government that finally was exposed, how rude, how useless they were, you might get ahead and you cut them back.
But if you don't get rid of the principle that they're supposed to do it, all we need are better people.
It's sort of like, you know, yeah, Ron, you've convinced us.
This, this Fed is not much worth anything.
So, what we'll do is we'll change it.
We'll go and ask the, you know, the professors at all the universities who's most talented to be the Federal Reserve Chairman.
You know, and they'll do that.
But, but the answer might be not having a central bank to rig the interest rate.
So, that's the way with most of this stuff.
And then it turns into a boondogle when you think about that.
You know, I try to prepare myself for how bad this is, but I still shocking how why do people, it is not so much that that is happening as why do people put up with it?
You know, when you look at foreign policy, why did the American people put up with this?
You know, when we look at the destruction in the Middle East and Ukraine right now, cities and millions of people dying.
Why?
You say, well, no, no Americans died over there and we're not involved.
But the truth is, you know, it's probably our money, our money that did this and the weapons they send them.
So it's that's why I think you always have to get back to the basics.
And I think that's what the founders tried to get.
And they, you know, Article 1, Section 8 is a great part of our Constitution.
This is what you're allowed to do.
And the liberals hate that.
They don't think that that is part of the Constitution.
And I think there'll be a big argument among people that will having to go back into work in DC.
There's so much traffic.
It's so congested.
I mean, I remember a colleague Jeff often said, why don't they just relocate the federal government to Kansas or somewhere like this, you know, that nobody really wants to live in.
I don't want to nothing against Kansas or whatever, but out in the middle of the country.
So then people would really have to have some hardships because DC is like a, you know, is like a playhouse for people.
I mean, in all of it's, it's the most expensive houses, the highest incomes in the country, et cetera, et cetera.
So relocate some of these jobs out there.
So, Joey, the last thing we want to touch on is AID, I think.
And this is they fired some people.
Yeah, it's more of a follow-up to what we were saying.
put that clip up.
So we saw, we talked about it last week, I think it was that a lot of people were sent home with pay.
Well, this is USAID end game.
This is from Hedge.
Trump firing 2,000 employees, playing, paying, putting most others on leave.
So there are, I think, about 13,000, they said employees, 2,000 and fired outright.
The rest of them, absent, I believe, 600, who they say are performing mission-critical activities, at least for things that are still ongoing.
They will be put on leave and they're going to figure out what's going to happen to them, whether they're going to be fired or sent somewhere else.
It's a good step, I think, obviously, to get rid of this bad organization.
The danger is that it'll be subsumed somewhere else and continue to do things that maybe this administration wants, that the other one didn't want.
I still like what's happening, regardless of whether or not they take my advice and get rid of this.
But this whole idea of exposure and the auditing and showing people what's going on, how much is it costing in this?
I think, you know, there's so often we would be talking on one of our programs and showing this horrible thing and it would be bad news.
Look at what they're doing.
And I would try to put the positive spin there.
Yeah, but just think how many how many friends we've just joined.
This tip the hat and they finally get disgusted and wake up.
But that's a heck of a way to do it.
But that generally is the way it happens.
That's the way war ends.
Exhaustion.
Exhaustion and the recognition that the war is, you know, too much pain and suffering of the people and the economic expenses.
And then it comes to an end.
But I think there's a better way.
Don't start them.
Yeah.
We start these wars.
Exactly.
I think they soften people up to the dismissal of USAID with some low-hanging fruit.
Receiving End Critiques 00:04:26
Again, using that term, some pretty obvious outrages.
And I have a clip of a couple of them from the article here that I think whetted people's appetites for the destruction of USAID.
And they said there's just a handful of USAID projects that have sensible people cheering the agency's destruction.
If we can put that next one up, go back, go forward, maybe.
There we go.
$1.5 million to produce, to push diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbian workplaces.
Okay.
$70,000 for DEI musical in Ireland.
$25,000 for a transgender opera in Peru, in Colombia, $32,000 for transgender comic book in Peru, $2 million for gender transitions and LGBTV.
I can't even pronounce it.
Activism in Guatemala, $2.5 million for electric vehicles in Vietnam, and $6 million to foster tourism in Egypt.
Again, they're not talking about a lot of money here, Dr. Paul, but what they're talking about are things that not only rob our pocketbooks, but disgrace us worldwide, forcing these people to do things that they may or may not want to do.
You know, diversity has been a big issue.
It's being attacked, rightfully so, in recent months.
And everybody likes diversity.
But the truth is, there's a difference between diversity that is forced upon people and diversity that is natural.
So I would say that if they were honest with themselves, if they truly want diversity, they'd have to be a libertarian.
Because you're, you know, not groups.
We don't even deal with groups.
Individuals can do what they want as long as they don't force it on each other.
But all this other stuff has been use of force, exposion, a bunch of junk under taxpayers' stuff in schools.
And then there, fortunately, there's been a rebellion against that.
But diversity, I think that's the magnificent thing about the libertarian message.
What about a free market?
How can it be more diverse than if you have free entry?
They say you don't ever have to worry in a free market monopoly, even if they have 98%, as long as they're free entry, as long as you can compete.
And that's what libertarianism offers, the competition in a voluntary manner.
But no, when diversity doesn't work, and now they come up and you hear about some bad things happening in our society and people are checking out, oh, yeah, how'd they get this job?
This very important job.
Exactly.
Yeah, and it's a problem.
Well, we talk about, you know, we're on sort of the receiving end because we're getting our pockets picked to do things we don't like overseas.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
But we also have to remember, especially we non-interventionists, is those sovereign countries on the receiving end of our generosity sending USAID over there.
Now, here's, excuse me, the next clip is the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who makes a good point.
He's been on the receiving end of this USAID.
And he says, USAID was the heart of a robust financial and power machine, a monster created to crush, crumble, and erode the freedom and independence of nations so that the liberal globalist empire could thrive.
President Trump drove a stake through the heart of the empire.
Now it's our turn in Europe to finish the job.
Very well said.
I bet he annoyed a couple people.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, the USAID was coming over there and subsidizing all the papers that were attacking him and whatever.
There should be opposition papers, but as you said earlier, they have to be organic.
They rise up organically.
They're not artificially funded from outside.
You know, if you trace some of that organization, how people are paid to work in universities and prepare papers, and the papers will do it.
And if you get a publication made at the Federal Reserve and put it in their magazine, it really is good for your career.
And that, of course, is all government money, manipulation, propaganda.
And say, look, all the university professors say such and such.
And that's the way it is with foreign policy too, the foreign policy experts, you know.
Where does it reflect on some of the votes in Congress?
Some of the people that shouldn't be voting certain ways, the pressures put on them by the propagandists.
Absolutely.
Early Bird Discount 00:02:26
Well, I'm going to close out our kind of a weird Monday because we had some problems.
I think Rumble had some problems for the live show, but put on that last clip to remind our viewers that there are only a few days left to get that early bird discount to the Ron Paul Institute's spring conference down here in Lake Jackson, just south of Houston.
You can easily fly into hobby.
That's my recommendation.
It's about an hour drive, maybe a little less down here to Lake Jackson.
And for that effort, you will be rewarded by not only our chairman and founder, Ron Paul, but our good friends Tom Woods, Representative John Duncan, David Stockman, and Jeff Deist, who served as your last chief of staff, Dr. Paul.
It's going to be a great conference, America in the Age of Trump 2.0.
Happy to report right now, Dr. Paul, that we've sold about half of our total tickets available.
So it's moving along.
Grab those last couple of few that are available on discount.
And we'll see you in just a few weeks now.
Oh, boy.
Sounds good to me.
And I look forward to it because we get to see old friends and make new friends.
And we always see some people coming long distances.
We don't get these huge, huge crowds, but we get huge enthusiasm.
And I like that too, because I think the real goal has to be to change people's minds.
That is the real test that we have because the ideas are what really count.
And ideas really are those ideas that are good and time has come, you know, forever, they cannot be stopped.
And I think, I think some of this, I see people say, well, it's the end of the Republic.
And they're very, very pessimistic.
And they look at all this bankruptcy and all the attack on freedom.
But in another way, is the mess that the cultural Marxists have created so that they can march in and take over is also an opportunity for us that believe in liberty to get ourselves in that position to influence them to reassess the benefits of a liberty.
And that I think is so important because if you're looking for a system of government and the most successful system of government, if you're looking for peace and prosperity, is a free market, a personal liberty system.
That is what we endorse.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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