‘War against the bureaucrats’

IF THERE is another good thing coming out from US President Donald Trump’s campaign to rid the US government of “waste, abuse, and fraud,” in other words, of corruption, it is opening the eyes of governments everywhere that no malfeasance (intentionally doing something illegal), misfeasance (doing something legal but in the wrong way), or nonfeasance (failing to do what should have been done resulting to damage), could occur in any government transaction without the participation of the bureaucrats, the ‘civil servants’ running the bureaucracy.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man whom Trump tasked for the job, put the problem more simply when he said that Americans’ exercise of their democracy thru their elected leaders like President Trump, is being obstructed, hampered, and frustrated by the unelected—the bureaucrats.

As Musk and his ‘DOGE’ (Department of Government Efficiency) has found, these bureaucrats’ grip on the machinery of government, absent any oversight by the White House and Congress, has become near total.

If not for Trump’s full support, Musk and DOGE would not have accessed the operations and expenses of USAID (US Agency for International Development), education, social pensions, law enforcement and of course, the Pentagon, which has failed an audit 7 years in a row.

Under the disgraced Biden administration, the bureaucrats were allowed to literally do their law-mandated jobs at their leisure that only 6 percent or about 180,000 federal government workers are reporting for work on a regular basis out of the total workforce of about 3 million.

The situation not only resulted to a failure to deliver effective, regular, and efficient public service as any taxpayer expects from their government. Worse, the absence of transparency resulted to the creation of Mafia-like operations composed of  bureaucrats within the various US federal agencies.

The best example of this machination of the system, thus far, is Musk’s discovery of the extent of thievery inside the US social pension system that enrich many bureaucrats from the billions of dollars they are stealing each year.

For indeed, only the imbecile can probably believe that in the US, one 369 years old and one 249 years old are still alive and continue to receive pension. Or that even babies and toddlers aged 0-9 years old, more than 38 million of them, are already drawing pensions.

What this all amounts to, clearly, is a systemic problem of plunder daily happening within the bureaucracy perpetrated by the bureaucrats themselves without the knowledge of America’s elected leaders in the White House and in Congress.

As Trump’s war against the bureaucrats are all in the public sphere, yours truly wonder if it has made any impression at all to our own leaders here?

After all, as a US puppet, we love to ape anything the Americans do, including the way our leaders and bureaucrats steal the public’s money.

Is President Marcos not also interested in finding out if the beneficiaries of our own social pension systems—the SSS, GSIS, and even PhilHealth—are the truly deserving and are all still alive?

And not only that. On many occasions, we have seen well-meaning officials get charged before the Ombudsman for corruption due to rigged biddings in their agencies mainly manipulated by the career bureaucrats.

Is it not time for Malacañang to now look into all these “details?” Doing so would definitely improve the President’s own trust rating.