Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
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to your smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so
much for your support. Breaking news. I feel like I
say that a lot in the last I've been saying
that a lot in the last few days. Right, we
have breaking news the USDA, or as I like to
call it, usday, They have an inspector general. Have you
heard of these igs? These are the guys that come
in and gals that come in and you know, review
things and you know, oh, we took a look at this,
and malfeasans that or whatever. Right and general and you'll
recall maybe although there's been a lot of news that
Donald Trump fired a whole bunch of inspector general or
inspectors general. And the breaking news from Reuter's is that
the USDA Inspector General had to be escorted out of
her office because she refused to comply with her firing. Like,
I know you work in the public sector, but I'm
not sure you understand what it means to get fired.
Trust me, I can tell you they generally don't allow
you to refuse. That's not how that works. Like you
you no longer have a job here, you are no
longer permitted in the building. We will take your key
card and maybe, if you're lucky, we'll give you like
five minutes to throw a bunch of stuff in a box,
or maybe you can come back after hours and will
hire some security to stand over you while you fill
your box with stuff, right, Like, that's kind of how
that goes. And by the way, the security people do
not know what you are putting in the box, whether
it's yours or not, which is always hilarious to me,
Like they're going to be there to make sure I
don't what steal something or do something that I look
all right. To be fair, I have never had security
have to monitor my exodus. Okay. I have been relieved
of my my broadcasting duties twice in my career, once
here and that was like ten years ago, and then
once in Ashville, and both times. It was nothing I did.
So it's not like I ever got fired for calls.
It was always budgetary. It was like, we can't afford
to pay you anymore. We're making cuts, and so they
let me go. And when I got let go here,
they let me actually stay on the air for the
rest of the term of my contract for another almost month,
which I was very grateful for. I appreciate that to
this day, I still appreciate that. It is such, it
is so out far outside of the norm. You know,
usually when you are told that you've been let go
by a broadcast company, they don't let you go back
on the airwaves because they don't know what you're gonna say,
you know, and they would prefer you not say anything
bad about them, what being in a heightened emotional state
and all. But I never had a security guard. But
I did have when I was in Asheville. They had
me come back in after hours and the boss was there.
But it's not like he stood over me watching me
or anything. But because I had a lot of stuff
in my little office, and so I had a box
and I put a bunch of stuff in there, stole
a couple of computers, just the normal, you know, the
normal thing. Then maybe some accessories and stuff, some historical
things from the front lobby. But other than that, no,
there was I'm just kidding. I did not do that.
But you know, you bring stuff into the office, and
I keep a lot of paper records of things and
so anyway, but this idea that the security people are
going to be there, they're going to know what you're doing,
and way, way, wait, that's not yours, Like really the
bibblehead do you think that's the stations that No, that's mine,
you know. Anyway, So this USDA Inspector General had to
be escorted out of her office. This is just breaking
from Reuter's News and apparently, uh oh, hang on a second,
there's a Wikipedia about this person. Her name is Thong,
her last name is Thong. I don't know her first name.
Born in Philadelphia, raised in Honolulu. Earned a Bachelor of
Arts degree in Asian Studies and a jd from Vanderbilt
University Law School. Began her career as a staff attorney
for the US Commission on Civil Rights. Served as Assistant
General Counsel for the Legal Services Corporation, Assistant Inspector General
for Management and Policy. Nominated to serve as Inspector General
of the Small Business Administration in nineteen ninety nine. She's
been there a long time. Yeah, she was. Yeah, she
was initially put in there by Clinton. She doesn't have
any experience in agriculture. She's the IG for agriculture. So yeah,
I don't like the igs shouldn't be a permanent thing,
should they? Like, you should put an inspector general in
there when there's some whistleblower report of malfeastins or something. Right,
This shouldn't be a career post, should it. I don't
know now. The Trump administration also announce yesterday that it
is offering buyouts to all federal employees who opt to
leave their jobs by next week. And if I recall correctly,
this is exactly what Elon Musk did at Twitter. When
Elon Musk came in, and you had all these Twitter
employees that were, you know, uh, predicting the end of
Twitter as we know it. The whole thing is gonna
come crashing down, which, by the way, last I checked it,
you know it's still I'm actually looking at it right now.
It's still up. It's still working. This gets to the
and this was also evident in the reporting on the
Federal freezing Fund or sorry, the federal funding freeze. The
freezing fund is different. That's for refrigeration outreach, but the
funding freeze. All of the stories are framed in this
speculative way, like this could do that, this, may they
do this other thing. Oh, the impacts are far reaching.
We have no idea. It's like all of these predictions
of dire consequences, and it is the laziest form of
what I call journalism ing. That's what it is. It's
not journalism. You predicting something could happen. Yeah, well, what
about all of the other things that could happen? How
Come that doesn't get any space in your story? Right
when they were making these same predictions about Twitter, and
it turns out, actually you don't need all of that
staff to run Twitter, Elon Musk stripped it down, saved
a bunch of money, right, did a bunch of changes
and such, and people who want to work there and
who are doing the work. We played this clip yesterday
from a former federal employee who talked about the eighty
twenty rule. Eighty percent of the work is done by
twenty percent of the people that is not restricted only
to a public sector agencies or employers. This happens in
the private sector too, which is why, like Elon Musk
has talked about this like it it is important to
go through and clear out because once a company or
a government agency starts doing something and they get good
at it just getting into government agency, but like, okay,
they they they get kind of okay, maybe they've hired
a bunch of people and they got a big budget.
That the mission creep is a natural thing. It happens everywhere,
right If you want to say, okay, we're going to
set up a little government here and it's going to
be meant to you know, take some taxes, build up
an army, you know, or police force, fire department, pave
some roads, that kind of thing. And as they start
doing that and people are okay with the the service
they're getting for their money, then what happens, more economic activity,
more revenue comes in, and then the gov code people
start saying, well, you know, we could also do this
other thing over here. It's like wholl whoa whoa, oh,
whoa whoa. No, just keep doing the thing that you
are doing. And then as efficiencies are introduced, problems get addressed.
And so now it's not like draining the budget. You
get things short up, and then the private sector like, hey,
you say, hey, I made a widget and the widget's
working really well. It's why I call it well widgets
or well working widgets. And now we're on sort of autopilot.
And then you start looking to do other things and
you start expanding, and then you lose sight of the
core mission. And then every now and again it's important
to come out and clear out the deadwood and refocus
on the core service that you're supposed to be providing.
So Trump comes in and there are all sorts of
laws and stuff about civil service protections and the union
and all this other stuff. But he says you got
to come back to work or come back to the office.
And you got federal employees that don't want to do it,
and so this is their offer, like okay, And companies
have done this over the last year. They've said, if
you don't want to come back to the office, that's fine,
here's a severance deal, right, And this deal that they
are offering employees is eight months of pay. Eight months
of pay and you don't even have to come back,
just go here's a check for almost a year of
work that you're not going to do, and truth told,
you're probably not doing anyway. So like, here's a check
buy and this I'm supposed to believe is outrageous. It
is not outrageous, and in the long term, it's going
to cost us less money. How many people take advantage
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Trump speaking now? Oh my gosh, more from the fire
hose real, No, I can't drink anymore.
Speaker 2: I remember who were set loose into our country by
the last administration. We are deeply honored to be joined
today by Lincoln's parents, Alison and John and her sister Lauren.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump is signing the Lake and Riley Act into law.
This is the ceremony you're listening to.
Speaker 2: So so we were together right after that happened, and
it's a tremendous tribute to your daughter. What's taking place
today that's all I can say. But so said, we
have to be doing it at all. Thank you very
much for being here. To Lacoln's family. We will keep
Lincoln's memory alive in our hearts forever, Everyone's hearts. With
today's action, her name will also live forever in the
laws of our country. And this is a very important law.
This is something that has brought Democrats and Republicans together.
That's not easy to do. Lincoln, Lacoln did it. America
will never ever forget Lacln. Hope Riley, the vicious criminal
who murdered precious Lacan, was an illegal alien member of
the barbaric Venezuela in prison gang known as Trendy or Ragua.
He trespassed across our southern border in twenty twenty two
and was apprehended by border patrol, but under the cruel
policies of the last administration, instead of being deported as
he should have been, he was released into the United States,
as were millions of other people, many of them very
dangerous people. And you see what we're doing. We're getting
the hell out of here. He was soon arrested again
in New York City charges of endangering a child, but
because of New York City's deadly sanctuary policies, as we
have in California and many other places which we're ending.
We're going to end them. He was released again to reoffend.
The Biden administration then provided this illegal alien criminal with
a free taxpayer funded flight from New York to Georgia,
where he was arrested yet again constantly, this time for
stealing from a walmart along with his gang member brother
who was a bad one. Only after being released a
third time by the US law enforcement did this cold
blooded criminal go out and that fateful morning hunting for
women on whom to pray. That's what he did. He hunted,
He hunted. It was like a hunter. I'm going to
show them who the hunter is. This horrific atrocity should
never have been allowed to happen, and as President, I'm
fighting every single day to ensure that such a tragedy
never happened again. You don't want this to happen, and
under the law factor, under the law I'm signing today,
the Department of Homeland Security will be required to detain
all illegal aliens who have been arrested for theft, burglary,
larcity shoplifting, assaulting a police officer, murder, or any crime
that results in death or a serious injury. In addition,
for the first time ever, this Act gives state governments
the ability to sue the federal government for immediate injunctive
relief if any future administration ever again refuses to enforce
the immigration laws of the United States like happens.
Speaker 1: And that, my friends, that's the key. That's the key
of the Lake and Riley Act. I know the critics
are focusing on oh jantee immigrant and alist. The key
here is that states will be able to sue the
federal government if the federal government isn't doing its freaking job,
which they only they are empowered to do. Remember, Democrats
sued and they argued all the way through the courts
that you can't force us to follow federal immigration law.
When Texas started doing their stuff right with the floating
barriers and trying to put patrol along the border, and
they were like, you can't do that. That's our job.
We're supposed to be in Texas Like, well, you're not
doing it. They're like, so what, you can't do it either,
we don't want it done. That's the position they took
and they were successful, and so now this law not
an executive order, this is now a law. Now people
or states will have standing to sue the Feds if
they do that again. All right, I hope you had
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So the Trump administration announces that it is offering buyouts
to all federal employees who wish to leave their job,
which is basically all of them, I think by next week,
so they're on a deadline. A memo from THEPM not
to be confused with the OMB okay, that is a
different thing. That was their memo that they sent out
that caused all the hullabaloo. This is another government agency,
the Office of Personnel Management, which, by the way, did
you hear this story too? That I don't have anything
printed down on it, but I saw it. I read
a little bit about it, where like there was some
some employees, some federal workers, and I don't know, they
may have gone through their union or something to complain
at the suggestion that the administration wants to be able
to send messages directly to all workers rather than having
to send them to an agency first and then rely
on that agency head or whoever's in charge of the
email distribution, which is probably a freaking standalone position, but
they send it to them in every agency and then
have them distribute. And so they're like, why don't we
just have one big distribution list and will send it
to everybody. We want to be able to send it
to everybody, And they're like, you can't talk to me directly.
Try to pull that at your gig, right, do you
think your boss would put up with that? I don't
know about you. Every place I have ever worked, the
top person in the company has always been able to
directly email everybody all at once mass distribution list. They've
even been able to email me personally if they so choose,
But they never know who I am. So like they
could just send me an email like Pete heard your show,
you stink Like they could have just done that, but
nobody ever did. Maybe I don't stink that could be it,
or they don't know I exist, they don't listen that
either way. But the idea that I got to go
through as a boss, I would have to go through
different layers of protection. I can't take an email directly
from the boss. I might feel anxiety if I get
a message from the top man because he's orange and
he's scary. So anyway, a memo from the OPM, the
Office of Personnel Management, which is the government's HR agency,
said that it would begin subjecting all federal employees also
to quote enhanced standards of suitability and conduct enhanced standards
like wait, did you say standards? I'm out? And then,
according to the AP, it ominously warned of future downsizing
ominously What I say the other day talking about media bias,
whenever you're reading a story or listening to a story,
look for or listen for the adjectives that are used.
That will tell you what the sentiment of the reporter is,
right when they are ominously warning of future downsizing rather
than just warning of future downsizing or telling employees to
expect future downsizing. Now, look here, I have to acknowledge
I have a bias. I say this about a great
many different types of work out there that because I
work in radio, I have worked in radio for twenty
plus years, and I might not have the softest shoulder
to cry upon when it comes to this stuff. Okay,
because in my industry, and really I mean accept probably
in the mortuary services and probably tax preparation, the threat
of downsizing is always there. Talk to some of the
people that work in manufacturing about whether or not they
think that their job could be eliminated at any given moment.
Talk to all the mill workers and the families of
the mill workers over the last oh I don't know
forty years around the Carolinas right whether their jobs were
safe from downsizing. I know, I know media learned to code.
Blah blah blah. The email was sent out to millions
of employees and said those who leave their posts voluntarily
will receive about eight months of salary, but they have
to choose to take the deal by February sixth, which
I was just say this to somebody yesterday. I don't
like the arbitrary deadlines for these types of big decisions.
I don't appreciate that, but I understand these are tools
in negotiations. It is like you go into the car
dealership and they're like, oh, I can give you this offer,
but you got to do it now. Like, no, you don't.
If you're making me this offer, you can make that
offer any given day of the week. It's just that
you want this sale right now, and you think that
by giving me a fake deadline, you will increase the
pressure on me. To say yes. So usually it does
the opposite to me. It makes me want to say
no because now I know that i'm the mark. Why
didn't you just give me this deal and let me
think about it. If it's a great deal, I'm going
to come back and say yes. But when you say
you got to decide before you leave the showroom, that
I say, okay, well then I'm leaving right now. Bye.
You just made my decision for me. There's another when
I learned a whole bunch of these things, Like one
of them is called the silent treatment, where you just
sit there and when someone's like trying to pitch you
or or you know, give you prices on stuff, and
you just sit there and you don't say anything, just
keep staring at him, maybe do a little bit of
a squint, like a half squint hmm, And then it
becomes uncomfortable for them, so then they counter themselves. And
then there's another one the you can do better than that.
I don't know what it's called, but that's that's what
you say. And you can just change your tone of
voice as you say these things. I learned this from
a guy he wrote wrote several books. Weekend Millionaire series,
Mike Summy up in Ashville, Millionaire Guy, and I would
have him on the show and we would talk, and
he wrote about these things in his books, and one
of the tactics that he talked about was he and
one time he went in to buy a car and
he literally just sat there and he said, Oh, you
could do better than that. He said it like half
a dozen times, back to back to back to back
to back to back, and the guy just kept low
balling himself, which sounds kind of gross, but you know,
he just kept undercutting his own price because he could
do better than that. And Mike, he said, I would
just change the tone of voice. I would say it
in different inflection, you know, Oh, come on, you can
do better than that, or you could do better than that.
You could do better than that. And he just keeps
saying it, so it sounds like a new sentence and
it's not a new sentence. So there are ways to
count to these things anyway. So the false deadline, the
arbitrary deadlines, I tend to not like and I react poorly,
but I know this about myself. Self awareness is essential.
The email was sent to more than two million federal employees.
The federal government employees more than three million people, so
two out of three people got this email. Basically, By
the way, the average tenure for a federal employee is
almost twelve years that according to a Pew analysis of
data from the OPM. And then we get to the
speculative fear mongering over at the Associated Press story that
the sky is falling if people take this option, if
they take the buyout, what will we ever do again?
Same reaction when Twitter said they were doing this and
they fired a bunch of people, gave them early exit
packages and the like. There have been companies that have
done this. They're still in business. In fact, they're doing better.
They do better. You don't want some of the people
that take these severance deals, are these options? They weren't
really doing bang up work to begin with. All right,
if you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
I know you do too. And you've probably heard me
say get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because
it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've
been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and
it's a website. And it combines news from around the
world in one place. You can compare coverage and verify information.
You can check it out at check dot ground, dot
news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast
description too. I started using ground News a few months
ago and more recently chose to work with them as
an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories
get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows
you which stories get ignored by the left and the right.
See for yourself check dot ground, dot news slash pete.
Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off
any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited
access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps
my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they
make the media landscape more transparent. Okay, char let's take James.
Hello James, welcome to the program.
Speaker 3: Hey Pete. Thanks, good to hear you. Yeah, I'm delighted
to hear you talking about making comparisons in the business
world what Truck's trying to implement with the government. Because
I've worked for a manufacturer for thirty eight years, I've
seen rounds of trimming and job reduction, and you're right.
Usually it's people that you knew weren't hitting on much.
There's exceptions, but they're usually the ones that have to go.
And then budgeting is interesting too because there's a lot
of discussion about that with the government. But every year,
if your department had a budget, you could just count
on a five percent cut every year and every third year.
We would do zero based budgeting, where you start with
a clean slate and you justify every single bucket that
you need to function for that year. And we were
a profitable company, and that's how it's done. And the
government do you remember a few years ago when they
talked about eliminating Saturday delivery for the mail service. You
talk about a no brainer. They couldn't even do that.
In fact, they could probably cut it out Tuesdays, Thursdays
and Saturdays and reduce the size of the postal service
seventy percent. No one would notice, but they won't do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no. Zero based budgeting would be a massive
change to the way government functions versus what is currently used,
which is continuation budgeting, where whatever we spent last year
carries over to this year, continues over and then you know,
we obviously have to increase by you know, cost of
living and inflation and everything else. And so it's just
this natural, built in mechanism to keep the agencies growing
and growing and growing, and there's never any kind of
a fresh look at the numbers to say is this
even doing its job? Is this is this accomplishing the mission.
Speaker 3: It's just discipline and you know, and whenever we had
to face you're right, the cost of everything goes up.
But also after you've done things for a year or two,
you realize you have to prioritize and like, all right,
this bucket went up five percent, but man, I'm going
to take it out of this thing that we don't
even do anymore. And then then that's how it's no
different than you run your household. You just you just
have discipline and you spend on what's important and you
don't spend just because yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like okay, think of it. Like all of
the apps, right, people pay for various uh, you know,
video streaming, television apps, and at some point you realize like,
oh my gosh, this thing is auto drafting every single
month for nine to ninety nine, and you add them
all together and before you know it, you know, you're
spending one hundred dollars on apps that you don't even watch.
So you go through and you're like, cancel, cancel, cancel.
I don't want these apps anymore. It's the same same
sort of approach, same idea, and then it's the ones you.
Speaker 3: Care about go up five percent. You got it.
Speaker 1: Covered, right, yeah, exactly, Yeah, yeah, James, I appreciate the call, buddy,
thank you. Yeah, man, all right, take it easy. This
is this is interesting too. I just saw Elon Musk
tweeted out or xed out, tweeted out support for Trump's
executive orders and proposed actions. And let's see the one
with the let me see delaying Oh here is uh wait,
no ending federal effort, no birthright citizenship MM, Gulf of
Mexico not very popular to call it the Gulf of America.
Closing all Yeah, so closing all federal government DEI offices
and firing all federal employees working in DEI initiatives as
a forty four percent support rate fifty one percent to
pose and that's like, yeah, that's the highest, tied with
delaying the ban of TikTok. And then I got an
e or a Yeah, I got a message here from Ashley.
It's a Pete tweet. Ashley says, I just wanted to
let you know that. On Glenn Beck's program this morning,
he stated that federal employees percentage at home rate was
ninety six percent. Okay, So if I understand that correctly,
ninety six percent of federal workers are working at home,
that seems very very high. Not unbelievable, that's very high.
It's like at that point, who's in the office. Who's
the schlub that's actually going into the office at all?
Think about that, you haven't You got an office of
one hundred workers and four of them are showing up.
That's crazy. So even this is the ap even a
fraction of the workforce, were they to accept the buyouts here,
it is speculative, could send shock waves through the economy
and trigger widespread disruptions throughout society as a whole. Oh
my gosh, wait a minute, they're getting eight months of
pay for not working. Couldn't they, I don't know, take
the money that they're getting for the eight months worth
of pay and maybe travel around and wouldn't that boost tourism?
What about the economic multipliers? We always hear about the
multiplier effect. Whenever they want to tax us to build
sports arenas in Stadia, they're like, oh, but the multiplier effect.
These people are coming and spending money and blah blah blah.
Where is that these people are? Now? This is I thought,
this is what Democrats wanted. That's why we got Obamacare.
Remember Nancy Pelosi, She's like, now they'll be able to
go be artists and stuff and stuff, and they don't
have to worry about paying for their health insurance. They'll
be free to create what maybe maybe we get Pelosi
to lead this branding effort. Right, let's free the federal
workforce up to go and paint. They can join Hunter Biden,
who now has to paint a lot more because all
this pain burned up in California worth billions of dollars.
As I understand it, he submitted an insurance claim. Yeah so,
but they do acknowledge the AP acknowledges that that all
of this the shock waves throughout the society, bringing us
to our knees in eight months. It could trigger wide
ranging and as yet unknowable implications for the delivery, timeliness,
and effectiveness of federal services across the nation. And I
would just submit. Okay, yeah, all right, let's see what
it looks like. That's I'm okay with this. Yes, I
will run the experiment. Let's run this experiment and see
what happens. I'm down, all right. That'll do it for
this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could
not do the show without your support and the support
of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if
you'd like, please support them too and tell them you
heard it here. You can also become a patron at
my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.
Speaker 2: M hm.