The Trump Presidency 2.0

R.Caerbannog said:
So what would be better clearance wise? Gracefully take a bow by taking the downsizing deal or being unwillingly terminated/downsized/fired?
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If I'm picking up what you're putting down, and with all other things being equal, no cleared employees facing the "leave now with a possible payout or get terminated (due to downsizing) later" scenario would necessarily be in a worse position clearance-wise for choosing either. The exception to that would be if an employee who chose to stay was ultimately fired due to not complying with their agency's updated RTO policies.
 
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GOTWA said:
Depends where you're at in your investigation cycle. If your five year is coming up, you'll want to be with someone that will initiate it. Since we're in CE, the turnaround is about two weeks from the time your EQIP is submitted. Companies are hurting for people so there's a chance they'll bring you on even if you are out of scope or lack a clearance. Just depends if that particular skillset is easy to fill or not.
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Thank you. That helps explain things. So if your skillset isn't that needed it would be better to jump ship with a private company that will keep your clearance active. Otherwise if you get fired you pretty much lose everything?

@Totentanz Thank you for the clarification as well.

Not related just thought it was funny:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1887701988135014523
 
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I wonder if these guys are upset they didn't take the deal. Now, over 9000 are about to have their jobs cut. It's almost poetic.

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Locksteady said:
If I'm picking up what you're putting down, and with all other things being equal, no cleared employees facing the "leave now with a possible payout or get terminated (due to downsizing) later" scenario would necessarily be in a worse position clearance-wise for choosing either. The exception to that would be if an employee who chose to stay was ultimately fired due to not complying with their agency's updated RTO policies.
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Just saw this. So essentially if they're fired they do lose the clearance, but those who choose to leave or stay are in the same boat. Huh.
 
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R.Caerbannog said:
Just saw this. So essentially if they're fired they do lose the clearance, but those who choose to leave or stay are in the same boat. Huh.
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No.

So if you have a successful investigation for a job that gives you clearance eligibility for like 3 years, if you left that job after 1 year, you might have like only 6 months of eligibility status left before your investigation results expire vs. having the 2 remaining years if you'd kept the job.

If you get rehired in that 6 month timespan, you'd have 1 1/2 years left since the clocks keeps ticking during those 6 months too.

If you didn't take a clearance job in that shorter span of time, then it'd expire and they'd have to start a whole new investigation if you applied to a job with the same clearance eligibility requirement.
 
I've been mulling this over for a while and I'm not quite sure I'm there yet with the analogy, but here goes.

What's happening right now with the Trump administration reminds me a lot of the approach JSOC took against AQ in Iraq. Ultimately, we hit them so hard in so many different places for so long, that it affected their ability to do... pretty much anything.* Also, we really concentrated on going after the dark money. It's really, really hard to do nefarious things without the dollars to backstop everything. Even true believers want to get paid every once in a while.

That seems to be the approach right now. There is so much happening all over the place, including in a lot of unexpected ways (Gaza? WTF) that it's hard to react. And with DOGE going after the money, and with the corporations like Meta that were basically paying protection money to the Left now free to not do that (or afraid to keep doing it), we're seeing a LOT of change VERY quickly.








*...and then we told the Iraqis "Hey, you've got this! We're out." and then ISIS.
 
Marauder06 said:
The article is paywalled, so I couldn't read it.

Maybe I could get USAID to pay for it?
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Democrats are in an uproar over President Donald Trump’s plan to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development and move its functions into the State Department. At a rally in front of the shuttered agency, Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) declared that “this is what the beginning of dictatorship looks like,” while Rep. Jamie Raskin (Maryland) said Trump “is threatening lives all over the world.”

Please. Shuttering USAID is not some evil MAGA plot. In fact, it was first proposed by a Democrat — Secretary of State Warren Christopher — who tried to close the foreign aid agency during the Clinton administration.
In 1995, Christopher proposed a plan to eliminate three independent foreign policy agencies — USAID, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) — and merge them into a “super State Department.” In a 15-page single-spaced memo, his State Department declared “the current organizational structures and activities of the department and other foreign affairs agencies … are increasingly redundant, bloated and unresponsive to policy makers.” It even produced an organizational chart showing the three abolished agencies absorbed into a new “Consolidated Department of International Relations.” This would have restored President John F. Kennedy’s original vision for USAID, which he established in 1961 by executive order as “an agency in the Department of State” — but has since grown into an massive, entrenched bureaucratic behemoth.

Then, as now, the consolidation plan encountered fierce opposition from the foreign aid bureaucracy — USAID Director J. Brian Atwood told Christopher he would resign if his proposal went through — which managed to persuade Vice President Al Gore and his “reinventing government” team to torpedo the plan.

But not before my then-boss, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), got involved. In a Feb. 14, 1995, Post op-ed headlined “Christopher Is Right,” Helms declared he would not allow the Clinton administration to shelve “the most thoughtful reorganization of U.S. foreign affairs institutions since World War II.” USAID, Helms wrote, had become “an entrenched bureaucracy” that was “not functioning as part of a coherent, coordinated approach, maximizing the benefit of every dollar spent” and adding, “It is my intent to support Secretary Christopher against the bureaucrats who feel threatened by his long-overdue reorganization of Foggy Bottom.”
Helms put forward a plan of his own to merge the three agencies into the State Department. Atwood went on the attack, declaring Helms an “neo-isolationist” who wanted to gut foreign aid. Big mistake. It turned out that many within USAID supported Helms’s reorganization, and some began leaking internal memos to Helms’s staff detailing waste, fraud and abuse inside the agency — which we released to the press as “Captured Enemy Documents.” Noting how Helms had famously blocked a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a performance artist who smeared her nude body with chocolate syrup, a Post article said the pugnacious senator was now “smearing AID’s nude body with chocolate syrup … pointing out AID’s supposed miscues in a series of press releases.”

Among the captured documents was a cable from the U.S. ambassador to Chad complaining to the State Department about USAID’s attempt to fund a bizarre study on the “Viability of the Chadian State,” asking: “What exactly would we have done if they concluded that it wasn’t?” USAID projects, the ambassador said, deepened “the culture of dependency,” resulted in “little direct contact with poor people” and had “gestation periods longer than that of an African elephant.”
Helms refused to allow a Senate vote on the Chemical Weapons Convention or payment of U.N. arrears until Clinton agreed to his reorganization plan. After a long standoff, they compromised: Congress passed, and Clinton signed, the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, which eliminated two of the three agencies (USIA and ACDA) and allowed USAID to remain a distinct entity but took away its independence, putting its administrator “under the direct authority and foreign policy guidance of the Secretary of State.” The bill was supported by none other than … wait for it … Sen. Joe Biden, then the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/06/edith-pritchett-cartoon-jurassic-world/

Thanks to the Helms-Biden law, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has full legal authority over USAID — including the power to serve as acting director, delegate his authority to a subordinate in the State Department, pause foreign aid spending, direct staff not to report to work and move USAID functions into the State Department — all of which he has done. To permanently dismantle USAID requires an act of Congress, but short of that Rubio has broad authority over its operations.

He is right to exercise that authority. The fact is, none of the good things USAID does cannot be done from the State Department. But too many foreign aid bureaucrats don’t like the president’s team ensuring that their work keeps with Trump’s foreign policy objectives. As Rubio correctly put it during his visit to Central America, “In many cases, USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy with that country or with that region. That cannot continue. USAID is not an independent nongovernmental entity. It is an entity that spends taxpayer dollars, and it needs to spend it, as the statute says, in alignment with the policy directives that they get from the secretary of state, the National Security Council and the president.”
Trump, Elon Musk and Rubio are finally making sure, as Helms insisted three decades ago, that “every dollar spent on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy is spent wisely, efficiently and in support of our national interest.”
Somewhere, Helms — and Christopher — are smiling.
 
Just from an organizational and coherent national policy perspective, how could USAID **not** be under the State Department? If USAID is supposed to “end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies,” as stated in the article, shouldn't that be done under the direct supervision of the Department of State, whose mission is to "advance U.S. interests and values abroad while promoting a peaceful and prosperous world?" What's to stop USAID from going off on its own program and unintentionally (or, perhaps, intentionally) act in ways that are counter to the goals of the State Department and/or the President of the United States?
 

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