I saw that yesterday OPM issued orders to all agencies to fire all probationary employees. Now for those of you who don’t know, all employees hired by the federal government are on probation for two years. After that they have the full complement of employee rights but in the first two years they can basically be fired at will. I had to certify that they were good before the end of the probation period.

(As an aside because I had over two years of federal employment because of my Co-Op engineering employment, I was already past probation when I was hired by the agency I worked at for almost thirty years and so they were stuck with me.)

Now this is one way to reduce the federal government but it is not the best way. The problem is that once again it fires people indiscriminately without regard to competency. Some of these new hires maybe the wiz kids we need. What we need to eliminate is the numerous senior employees who are worthless and just getting by like labor union members on seniority.

I love DOGE but I want to see a more targeted approach to firing federal employees. Now if you eliminate entire agencies or functions and then you have to go no matter how competent you are because you are doing things that don’t need to be done.

Just to clarify what I mentioned in my previous rant, there are several of you who are old enough to have been in the IBM punch card game but I don’t think any of you actually developed computer programs in that time. So I will explain what was involved. Back then you couldn’t just log on your computer and access a programming site and type in your program. No IBM was the system and to run a program you had to go to the computer center and using IBM punch cards , which we had to buy but weren’t expensive maybe $5 for a hundred or so, and they were stiff and probably stacked up as maybe 50 to 70 for an inch. You put them in the punch machine and then on a keyboard you typed out a card for every line in your program.

As an aside, in my senior year we had a stand alone computer that I had access to because I was being paid as a computer assistant to help students with questions and I could type the program directly into the computer without punch cards.

Now with punch cards think hanging chads. The point of this rant is that once for a reason I don’t recall we had to develop a program in FORTRAN and they had to develop the same program in COBOL and my stack was about an inch high and theirs was about six inches. It was and still is a stupid computer language.

This is like when I told you that the National Archives is looking for people who could read and write cursive. With a DOGE update you could probably eliminate 75% or more of federal IT positions.

I was just watching Treasury Secretary Bessent on Ingraham and he said that the 12 or so computer systems at the IRS are running on COBOL, an obsolete programming language. People COBOL was invented in 1959 and was one of the two computer languages in vogue when I was in college 60+ years ago. It was the language used by businesses and financial institutions etc. The other language was FORTRAN which is the one I knew and used because it was the one used in math and science etc. Personally I don’t know why anyone would ever use COBOL because I could do the same thing in FORTRAN with a third or less lines of code.

Anyway, my point is that this is exactly why we need Musk and his nerd wizards to clean up the mess. I saw when I was looking up COBOL that they are actively searching for people who are literate in it because of all the antiquated systems that need to be maintained.

It reminds me of that space movie where they had to bring back old astronauts like Bruce Willis and others because they needed people who were familiar with whatever antiquated computer language that was required.

Let me explain the difference between being a genius by IQ and a real genius on a particular subject. I am pretty sure that I would qualify as a genius under the IQ over 140 criteria but that doesn’t mean anything when it comes to being an actual genius in a particular area of competence. As I have said before, I have never done anything that wasn’t easy to me even though I have done things that no one had ever done before. My daughter is I think maybe more intelligent than me but she never pursued a singular field. My son who is a mathematical genius and I if I remember correctly proved an unsolved mathematical theorem but is not in mathematics now.. He is the one I previously posted about that just graduated in French. He is literally a mathematic genius,

So my point? Being an IQ genius is not the same as being an actual genius in a given field. As I have ranted about before I did something in computing that hadn’t been done before but I didn’t think about a career in computing. I went into litigation. And was very successful, but it wasn’t game changing.

Musk’s kids are people that have from their earliest days ate and breathed code. They are the kids that hacked government systems and now they are uncovering the corruption in the federal government. My point is that there is a difference between those with a high IQ and those who have a particular area of expertise.

I know several Mensa people who were worthless.

I don’t know if you have seen it but he has posted a video. Look it up because I’m to lazy to put up a link. But anyway he was in the European Alps not skiing but at a conference and he noticed that most of the big spenders were Ukrainian people. Spending up to a million dollars on a few days vacation. Guess where the missing $100 billion dollars went? And he also discovered and said it was a fact that half the weapons that we have sent to Ukraine were sold to other sources, most notably the Mexican Cartels. We are funding our opposition.

I am so happy that she and Trump are going after the leftist who have been fighting against ICE and the CBP. Homan has said it would happen and now Bondi has charged Hochul and Loopy Letitia with crimes. Hooray! It’s about time and it will send a serious message to all the other lefties that you are not going to get a pass for your virtue signaling. Actions have consequences and your ass is facing jail time. And it’s apparently working because Newsom and California are now saying that they are cooperating with ICE even though they are a sanctuary state. Indict them all.

I continually crack up at all the losers on the left who are ranting about Musk having young people in DOGE. Let’s remember that Microsoft and Facebook and many other companies were founded by people who didn’t graduate from college and were in their late teens or early twenties. AI is being developed by young wiz kids. Some people are just geniuses in computer programming and everyone else isn’t. So the left is complaining that geniuses are auditing the government instead of people who are incompetent. They are stupid and desperate.

Btw it’s the young hackers who infiltrated Hillary’s server and provided the information to our enemies.

Listen almost all computing advances come from wiz kids not the stodgy older generation.

I have talked about this before but it’s time to limit the power of US District Court judges to issue nationwide TRO’s and injunctions. In the federal legal system there are 94 districts and 12 geographic circuits plus a 13th the Federal Circuit which has nationwide jurisdiction but only over a specific set of issues.

Now I think I previously advocated for district court judges to only be able to issue injunctions that pertain only to their districts. Thinking about it today, I think they should be able to issue injunctions that pertain to their circuit. The reason I changed my mind is because when some action is clearly illegal or unconstitutional, then it would require the filing of 94 suits to stop it. I think 12 is enough. However either the Supreme Court, and Justice Thomas has suggested such before, or the Congress needs to pass a law restricting the district court judges. Under the Constitution the Congress sets the power and jurisdiction of all courts below the Supreme Court.

Look we had Loopy Letitia file a case in Manhattan to stop the confirmed Secretary of the Treasury from having access to Treasury Department documents and records. On its face that is ludicrous and yet the activist judge issued a TRO ex parte, meaning without hearing from the other side, on total unsupported claims of irreversible damage. Now consider that the Treasury Department and the Secretary are located in DC not NY. He has no jurisdiction in DC!

This has to stop.

I wish the security guard at Education had responded to Mad Maxine when she said we pay your salary with No you don’t. I pay yours. You don’t have any money to pay my salary. All you do is corruptly take money from taxpayers like me and give it to your cronies who then give it back to you.

And I truly applaud him for standing up to her.

Now I have been calling for the elimination of the Department of Education forever. Now that it is a possibility and given the faux outrage over USAID, I suspect that the real outrage by Mad Maxine and her cronies is because DOGE will discover that Education is just a place where our money goes to be redistributed to teachers unions who then donate it back to the idiots like her.

They never thought that they would be exposed because they never thought that an administration would come in and have a different type of audit or review. I heard today that the reason that Elon and his team are able to move at the speed they are moving is because they are using AI. His computer wizards are so far ahead of what the agency has and it’s scaring the crap out of them. My guess is that most IT people in the government are clueless about AI. I certainly am. Not that I was an IT person but in the course of litigating cases I had to enlighten them on how to do somethings.