Fridays are becoming bloodbath day in the federal workforce. In the same way that bad news stories used to be held for Friday late afternoon, that’s when we now hear about a lot of these firings. Midafternoon, I heard that the Department of Homeland Security had essentially abolished all its international civil rights and detention abuse agencies. They abolished the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office of the CIS Ombudsman. In other words, basically everyone in the department charged with providing some oversight of the treatment of people by the department’s various policing agencies or when in detention is gone. They’re all gone. The only exception is the department Inspector General. But an IG really has a much broader brief. In any case, all terminated immediately, out of the blue. Those are all, I believe, statutory offices. I know the Office of Civil Rights is. So you really can’t abolish those. Except when you do. So that’s where we are.
Just a few moments ago I heard that USAID had terminated about 160 personal service contractors. These are longterm contract positions for people whose brief is to shepherd aid deliveries abroad. They serve as the U.S. government’s eyes and ears to make sure the money is used for what it’s meant to be used for, that it gets to the intended recipients. For those who are familiar with this kind of work, all 160 are part of Disaster Assistance Response Teams. At some point when we’re back to the normal world and some terrible earthquake happens somewhere, I think this basically means if the U.S. wants to send some help … well, we fired the people who do that stuff.
It’s easy to lose track of the fact that most of this stuff is illegal.
