Rebuild the Federal Government

As an improvising musician, I use each mistake made as an opportunity to create something new.

I believe the damage done to the federal bureaucracy by Trump and his incompetent appointees can be turned into a general overhaul of federal government procedures and systems. The disruptions of each agency should be turned into a reform of each agency.

This reform should be as nonpolitical as possible.

That sounds crazy but I am talking about the basic systems of service which rarely have political considerations. The political considerations are above the pay grade of the basic civil servant, they just have a job to do.

This overhaul should be led and informed by those lower-level employees and managers who know how the agency interacts with the public best. There will be differences of opinion within this group, but they need to provide input for better procedure design.

The common practice of the executive changing the rules to block legislative intent and legislation being written to block executive intent needs to be set aside in the interest of basic customer service for the citizens and resident of the country.

Legislation should be written to a “Supreme Court review” standard of tightness by making it as simple and mechanical as possible.

This is an opportunity to transcend political consideration and make the function of each agency the central focus of system design like a business would have. The best tech talent should be put into a design team for a new secure set of systems to replace the obsolete gear and software.

Infrastructure

Climate change is not the only driver of change in the use of fossil fuels. Discoveries and technologies are making increasingly cheaper energy generation a reality. This is happening while general energy efficiency continues to rise.

A public or private business entity should put solar panels on every roof and electric vehicle recharger systems in every building in the country, homes included.

It should be designed to over produce electricity for the site. The building owner gets free electricity while the excess goes to the grid and is sold. It could replace electric utilities as we know them.

The current system would be reversed. The consumers become the generators and the grid can become a storage system. The latest solar photoelectric cells are testing at 29% efficiency, so storage is the big problem, not generation.

What do we do with the electricity? We store it in better batteries, gravity storage and supercapacitors that will lead to uses for that much power such as maglev rail, electrified roadbeds, desalinization and/or electric aviation.

How many hyperloop tubes could be stacked in the current railway beds? Can hyperloop be used for freight? The rail system we currently use was completed more than a hundred years ago and we have been repairing it ever since. Maglev vactrains should have much less wear and tear as the train never touches the track at speed.

Personal little camera drones are the beginning of flying cars. They are already being made. Yes, I am of the “Jetsons” generation and I am appalled that it has taken this long. The problem is air traffic control. Unlike street traffic a century ago, mere stop signs, traffic signals and driving rules are not enough. Human beings cannot be left in control of these vehicles while they are flying. They are not competent enough.

Politics and Civic Life

The need to make human beings more competent and to get larger numbers of competent human beings means that public education needs to be fully funded. Current events in the political world illustrate that the need for critical thinking skills is gigantic. Scammers depend on the lack of these skills, as do crooked political figures. The disinformation wave is the clearest danger to public debate as it seeks to redefine reality itself.

This redefinition of lies as the truth could be cured in America by borrowing a legal principal from our friends the British. In civil suits, the loser pays all expenses. The nonsense lawsuits will cease quickly.

Government/Business Relationship

The USA government, state governments and local government all provide funding for education, infrastructure and everything else. This requires money which is supplied to government through tax and licenses revenue. We should add intellectual property royalties to this list. If a government agency finances the basic or advanced research that results in a commercial product or service, the government should receive royalty payments. The standard royalty structure is okay.

Conclusion: The great irony

At the same time as science and technologies are making incredible advances in knowledge and capability there is a fascist social movement who members have beliefs about reality based in the bible and not science. They want the dark ages are back.

Each economic disaster creates opportunity for the rich to buy property from desperate middleclass people at bargain basement prices. It is why each crisis is instigated. It is just business as usual, like a harvest of some kind.