INCOMPETENT GOVERNANCE NOW KNOWS FEW BOUNDS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

 

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“INCOMPETENT GOVERNANCE NOW KNOWS FEW BOUNDS”

 

It’s easy to blame the Trump administration for much of the incompetence that’s so readily visible in Washington, D.C. these days.

 

Certainly, some of the officials he worked hardest to get confirmed to his administration have exhibited among the highest levels of ineptitude. Those included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security advisor Mike Waltz and super diplomat Steve Witkoff, all of whom were on the Signal app dealing with top secret schedules for an air attack on Yemen’s Houthi militants, who have disrupted sea lanes in the Middle East.

 

Somehow, the communication also went to the editor of the Atlantic magazine, who promptly revealed the security breach. Meanwhile, Russian hackers were trying also to breach the app. Later, it was disclosed Waltz and others in the Signal group also conducted other official business on insecure gmail accounts.

 

Just a “glitch,” Trump claimed of the security breach involving his top defense aides. That’s the same Trump who demanded onetime Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s imprisonment for using a non-government communication channel. Trump appeared to be using a very plain double standard.

 

Republicans in Congress also had no good excuses for their own incompetence, which has affected some of California most Trump-favoring counties. For more than 100 years, Congress awarded extra money – but never much, by federal budget standards – to counties whose land is largely owned by federal agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

 

This year, that was to be just over $250 million, a pittance in a budget totaling more than $6 trillion. The money is supposed to help rural counties compensate for the fact that must of their territory can never be taxed, very different from urban counties where huge swaths of land are privately owned.

 

California’s share of the pot this year was to be about $33 million,  reported Calmatters, the money going to small-population counties like Alpine, where 96 percent of land is federally owned, and Trinity (73 percent).

 

Because they can’t tax that land, the counties need a supplement to the property taxes they can assess to help pay for things like schools, road repairs and law enforcement.

 

Like most similar counties nationally, rural ones  in California consistently vote Republican, but Democrats have never cut off their funds. This year, the Republicans did, the putative appropriation hitting the cutting room floor along with other seemingly random slashes.

 

That’s was pure incompetence by the Republicans controlling Congress, apparently ignorant of where the money involved was to go.

 

Further federal incompetence has now reached levels and areas of expertise including public health and scientific research, with seemingly random cuts to the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other grant-giving agencies like the National Institutes for Health.

 

This alarms some of the Democrats who control California government sufficiently to get them to make new commitments to fund research in California with state money, if the feds won’t do their share.

 

It’s worth noting California is already the nation’s leading ‘donor’ state, paying far more in federal taxes than the federal government spends here. In 2024, Californians paid $692.2 billion in federal taxes, while the state received $609.1 billion in federal funds, including Social Security payments, military pensions and all other forms of spending. (That amounted to a “donation” of more than $2,000 per Californian to folks in “recipient” states like Mississippi and West Virginia.)  

 

Said Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, “Scientific research and innovation is the engine of California’s prosperity. It undergirds the University of California and other universities here…This foundation of the state’s success is threatened by Elon Musk and President Trump’s efforts to bulldoze…our most esteemed scientific institutions.”

 

So he’s asking fellow legislators to set up a new state Institute for Scientific Research, which among other things would try to make sure Californians have access to the most modern vaccine updates even as Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tries to discredit some vaccination requirements for schoolchildren.

 

This all forms a picture of gross incompetence at the highest levels of the federal government, some of which might have to be made up for by state and local governments.

  

 

-30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net