By Natalia Castro
When federal bureaucrats are unaccountable to even their own managers, it can be hard to identify and correct abuse within the system. In his most recent undercover expose, James O’Keefe sought to uncover the stories of the federal government’s worst employees directly from the source. This week, Project Veritas released three videos highlighting rampant misuse of federal resources by employees for political gain.
All stories have a similar thread: the employees believe they can never be fired. And they are not completely wrong, current law makes their removal extremely different despite clear evidence of abuse.
O’Keefe’s team of investigative journalists went undercover speaking with federal government employees who are also active members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization dedicated to ridding the country of capitalism — the economic system responsible for freeing and uplifting millions around the world from poverty — and replacing it with socialism (also known as the economic system responsible for killing millions of people in the last century and continuing to leave Venezuelans starving and penniless).
In the first Project Veritas video, Stuart Karaffa, a Department of State employee explained how he spends his day working, “I have nothing to lose. It’s impossible to fire federal employees… I’m just straight like 8:30 to 5:00. So it gives me so much more time, and emotional bandwidth to do all of this (Democratic Socialists of America) stuff.”
Karaffa explained in detail how he spends his day working on press work for DSA and simply waits until 5:30 to send the draft messages out in order to prevent a paper trail from being formed.
This appears as a direct violation of the Hatch Act with prevents government employees from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty.
But Karaffa is not the only employee wasting taxpayer money to support a socialist political agenda, in the second installment of Deep State Unmasked, two more DSA members discussed how they use government resources to further their “movement”.
Allison Hrabar, the Department of Justice employee also known for leading protests against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielson, explained to the Project Veritas team that she uses government research accounts to target individuals for DSA protests.
Hrabar explained how pervasive the DSA network is within the federal government, “There’s a lot of talk at work about like how we can resist from the inside… We have a member who works for the people who distribute food stamps, and they can like take that away, and they’re slowing what they do… what they’re doing means that people are going to be able to stay on food stamps for another month or two, which is like really important.”
This is a common tactic according to Hrabar, who also notes that she usually waits until the last day to submit merger forms she disagrees with, often waiting until ten minutes before they are due to prevent the process from moving forward efficiently and to make a small dent in “company profits”. Hrarbar has now been referred to Department of Justice Inspector General.
Jessica Schubel, a former Department of Health and Human Services employee, further stated that she has friends still within the federal government who leak information to her to give to reports to manipulate public opinion before official data is released.
In Project Veritas’s final video, journalists highlight Natarajan Subramanian of the Government Accountability Office boasted that the DSA has “a bunch of just communists, no prefix, and that’s basically me. We have some folks who are Trotskyists or Leninists. A fair number of DSA employees are federal — DSA people are federal employees… you see people from various agencies, usually Executive Branch.”
Subramanian reaffirmed Hrabar’s point of slow walking as resistance. Subramanian explains, “If you’re in Executive Branch agency, you can slow ball things to a degree that it’s like ineffective… No one knows I spent six hours yesterday doing social media for DSA. Technically, everything I’m doing with DSA is stuff that I am not supposed to be doing for work.”
Subramanian even boasted that he has a friend at the Department of Defense who has Top Secret security clearance and yet actively works with DSA and their resistance movement.
Subramanian has been pulled off of director work at the GAO upon release of the tape.
This should be terrifying for all Americans who believe our government should not be hijacked by socialists working to pervert the agenda of an elected administration.
These DSA members work directly against the aim of their agencies with little fear of pushback for a simple reason- it is nearly impossible to fire a federal employee.
A 2015 Government Accountability Office report estimates it takes between 170 and 370 days to fire a poor performing federal employee. Even once they are dismissed, unions engage in lengthy litigation processes to prevent the employee from actually being fired. For this reason, managers usually opt to move employees to a different office or agency rather than removing them all together, this allows the poor performer to simply cause the same chaos in a different area.
Luckily, U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) in the House and David Perdue (R-Ga.) in the Senate have introduced the MERIT Act to combat this exact problem.
The MERIT Act expedites the timeline for removing poor performing employees and upholds whistleblower protections in order to allow bad actors to be identified and expelled.
Socialists cannot use government resources while being paid by taxpayers to subvert to agenda of the elected administration. Congress must pass the MERIT Act so these employees can be removed immediately. We have a democracy to uphold the consent of the governed so that this exact obstruction cannot occur and the bureaucracy cannot continue acting as an unaccountable fourth branch of government.
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Natalia Castro is a multimedia manager at Americans for Limited Government.
