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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm doing alright. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Only doing all right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah. Usually I'm fabulous or I'm excellent or I'm something else. But I have to say, given the times, given the shall we say uncertainty of the times, I think I'm doing all right, because I one, don't work directly for a federal agency. That's a relief for me. But also, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not going to be tapped by anybody to do anything in terms of this administration. But I will say if all of the federal employees who have been fired were lawyers, they'd all have work.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because the current presidential administration is generating significant legal work.
N. Rodgers: Significant hour. Aren't they paid by the hour? We got to be in the trillions at this point.
J. Aughenbaugh: Billable hours. Which is what newly hired attorneys at law firms hate to hear, but for the partners, it means significant profits. Billable hours.
N. Rodgers: The billable hours on the Trump administration have got to be in the thousands at this.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I think we're probably approaching seven digits here.
N. Rodgers: No, hours, not the money. You think the hours? I don't know how many days it's been, but it's been 24 hours have reach one of them.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm not even talking about the money yet. Though interestingly enough, at the end of February, Nia, I saw that some of your more prominent appellate law firms. These are law firms who do a lot of appeals work both at the state and federal level are now charging over $2,000 an hour.
N. Rodgers: Wow. We should say, first of all, this isn't in the news. We're just going to update on Trump's first couple months in office. We're going to do this every so often until either things calm down. Or we give up. I think that might happen before things calm down is that we give up, but I hope not because Aughie and I are both, I think, mildly alarmed to alarmed somewhere on that spectrum. But also just going, Wow. The flux here is unbelievable. Nobody has any idea what's actually happening and not happening.
J. Aughenbaugh: When you go back to the original purpose for this podcast, we wanted to have a podcast that looked at government documents and government processes and show model.
N. Rodgers: The government documents are disappearing left and right. The processes are going completely berserk.
J. Aughenbaugh: We wanted to go ahead and model, if you will, behavior for our listeners as to how they could, okay, shall we say, take ownership of their government.
N. Rodgers: Approach the government and what to understand about Byzantine stuff you're not going to change. Where you can make a difference because when it all comes really back down to it is Aughie and I, what we will tell you before we tell you anything else is vote. Vote because voting is the most important thing you can do as a citizen. It's more important than jury duty. Take me to court supremes and see what I do. Like, it's more important than jury duty. It's more important than obeying the speed limit. It's more important than anything else, although don't be crazy with the speed limit. But you need to vote because elections have consequences.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're seeing this firsthand in the roughly first 7-7.5 weeks of Trump 2.0.
N. Rodgers: Nice tech reference. Thank you. Considering how it's all involved with Mr. Musk.
J. Aughenbaugh: Musk. Listeners, what we're going to do this in the news episode, and this is going to be one of our shall we say, full or bodied in the news episodes.
N. Rodgers: This is going to be a long one.
J. Aughenbaugh: This isn't going to be what we aspire to with in the news, which is typically 15-20 minutes, quick hitter.
N. Rodgers: Which we hardly ever make, but usually it's under 30. We have these goals and aspirations. This one's not going to be that. This is going to be a little more involved. We should, by the way, also note the date we are recording, which is unusual. We don't usually do that. We are recording on March 14th. The reason we have to give you the date of when we're recording is this target is moving so fast. That some of this will be out of date by lunchtime. This is a Friday, in case you're wondering what day of the week we're recording, recording on a Friday. There does tend to be action on Friday afternoons and Saturdays. In a lot of these instances.
J. Aughenbaugh: What we're referencing here, which was neatly described in an infamous West Wing episode is Friday is considered takeout the trash day in the federal government.
N. Rodgers: It's a news dump.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is when and this is based on the old news cycle. The old news cycle was basically traditional news organizations would cover the news Monday through Friday morning. The expectation of those news organizations was that the government, like most, if you will, enterprises in the free Western world would be easing into the weekend so that news organizations would not pay as much attention to what the government was doing, particularly on Friday afternoons, Saturdays, and of course, Sundays. Most presidential administrations knew this. They would, shall we say, drop their big bombs. They're less than positive.
N. Rodgers: The things that they didn't really want you to pay all that much attention to, on Friday afternoon. In the hope that by Monday morning something else would have happened or you would have forgotten about it, or the news wouldn't cover it because they'd be starting a new news week or again, that's sino the entire Vietnam War. Where every single important number was ever dropped on a Friday afternoon.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, the logic here is most of the public is not going to be paying attention to the news on Friday afternoon, Friday, evening, Saturday because, hey, you're not at work, you're spending time with your family. If you don't have families, you're out doing, fun, exciting stuff, and you're not going to go ahead and check the newspaper, or turn on the TV to watch the news. Well, today, however, we have a different news cycle.
N. Rodgers: We have a 24 hour news cycle, and we have a president that likes the 24 hour news cycle.
J. Aughenbaugh: He wants the attention.
N. Rodgers: He likes the attention. He wants to be in the news all the time. He's fine being on the front page of it. One of the things that at least I don't know if your dean ever said it to you, but our old dean at the library used to say to us was, Let's strive to never be on the cover of the Richmond Times Dispatch. Let's not do anything so bad that we end up there because that is not a place where any of us want to be. Boy, Donald Trump does not live by that rule. He is the front page is the best page.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because, he comes from the private sector.
N. Rodgers: Any intention is good attention.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you are, creating a new business or you have just built a new luxury hotel. All news is good news. Even if somebody's criticizing, the lobby of your new hotel. Well, then people are going to come and check it out. If they don't find the lobby to be as bad as the critics said it was, well, then, hey, you might go ahead and get yourself a room and stay there overnight and keep that in the back of your mind. That's the logic of a business person.
N. Rodgers: It gives you something to yell about. This person has no taste, they're terrible, blah, blah, blah.
J. Aughenbaugh: But if you are a garden variety career civil servant, much like Nia Rogers and I.
N. Rodgers: You do not want to be in the news. Because being in the news means something has gone terribly, terribly awry.
J. Aughenbaugh: When you work for the federal bureaucracy, there were two phone calls. This was the old adage. There are two phone calls you never want to get. One from the chair of a congressional committee saying that the committee wants you to testify.
N. Rodgers: Would like you to come in.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's one phone call. The second was, you never wanted to be called by either a reporter from the Washington Post or the New York Times asking you to go on the record.
N. Rodgers: Or anything. Can you go on the record that oxygen is breathable? I'd rather not.
J. Aughenbaugh: Could you go ahead and discuss why the sky is gray, and you're the head of the EPA, and you're like, no.
N. Rodgers: Can't really tell you. Sorry.
J. Aughenbaugh: Aren't you guys the experts on this? Today, we are not.
N. Rodgers: How many lawsuits have we had in these seven weeks, which feels, I'm sorry, a little bit longer to me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, we're going to break this down basically into three categories. This is Aughie's attempt to impose organization on. We are not going to address, though it is a worthwhile podcast topic, which we may get to. We're not going to address, if you will, the impact on governing or worker productivity by and large. We're going to focus on three, if you will, elements. One, we're going to look at court cases. Two, we're going to look at personnel cuts, and then three, we're going to look at government spending.
N. Rodgers: We have a surprise for you about that so stay tuned for that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because when I was doing some research, I was just like, oh, good Lord. First, we're going to start with court cases. For those of you who want to track this stuff, probably the best website to go to is the Just Security website.
N. Rodgers: Would you like me to put a link on the research guide.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, I think that would be good because they update it every day.
N. Rodgers: How sad is that?
J. Aughenbaugh: As of March 13, there had been 119 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration since he took office on January 20. By the way, when you look at their table, there were lawsuits filed the day he was inaugurated.
N. Rodgers: He knew how things were probably going to go.
J. Aughenbaugh: As of March 11, 44 of those lawsuits led to adverse rulings against Trump administration. Two of the lawsuits had been dropped. That basically means that 73 of the rulings either went the president's way or the court has yet to issue a judgment.
N. Rodgers: Half, the court hasn't issued a judgment yet, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it's about half.
N. Rodgers: Because, guess what people? Courts take time.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is going to be a theme of this podcast episode.
N. Rodgers: We could underplay shares if I could turn back time.
J. Aughenbaugh: For those of you who want immediate stoppage of Trump administration activities, you're not going to get immediate results. If you're a Trump supporter, you're not going to get immediate court rulings favoring the president and his staff because court proceedings take time. I'm going to come back to that in just a moment. In a couple of the cases, including the infamous USAID case, where the Trump administration was accused of not honoring USAID contracts, the judge ruled partially in favor of the plaintiffs and partially in favor of the president. The plaintiffs who are going to get paid are the ones who already did the work.
N. Rodgers: Which is only fair. If you have done the work, you should get paid. That's how capitalism works.
J. Aughenbaugh: That is contract law 101. You signed a contract. You as the vendor did the work, you should get paid.
N. Rodgers: Because you have already put forth resources, you need to be reimbursed for your resources.
J. Aughenbaugh: But the judge also partially ruled in favor of the president in saying that future contracts, can be suspended, terminated by the federal government.
N. Rodgers: You were going to build a well next year. We can stop that contract because you haven't started it. You haven't put in your own resources.
J. Aughenbaugh: But you can still sue the federal government for breach of a future contract per federal law.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, but good luck with that if you're in Ethiopia and you're looking to get a well built. Unfortunately, a lot of the USAID cases will, in fact, not go forward because they won't have the finances to sue in the American legal system, especially when they're making how much per hour? The lawyers.
J. Aughenbaugh: $1,500 to $2,000. The caveat to that Nia is many of these contracts are by non-profits. Many of those non-profits do have lawyers. But some of those non-profits, because they've already lost government contracts or their funding has been impounded, which we will get to in just a few moments, they've been forced to lay off staff. They may not be able to represent you as effectively as they once did.
N. Rodgers: But am I correct that when any president loses any case, they immediately appeal it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, and this is something I'm going to push back on the accepted wisdom that there are a lot of press reports that are like the Trump administration is not following federal court rulings that are adverse to the administration. In my research, the only example I found was the initial response to the district court judge who ruled against the USAID. In almost every other situation, the Trump administration has complied. But then they do, as Nia, you just described.
N. Rodgers: Every president does. This is not a Donald Trump thing. This was not a Biden thing. This is the Office of the President saying, oh, no, you didn't. You don't get to tell me what to do. I'm going to appeal this because anybody who loses in a court can appeal?
J. Aughenbaugh: Can appeal. We know this historically.
N. Rodgers: Well, we wouldn't have a Supreme Court if we didn't have an appeal system. That's the whole point.
J. Aughenbaugh: I was going to go ahead and mention the fact that typically, the federal government comprises well over 50% of all Supreme Court cases, no matter the term. Who makes the decision to appeal? Lower court rulings that are against the federal government? It's the executive branch. The executive branch that is led by whom Nia?
N. Rodgers: The president.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is actually pretty normal.
N. Rodgers: That is not him power playing. That's just what presidents do. Presidents don't like to be told no. They don't like to be thwarted. Let's just be straightforward for just a moment. Donald Trump is hardly the first narcissist to hold that office. You have to be a certain kind of person to make it through the primary process and the beating that you take in order to get to be president of the United States, except for Gerald Ford. He's the only person who never had to go through that process. Everybody else has been beaten with a stick before they get to the White House. When they get there, they're like, no, we're going to appeal that. We're going to always appeal that because we believe we're always right.
J. Aughenbaugh: I am Superman, I am Wonder Woman. I made it through this.
N. Rodgers: I'm never wrong.
J. Aughenbaugh: I made it through this process. You can't take me out. You can't tell me no and moreover. Some of our most cherished, honored, lauded presidents, appealed all the time.
N. Rodgers: That's why they have a staff to do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: FDR only ends up eventually convincing the Supreme Court to declare the new deal constitutional because he appealed over and over and over again. I don't know how many biographies I read about his administration that went ahead and said that he had people in his own justice department who were like Mr. President, if we keep on appealing, we're going to lose. He's like but eventually, they're going to say, yes.
N. Rodgers: Blotter on the stone.
J. Aughenbaugh: We also know this about the current president, Nia. Donald Trump doesn't mind going to court.
N. Rodgers: My gosh, he loves court.
J. Aughenbaugh: He didn't mind going to court when the four years when he was, in between his terms, we knew he liked going to court before he ran for president. This is a guy who is.
N. Rodgers: Litigious. He is litigious probably from birth. He probably was born saying, I don't think you did that right. But we should also side note for folks. As much as people love the appeals system, including the presidents, the appeals system, like a fine mill for flour grinds very slowly and very finely. The reason for that is because judges are hyper aware of the idea of either turning down a president or supporting a president, and they need to make sure they have dotted every I and crossed every T. They want to make sure that they are in the right and that they won't be overturned by a higher court. There's a real pressure on the courts to slow down. I would guess that we're talking, what, a year?
J. Aughenbaugh: Typically, it is 12 to 18 months.
N. Rodgers: That can leave a lot of flux for a long time.
J. Aughenbaugh: I understand for a lot of people who rely on the federal government for aid, not knowing if that money is going to resume for the thousands of federal government bureaucrats who have been told that they've been laid off, terminated, et cetera, only to go ahead and have a federal judge say, well, you may not have been terminated or laid off and the disruption that causes in your professional and personal lives, I know that flux.
N. Rodgers: Can I offer a personal commentary on that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: I think that that may be part of the goal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
N. Rodgers: Part of the goal is knowing that this is going to take a while, and some people will just give up.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
N. Rodgers: Some people will say, well, it doesn't matter now because I've already found another job or I've already gotten another contract or I've already moved on from [inaudible] 'cause I'm running a business and I'm living a life and I can't wait for it to be [inaudible] .
J. Aughenbaugh: While I'm not entirely sure what the endpoint is of Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE is, causing the disruptions is definitely an artifact that they have embraced.
N. Rodgers: It is part of the plan. Throw all of the pot of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Excuse me. I would like to note that in Aughie's notes, he said something here, and I had not thought about it, and it's really important that we mention this when we're talking about legal cases. The district court judges that are issuing national injunctions, that's not how that works and aren't they peeving the Supreme Court by doing that? Because the supremes are the national?
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, I'm going to give you a hypothetical. Let's say Nia works for a federal agency, and she and the rest of her colleagues have received a memo from the Trump administration saying that by the end of the month, they will be laid off. She doesn't believe that that notification has followed the law so she and a bunch of her colleagues hire a lawyer who files a lawsuit in a federal district court, claiming that the layoff is illegal. Now, her lawyer files the motion and ask for an injunction. The purpose of an injunction is to stop the offending party's behavior so that a court can consider the merits of the case. Now, one of the big issues in the US legal community right now is this growing tendency of district court judges to issue not just injunctions for Nia and her colleagues, but to go ahead and issue an injunction to stop the offending behavior across the entire country.
N. Rodgers: I work for the Clam Reclamation Bureau, which by the way, doesn't exist. I work in the Maryland office, and the Maryland office files this complaint. This pretended injunction says, no, the people who work in the California office are also protected from being laid off in this layoff because I'm issuing a nationwide Clam Reclamation Bureau stop, where nobody can be fired. I don't know, listeners, if you remember, but Maryland is not in the same district as California, those would be before two different judges.
J. Aughenbaugh: Judges.
N. Rodgers: The only way that you could get a national injunction would be for the supremes to do it.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the growing tendency of district court judges to issue national injunctions, there are two sides to national injunctions. On one hand, you could argue, well, if this layoff is affecting everybody who works in that agency, then it should be applied nationwide. On the other hand, who actually brought the lawsuit claiming that they've been injured, well, only the workers at the Maryland unit.
N. Rodgers: Have standing in that particular case.
J. Aughenbaugh: What I'm afraid here is the willingness of federal judges to issue these national injunctions may lead the Roberts Court to rule them out completely.
N. Rodgers: Because at least for the justices, I think of the conservative justices, would like for the lower courts to stop doing that.
J. Aughenbaugh: In particular, we're talking about Justices Thomas, Alito Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.
N. Rodgers: Because they believe in hierarchy, they believe there's a system and that there is a mechanism to do what needs to be done if there needs to be a national injunction, but is not within the district courts.
J. Aughenbaugh: They believe the district court judges are exceeding their authority within their jurisdiction. Those are the court cases. You ready to talk about terminations and layoffs?
N. Rodgers: I am.
N. Rodgers: There's been so many, that what we're going to do is highlights for you, because at this point, I don't even know if DOS knows how people have been let go from the federal government. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to slam our federal workers. I love our federal workers, but this is slightly less important to me than Aughie's third point, which is the spending, because when you hear about that, you'll be like, wait, what? That's what I did.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, Nia just pinpointed part of the difficulty. We're not being opaque because we're being lazy. We're being opaque about the number of terminations and layoffs, simply because nobody can get an exact figure.
N. Rodgers: Nobody knows. Even the departments themselves don't know exactly. Part of that is because DOS has sent letters to people directly. Part of that is because and I'm not trying to be ugly here about any agency. Let me be honest with you. No head of an agency knows exactly how many people work in their agency at any given time. That's because people retire, people go out on leave, people are hired. There's a constant low-level churn in every agency. That's just a natural norm. It's true in every business, as well, but there's just a low-level churn. What you would end up saying is every time we've been talking about an agency, we've given approximate numbers of their workforce.
J. Aughenbaugh: Just think about the number of different types of workers. You have the permanent full-time. Some of them may be retiring. Some of them are contemplating retirement.
N. Rodgers: Some of them are out on maternity leave or paternity leave.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or they're out on family medical leave.
N. Rodgers: Some of them are out for research, so they've taken a sabbatical.
J. Aughenbaugh: You have probationary employees who were recently hired. Do you officially count them before they're probationary?
N. Rodgers: Exactly. In the number of people who work in your agency? Well, they work there, but we know that probationary employees in the federal government have almost no protections because they're trying to figure out if you're a good fit. You're trying to figure out if you're a good fit.
J. Aughenbaugh: Do we also include contract employees?
N. Rodgers: And temporary employees.
J. Aughenbaugh: Those who were hired for specific projects or tasks with no guarantee that they would become full-time and permanent.
N. Rodgers: Temporary employees, for instance, when there's a massive spill of oil in the Gulf, never happens. But anyway, when there's one of those and somebody has to wipe down ducks with donned dishwashing soap, part of that is volunteer, but part of that is also temporary hire. They are not intended to be permanent government employees, but they are being paid in those times.
J. Aughenbaugh: At Virginia Commonwealth University, much like almost any government bureaucratic office, those workers that Nia just described, who helped out after oil spills are considered emergency hires. They can work a certain number of hours. They don't get benefits, and when they reach a certain threshold of hours, then they either have to be made full-time or they have to be terminated. Do you count them?
N. Rodgers: Do you count interns and fellows? People that you don't pay but are attached to your institution or you pay a stipend and they're attached to your institution. Now that we have described to you how impossible this number is to count.
J. Aughenbaugh: We also want to distinguish between terminations and layoffs. When you've been terminated, you have been fired, which means,
N. Rodgers: Go now and get another job somewhere else.
J. Aughenbaugh: When you've been laid off.
N. Rodgers: You may be brought back.
J. Aughenbaugh: You may be brought back. Again, the imprecision
N. Rodgers: Of this theoretically precise group of people. Well, I'm a little concerned about DOS's lousy goosiness with this in terms of, like, wow, how did y'all even build a car if you can't be more precise than this?
J. Aughenbaugh: For our listeners who are just like, why are you emphasizing this distinction? Well, the distinction is important in the law because when you've been terminated, you have certain rights and obligations. But when you've been laid off, another set of, if you will, legal protections and obligations kick in.
N. Rodgers: For instance, when you've been laid off and you apply for another federal government job you get preference.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: If you meet the qualifications to the job, they are supposed to consider you first because you have already done all the other employment things that you need to do for the federal government. It's a whole thing. Well, anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're just going to touch upon some of what for Nia and I, are the most noteworthy. If you don't fall into this category, this is not Nia and I saying.
N. Rodgers: You're not important. It's not a say.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or the work that you do is unimportant to the federal government or the American people. Probably the most recent obvious that we have to touch upon is the Department of Education. On Tuesday of this week, and again, we're recording on March 14th. The Department of Education announced that were targeting 2,000 people for layoffs and told the staff in Washington, DC and regional offices, some of them would be closed starting Wednesday of this week.
N. Rodgers: The offices.
J. Aughenbaugh: The offices.
N. Rodgers: Part of that is that they were trying to reorganize what the other employees would be doing.
J. Aughenbaugh: The remaining employees. That's right.
N. Rodgers: They decided to take a day to do that. We can't even talk about the fact that you're going to try to reorganize the Department of Education in one day. But that's a whole separate issue. But Aughie and I would need adult beverages to get through. But yeah, 2,000. It is a fair bit of their workforce?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm sorry for the technical language. The Department of Education, in many ways, is the classic pass-through federal government agency, meaning a whole bunch of federal money passes through the Department of Education and then gets allocated to state and local government agencies.
N. Rodgers: I struggle with the fact that the president keeps saying, we're going to return education to the states. I'm like, Where do you think it's been this whole time? It has not been at the federal level. The Feds don't make any decisions about curricula. They don't make any decisions about anything like that. What they do is give schools money to do certain things.
J. Aughenbaugh: Are there conditions on the receipt of that money?
N. Rodgers: Sure.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is an example of cooperative federalism, which now two generations of my students have heard adnauseum, but nevertheless, 2,000 Nia, 2,000.
N. Rodgers: I'm more scared by NOAA than I am now actually. I'm sorry. Education stresses me, but NOAA stresses me more.
J. Aughenbaugh: Of our favorite federal government agencies. We've done a podcast episode about it.
N. Rodgers: We love NOAA.
J. Aughenbaugh: NOAA, which most Americans know as the National Weather Service, but actually stands for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Trump administration has directed NOAA to lay off approximately 1,000 workers on top of the 1,300 that have already been laid off. The New York Times has estimated that that is 20% of the agency's workforce.
N. Rodgers: Well, that's 20% of Hurricane season that we can't predict. It's a gooby.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not just being able to go ahead and accurately predict adverse weather conditions.
N. Rodgers: Hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, floods.
J. Aughenbaugh: Understand, listeners, that NOAA provides data that is essential to farming in the United States.
N. Rodgers: And to shipping and to fishing.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. These are three of the industries that the Trump administration has said will be protected no matter what.
N. Rodgers: The fishermen are like, I don't think that's, have you heard of the perfect storm?
J. Aughenbaugh: There are farmers in Nebraska who are like, well, should I plant my crops now or wait a week?
N. Rodgers: Wait a week. Am I going to get another frost?
J. Aughenbaugh: Am I going to get another frost? Am I going to get another March blizzard that will basically damage whatever I plant? This is essential.
N. Rodgers: All that cold for cattle? Not so good. Cows. Not as much of an effect of hair.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is near and dear to me and Nia, simply because we grew up in rural areas. We know farmers. We know how important accurate weather data is.
N. Rodgers: Yes, because otherwise, they have to use their creaky knees. Oh, my knee is aching. I think it's going to rain tomorrow. That's what my grandfather used to say, and I'm like, okay, but can't we just use an actual weather prediction? Anyway.
N. Rodgers: That's a little terrifying. I know. That's very terrifying to me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, I'm going to let you pick an agency, and then I'm going to pick an agency.
N. Rodgers: Okay. The other big one that stresses me out right now is the Department of Veterans Affairs.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because they plan to cut more than 80,000 workers.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That would be back to 2019 staffing levels. I don't know if anybody remembers 2019, but veterans couldn't get in to see a dang doctor.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That is not okay. If somebody has physically put their body on the line and in any way paid a physical cost for that, we should be taking care of them. It's wrong for us as Citizens.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Send our young men off to get hurt and then don't take care of that. That is right, okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, Nia, the 80,000 that are going to be let go in June is on top of the 2,400 probationary employees that were dismissed in February.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, I don't understand what's happening at the department. I don't know why the Department of Veterans Affairs is taking such an enormous hit.
J. Aughenbaugh: That one is of concern to you. Me, I'm concerned about the next one in my notes, the IRS.
N. Rodgers: Well, have you done your taxes yet, Augie?
J. Aughenbaugh: I have done my taxes.
N. Rodgers: Excellent. Good choice.
J. Aughenbaugh: But for those of you who haven't.
N. Rodgers: Who have not. Holy cow.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because the cuts the IRS was already preparing to reduce its 100,000 person workforce by 50% through layoffs and buyouts. The Trump administration said they were going to lay off another 7,000, and they were hoping to close more than 110 offices in the month of February.
N. Rodgers: We don't know if that happened or not. But what we do know is that if you thought the waiting on the line for a phone call to the IRS was long before, you ain't seen nothing yet.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. If you hire a professional, they are going to be put on hold.
N. Rodgers: Right. Basically, ask them to put on hold for you. That's going to charge you by the hour, my good friend.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Having this done.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you have any kind of irregularities in your tax return, good luck on the IRS being able to go ahead and come to a decision because they won't have enough staff to go ahead and say, Yes, that deduction is allowed, and no, that deduction is not allowed.
N. Rodgers: Similarly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Social Security Administration being cut in half.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I don't know if there's a person who gets more frustrated waiting on hold than my 87-year-old mother. Because old people can feel their lives ticking away while they are on hold with someone. They feel it in a different way than young people do. I'm just saying I'm not trying to be ugly about my mom. I love my mom. But Man, after, like, 15 minutes, she's done. She's starting to talk about people's mamas. She's starting to talk about why I mean, you know, this is I don't even know what I'm talking about I'm like, Okay, it's about to get worse.
J. Aughenbaugh: I tried to explain this to my students. Older Americans have a couple of things that we younger Americans don't have, which is, they don't work, so they do have time to go ahead and complain and they vote, right?
N. Rodgers: So do veterans. So do people who do taxes. I'm just saying.
J. Aughenbaugh: The blood terms are going to be the bloodbath. It's not gonna be a slacking, as Barack Obama infamously said. This is going to be a bloodbath, because a whole bunch of Americans who can't get in to see a doctor because they were a veteran who, in 2026, okay, are still waiting to find out if their 2025 tax return got accepted.
N. Rodgers: I hope you didn't want to do anything with the money that you might be getting back.
J. Aughenbaugh: Back you're right. Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Who knows when that's going to happen, if at all.
J. Aughenbaugh: Grandma, okay, who's still waiting to find out what the heck happened to her July 2025 Social Security check.
N. Rodgers: There's gonna be some deep upset. One of the other things that you mentioned in your notes that I wanted to bring up was the FEMA cuts. Now, I get that FEMA right now has had some reputational difficulties. Right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Some stupid stuff went down in Florida in terms of people being told not to go where there were Trump signs. I don't know how accurate those reports are, but there were enough of them that there's probably something to it. That's not right. No federal worker should ever deny you assistance based on who you voted for. That is not acceptable under any circumstance. But a huge amount of what FEMA does in the first 24 hours after a disaster means the difference between life and death.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: To cut them, I don't know.
J. Aughenbaugh: FEMA does difficult work, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because FEMA is going to navigate the federal government, state, and local governments all to try to go ahead and respond to a natural disaster.
N. Rodgers: All of those institutions vying for power and control.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Then when they get on the ground, they have to deal with people whose lives have been effectively destroyed. Their homes are perhaps in the next county. They're not entirely sure where all their loved ones are. They don't know when they can get back to their neighborhoods, to their properties. They don't have shelter, they don't have food. If the weather turns, they may be dealing with scorching heat or unbearable cold.
J. Aughenbaugh: For many Americans, FEMA is the face of the federal government, particularly the face of the federal government at their worst moments. To go ahead and suggest that they want to one, eliminate FEMA entirely, but two, seriously gut the upper administration of FEMA, makes it almost impossible for FEMA to do its work. It's almost as though the Trump administration wants what remains of FEMA to fail..
N. Rodgers: It does, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: I get it. Nia, you were being very diplomatic. In the last few years, FEMA has taken some serious reputational hits. You mentioned Florida in a state that you still have family in. The storms last fall in North Carolina were horrible.
N. Rodgers: FEMA's response wasn't the best.
J. Aughenbaugh: Was not the best.
N. Rodgers: FEMA's response in Katrina was not necessarily the best, although that has a lot to do with the fact that the local.
J. Aughenbaugh: State and local officials.
N. Rodgers: Were not organized. Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because of federal law, FEMA can't go into a state and local area until state and local officials officially ask for the help.
N. Rodgers: But FEMA and I think there could be work to be done to change FEMA, but I think we need A FEMA or something like A FEMA. I think we'll find out that in the next disaster. Can I just say I'm crabby about the Forest Service? Partly because hello, giant fires in California that set the whole thing on fire if there hadn't been anyway. The other thing about Forest Service and a whole bunch of the people who've been fired out of Forest Service and Interior and those related agencies are people who keep the national parks clean? Like trails. People who go along the trails and just clean them because I'm not trying to be ugly. Humans are gross. Humans leave stuff behind all the time. People are lazy or they're stupid or they're whatever, and they leave their junk, and it has to be cleaned up, or animals will eat it and die and get hurt and all this yes. There's part of me that says, I understand you're looking for people who aren't doing useful work. But this thing with Elon Musk with his chainsaw and his we're just going to hack off huge parts of the government, but some of that work needs to be done.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, for many Americans who don't suffer through natural disasters.
N. Rodgers: I don't know who you are or you live.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or who have had positive experiences with the IRS. I know I'm shrinking the American population dramatically, but here's my point. For many Americans, their interaction with the federal government is the national park system. Because they go there every summer. It's one of the few things that many Americans have said, We do and we do well. Hell, we have people from around the world who are like, your national park system is great.
N. Rodgers: Almost nobody votes against National Parks. Like you have a few ranchers and a few guys like that who'd like to oil and people who want to drill for oil. But other than those people, everybody else is like, no we think that's a good idea to reserve some parts of the country. Pristine so that our future our children and our children's children can go there and go, that's what a bear looks like or that's what a waterfall looks like. Instead, anyway. Can I just one more? Can I just complain about one more?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I know, and we've mentioned it before, but I want to go on record saying again, I don't think that it's ever wise to get rid of people who know how to deal with nuclear weapons and nuclear.
J. Aughenbaugh: I wondered if you were going to go there.
N. Rodgers: If you're going to fire just about anybody, the two groups that I would prefer that you keep your grubby paws off are the people who deal with nuclear stuff and the people who deal with airplanes. Could you please leave those people alone yes. Those people need to be allowed to do the work because, one, we don't want the Wild West in the air where people are just hoping they land in the right spot at the right time and don't kill a bunch of other people. We don't want people saying, I don't know. Maybe we'll just whack it with a hammer and see if that makes the things stop ticking. Stop it. Be more careful. Now they're trying to hire back a bunch of people. If I were those people, I'd be like, Oh heck of a no, man. You fired me without even asking me what I do. You didn't even give me a chance with that five things I did last week memo. You just.
J. Aughenbaugh: If they did ask me to come back?
N. Rodgers: I would cost them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, I would charge them a premium. No, I'm with you.
N. Rodgers: You want me to put up with your nonsense? It's going to cost you, buddy.
J. Aughenbaugh: The National Nuclear Safety Administration fired about 1,300 of their 1,800-person staff. By the way, folks, these are people that need to have science degrees.
N. Rodgers: There are all nuclear engineers. They're not chuckleheads like me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, they're not a dime a dozen, folks. There are very few people in the world who have this kind of scientific knowledge. We can't be in the business of getting rid of that knowledge.
N. Rodgers: Do we really want those people going to work in Iran or Iran or North Korea. You think those people wouldn't be offered jobs in those places? You have to work. In most capitalist societies, you have to work. You can't just not have a job. Crazy.
J. Aughenbaugh: The next concerns the budget. Now, I'm going to put on my professor hat, and I'm going to go ahead and talk about impoundments. First, then we'll get to the budget. Many of you all have probably heard the word impoundment, and you don't understand what it is. An impoundment is when Congress has appropriated money in law, and then a president says, I'm not going to spend that money because either I think it is wasteful or I don't like the agency for whatever reason. That's what an impoundment is. The money has been already appropriated by Congress which constitutionally, all spending bills originate with Congress.
N. Rodgers: That's right. Typically have the power of the purse.
J. Aughenbaugh: Power of the purse. All spending bills start with the House. Then the Senate gets involved. The president basically has a choice. You can veto a spending bill or you sign it into law. But once it is signed into law. According to another law, okay, the infamous Budget Control and Empowerment Act of 1974, but also the United States Constitution. As a president, you have to spend the money. Now, is there a whole bunch of discretion on how you spend the money? Yes. Because Congress knows that it can't get really specific with every line item of every agency budget. But once it allocates the money, you have to spend it.
N. Rodgers: The Trump administration has lost in court on this topic. They have been told to spend the money that was allocated from Congress, even though they don't want to. We should, by the way, side note before we get into a whole lot of money talk here is that one of the things that President Trump ran on and one of the things that he perceives to have a mandate on and he may in fact have a mandate on is cutting government spending. What frustrates me on behalf of Donald Trump, wow, I never thought those words would come out of my mouth. Yeah, that's fine, except people also voted back in all their congresspeople or most of their congresspeople. Who were doing this actual spending.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: It's not the president who's doing the actual spending. It's the Congress. If you want Congress to lower its spending or to change its spending, you have to consider perhaps voting for someone who will spend less money.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Wow, I defended I defended Donald Trump there for the moment.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you did. Well, in part you did so.
N. Rodgers: But it's only fair.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, in part, you did so by criticizing the branch of the federal government that has spending authority, which is the Congress. How effective has the Trump administration been at decreasing federal government spending?
N. Rodgers: Can I answer?
J. Aughenbaugh: You go ahead. Yeah. Not at all.
N. Rodgers: I was so surprised in your notes. When I saw that. Either way, Aughie did not write out, but he basically did with words.
J. Aughenbaugh: I found this from multiple sources. They're all legit. The US government spent more money during Trump's first month in office Version 2.0, than it did in 2024.
N. Rodgers: Under Biden's last year.
J. Aughenbaugh: Trump has frozen billions of dollars of foreign aid, though, as we mentioned previously in this podcast episode, he's had to go ahead and free up some of that money for work that's already performed. We know that he's fired at least 20,000 federal workers. Again, the precise number.
N. Rodgers: Who knows?
J. Aughenbaugh: Who knows? But okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: The savings have been outweighed by the higher spending on health and retirement programs and rising interest rates, according to the Treasury Department.
N. Rodgers: Now, by that spending on health and retirement programs, does that mean Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security?
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct. Yes.
N. Rodgers: You don't mean within agencies on federal workers. You mean for the American population?
J. Aughenbaugh: The public. That's right.
N. Rodgers: Because aren't those the greater share of the federal budget anyway?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. For listeners, if you don't know, the US federal government budget for this fiscal year is a little over $7 trillion. I can't believe I just said that seven trillion.
N. Rodgers: You said it casually like it wasn't real money too. When you said it, you're like a little over $7 trillion. For sure.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, again, as we've joked on this podcast.
N. Rodgers: That's starting to be actual money.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's it. But the problem is, we have structural imbalances in our federal government budget simply because of retirement and healthcare programs.
N. Rodgers: Because they're ponzi schemes. As long as the birth rate in the United States stayed high enough that there were three workers for every one retiree, you didn't have a problem with this. But people have stopped making babies and they are making them at a much lower rate, and the boomers are a huge generation. The combination of that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. We've made a commitment to the boomers who are retiring that Social Security will be there for them and that Medicare will be there for them. This runs counter to what Trump but in particular, DOGE has been saying. That they have saved billions of dollars for American taxpayers by cutting the bureaucracy. But this is all a drop in the proverbial bucket. Because in particular, Social Security and Medicare consume a huge portion of the federal government's expenditures. One-third of all federal dollars spent last fiscal year, were in those two programs.
N. Rodgers: Medicare and Social Security. Not Medicaid, by the way. Medicare and Social Security because every old person gets those two things.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Unless Congress, and this goes back to your point, Nia. Unless Congress is willing to take on the infamous third rail of American politics.
N. Rodgers: Explain the third rail for people who have never been on the subway.
J. Aughenbaugh: In most subway systems, there are three rails. There are two that the trains run on, the tracks. But the third rail is the energy source. You touch the third rail, you die.
N. Rodgers: There's a zorking sound and then a scorching sound and then there's no more you. Because enormous amounts of power run through the third rail.
J. Aughenbaugh: In American politics, the infamous third rail are senior citizens.
N. Rodgers: Because as earlier noted by Aughie, they have time and they vote. They are the most dangerous group of people in the United States in terms of a democracy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. As I like to joke with my students, if you're a member of Congress and you propose that you're going to reform either of those two programs, you might as well just dust off your resume, update it because you'll need a new job, because they ain't going to re-elect you.
N. Rodgers: The only way that you might be able to pull that off is if you were a senator in your first year and you still had five years before you got booted out of your job because you would be booted after five years, you would not have a re-election.
J. Aughenbaugh: But then here is the next, and I know I am frequently the kid who's crying wolf, but the next is the debt service payments on the federal government deficit.
N. Rodgers: Holy cow.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thirteen percent of last year's federal government budget went to just paying the debt service.
N. Rodgers: Not paying down the principal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, just paying, if you will, interest rate.
N. Rodgers: Just the interest.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We're not paying down the principal here.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: We are just paycheck to paycheck paying the interest.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: If you wonder what that looks like, go to an amortization calculator or buy a new car calculator. Pick a calculator that will let you put in, and put in a low interest rate. Don't put in a high interest rate, but put it on $100,000 and see what that ends up for you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Most of your monthly payment is not towards the principal. It's paying off the interest that whoever loaned you the money is charging you.
N. Rodgers: Generally speaking, the people who loaned you the money are Americans. Our debt is almost all owned by Americans. There's this whole subgroup of people who are, oh, we'll just default, and we can go back to zero, and everything will be fine. That would be fine if those Americans could take the hit. But what you're talking about are businesses and individuals that have loaned the government money that if the government defaulted, would reverberate around the globe instantly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because that means then a whole bunch of Americans cannot pay their debts, which means they don't have money to go ahead and spend on foreign goods and services, and we are the consumers of the world. If our federal government defaulted on its debt payments, it would rattle, shake, cause an earthquake in the global economic markets. It would make Trump's tariffs pale in comparison.
N. Rodgers: Oh, my goodness. That would be like having a 9,000% tariff on everything. It would just be awful.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then, add onto this. Remember, the first part of Trump's effort to cut the federal government workforce was a buyout program. One hundred thousand of the nation's 2.3 million federal workers were given buyouts.
N. Rodgers: Paid, but not working?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Well, how does that save money? You want to talk about a welfare payment. That is a transfer of wealth. That is a welfare payment. If I'm paying you, Aughie, I'm going to pay you not to teach classes so that the university never. It get so crazy. This big whole touting of the USAID thing and blah, blah blah, blah blah with USAID and we're going to cut out all the spending, how much of the budget is the USAID?
J. Aughenbaugh: USAID is 0.06%. That is less than 1% of the federal government's budget.
N. Rodgers: Wait, 0.06 or 0.6.
J. Aughenbaugh: 0.06. It's 0.6. Excuse me. But it's still less than one.
N. Rodgers: It's slightly more than half of a percent of a 100% budget.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it's less than 1% of the federal government budget.
N. Rodgers: That means the federal budget is 99.4% other. That pie looks ridiculous.
J. Aughenbaugh: It is the metaphorical change that you find either in your couch or in your car, right?
N. Rodgers: It is. I don't know why touting it is such a thing except that for some voters, they perceive helping other nations. Why are we helping other nations? We should be helping ourselves. We're like, because it costs us nothing. Nothing comparatively.
J. Aughenbaugh: The amount of goodwill it engenders for the United States around the world, pays off multiple times.
N. Rodgers: The amount of bad will it is currently engendering is going to cost significantly more than 0.6% of the budget. But can I also mention something about Elon Musk?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, go ahead.
N. Rodgers: I don't understand how Elon Musk runs companies, because if I ran a company as badly as he is running DOGE, I would not have a company. He keeps saying, oh, we've saved billions on this, we've saved billions on that, but the reality is, no, you haven't. Mathematically, we can see that the number is actually slightly higher than it was last year. But even if it were just the same, it would mean that there had not been effective cut anywhere.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because as we could possibly talk about in another podcast episode, sure, you may be getting rid of underperforming government workers. But you may also be getting rid of over performing government workers. Now you're hurting the capacity of the government to go ahead and do things that Trump voters want.
N. Rodgers: Like their tax returns processed?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Or to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Let's just say if you're Trump and you want to go ahead and write off the nearly 50% of the American population who voted against you, you still have to go ahead and address those who did vote for you. If you start affecting the capacity of agencies that they rely on, this might be the greatest educational lesson that Trump can teach us, which is a whole bunch of Americans may actually now begin to figure out how the federal government impacts their lives.
N. Rodgers: Side note, for all the people who are like bloated bureaucracy and blah blah blah, personnel costs equaled 4.3% of the budget in 2022, 4.3%.
N. Rodgers: Let's round up to five. Let's give extra for graft and corruption. Let's give extra, 5% of the budget meant that 95% of the budget was other. Again, not a pie slice that you want to eat.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: Can I say, Aughie, that it's so weirdly obvious that certain people don't understand what the government does and how the government spends money? Trump keeps saying over and over, I will not touch Medicaid, I will not touch Medicare, and I will not touch Social Security. The reality is, if you don't touch those things, you could cut everything else, and you're only cutting 33%. You're still spending at 67% level which is not going to get you your $1 trillion.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because when you throw in Department of Defense with Social Security, Medicare, and just the debt service, that's over 50% of the federal government's budget. Think about it. Social Security and Medicare are about 1/3 of the federal government budget. That's 33%. You add in the debt service, which we talked about, is 13%. That's up to 46%. Then you throw in Department of Defense which is about 20% of the federal government's budget, that's 66%. That's 2/3 of the budget in four basic categories of the federal government budget, Nia. Unless you're going to go ahead and cut DOD, Social Security and Medicare.
N. Rodgers: You'd have to remove the entire rest of the government and then say to people, you're not getting any services. There'll be no services. Welcome to the United States where everything is graft and corruption. Whoever you can pay to do a thing, you're going to do a thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: That would be the budget that you see in third world countries that are used as examples in IR and comparative politics classes.
N. Rodgers: What we don't want to do do. This is Zimbabwe $800 billion note or whatever it is that they had.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, I know I'm an institutionalist. I know I focus on structure, but if you really want to tackle the federal government spending, you have to go to the structures in the institutions that consume the lion's share of the federal government budget. Cutting the workforce is going to hurt capacity, and it's going to be a drop in the proverbial bucket that is the size of the federal government's budget.
N. Rodgers: A whole bunch of it isn't going to work cause judges are going to find that you can't fire certain people.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the other thing.
N. Rodgers: I'm assuming that what we're going to have at some point is a Department of Interior and land sell off.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, we go ahead and fund this.
N. Rodgers: I don't know how else we would do it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Are we hoping to do this through tariff revenues. The federal government has a big old land auction.
N. Rodgers: I guess maybe part of why we want Canada and Greenland is so we can auction them off.
J. Aughenbaugh: I know we're being flippant about this, but the math just doesn't add up. One of the first classes I taught was government budgeting. When you have debt payments, if you don't make them. One of the reasons why investing in the United States federal government in terms of securities and treasury bills, etc., is that the United States federal government has never defaulted on its debt payments. That's why we're considered one of the safest investors.
N. Rodgers: That's why we have AA, AAA, whatever it is.
J. Aughenbaugh: Every time we do a government shutdown, the credit agencies are just like, maybe we should not, but we always restore their confidence. But if we don't make the debt payments, then the federal government's, if you will, securities, would not be investment worthy and it means a whole bunch of Americans and corporations who have invested. We're talking about also retirement plans. A whole bunch of Americans retirement plans have invested heavily into US federal government securities. Why? Because it's a safe investment.
N. Rodgers: Which is the kind you want to do when you're old.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, that's right.
N. Rodgers: Once you reach a certain age, you want your investments, your portfolio to look like you're about 90. You don't want anything to change. You want things to be as boring and stable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Stable and as steady a return.
N. Rodgers: Because you're living of that money. When you're 19 and you put stuff in your retirement account, you're like, put it out on venture capital. I don't care.
J. Aughenbaugh: Put it into cryptocurrency.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. Because you're like what else, I'll make it back and you probably will. But when you're, 64 and you're looking at in three or four years retiring, that whole thing changes drastically. You want blue ribbon boring.
J. Aughenbaugh: Blue Chip stops.
N. Rodgers: Blue Chips, that's what I mean.
J. Aughenbaugh: Government securities, they give you a consistent annual rate of return.
N. Rodgers: Even if it's not high, it's steady.
J. Aughenbaugh: Steady. You know it's going to be at least, okay, if not really positive, it's not going to lose your money. You're not going to lose money in your portfolio. But again, if you take that as a give it, then you're going to have to look at Medicare, Social Security, and defense spending.
N. Rodgers: When you fire a bunch of people and you leave a bunch of people, productivity drops through the floor because nobody is sure where the ground is solid. Nobody is sure whether they can spend something or not. I happen to know an individual who works for one of the spy agencies who is stationed in a foreign nation, who has been mildly concerned because they are in their first year working for that institution, and they don't know whether they are going to be flown home if they are fired. There's some real serious productivity questions and stressor questions. In the Department of Education, we'll just have everybody else do all the work that those 2,000 people were doing. How's that going to work? What's the wait time going to be for patrons on the one side? What's the stress level going to be on the other side.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because Nia, even if you assume of the remaining workers, some of them could probably be doing more. You're only going to be getting a small increase.
N. Rodgers: They probably can't do double or triple more.
J. Aughenbaugh: Maybe 5% more, 7% more. But you're not going to go ahead and get 100%. It's just not humanly possible. Anyways.
N. Rodgers: We have all the feelings. This has been the first round up, and we will, in the news you again, listen lovely listeners, probably in another couple of months maybe after the summer of Scots. Boy, that's going to be fun this year, isn't it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Good Lord. Yes. don't even get me started on you.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, you should just take a nap now, maybe to prep for that. Thank you so much.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks, Nia.