FMCS

Nothing to see there ... move on

The Democrats and their media, academic, entertainment, and deep state allies wail as Donald Trump eliminates wasteful and potentially fraudulent federal agencies and their smaller subservices. But wailing is just the beginning. The hard-left crazies within and around the Democratic party have decided that vandalism, gun fire and firebomb attacks should be directed against Tesla showrooms. But even that’s not enough. To show their displeasure at not getting their way, other hard-left crazies are vandalizing and threatening the owners of Tesla vehicles, channeling the Kemer Rouge in its very early days.

Why? Because Elon Musk, Tesla’s largest stockholder, is their public enemy #2, a champion of free speech and the originator and driving force behind DOGE—the new organization that is uncovering billions in federal government waste, fraud and abuse. Even the supposed Democrat elites have demonized Musk, labeling him a “billionaire” (only billionaires who support Democrats are acceptable) and a “Nazi” (then again, anyone who doesn’t agree with their leftist narrative is a “nazi”). There is no one within the party who has strongly condemned the on-going Tesla vandals and when they do make tepid statements, it’s more like “I can’t publicly condone this, but I understand.”

So let’s take a look at an small example of the waste that has resulted in all of the ewailing and outright name-calling, hatred, and vandalism.

Have you ever heard of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS)—an agency that employs 230 federal workers in a 9-story D.C. office tower with “an in-house gym, a smoking lounge, in-office showers,” and hallways filled with painted portraits of some employees of FMCS. Oh wait, those portraits? From the expose:

Top FMCS official George Cohen used a “recreation and reception fund” to order champagne and $200 coasters for his office, and to purchase artwork painted by his wife. The tiny agency commissioned paintings of its top employees — as one employee told me, “like they were reigning kings or something…I’ve never seen anything like it before.” It spent $2,402 retouching the portrait of someone who briefly held the top job in an acting capacity.

Contracts were let to family friends, employees used federal credit cards to purchase jewelry (in one case, $18,000 worth) and took trips to exotic destinations:

The agency had, inexplicably, an office in Honolulu … It funded constant travel of its employees to exotic locales, on the pretext that it was drumming up business for the federal agency — an admission that there was little demand for the agency’s existence.

But it gets better:

Scot Beckenbaugh, a top agency official, was paid $174,000 a year, but that wasn’t enough: He had his “duty station” listed as Iowa so that he could have all of his living expenses and food paid for in D.C., where he lived and worked, as if he was on a six-year-long business trip. When an employee raised the issue to an agency lawyer, the lawyer told him he “should not raise these issues … it would open a can of worms.”

And then there’s outright fraud:

When Charles Burton retired from FMCS, he incorporated an LLC to which another FMCS employee paid $85,000 using his purchase card, listing it as a “Call Center Service,” even though the company had neither a website nor a working phone.

When an accountant, Carol Booth, blew the whistle on financial abuses to the General Services Administration, which manages purchase cards and contracting, Cohen forced her to send an email (which he wrote under her name) rescinding her statement.

Once these facts became known, the new Trump administration shut FMCS down.

Now, Democrats might say that FMCS is small potatoes, and that shutting it down won’t eliminate the debt. That’s true, but most of us don’t live in a fantasy world where big government is always doing good for taxpayers, and government employees have jobs guaranteed for life. For those us us who prefer reality-based thinking, FMCS is a small example of the massive waste, fraud and abuse that DOGE has and is uncovering.

But it appears that the Dems and their leftist allies don’t want to consider examples or reality. They’d rather attack Elon Musk by criminally attacking Tesla.

To illustrate: On a recent edition of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night TV show, Kimmel—a hard-core Democrat—commented on the attacks on Tesla dealerships. In Jimmy’s fantasy world, attacking Tesla is the same thing as disagreeing with Musk. It’s sort of the Left’s attempt at “free speech,” except with criminal behavior that could get someone killed.¹

Kimmel joked about the attacks and then smirked as he told the audience not to do that. The audience laughed and cheered, not at the faux warning, but at the fact that their arch-enemy, Elon Musk, was under attack. No matter that Tesla employs tens of thousands of hardworking Americans or that attacking a car company for the unrelated actions of its CEO is just a little unhinged. Kimmel and his crowd love it.

Way back in October of 2022, I commented on Kimmel (in a footnote to a piece on the on-going censorship of Covid opinion), who even then was ragging on Elon. After all, Musk wasn’t toeing the Democrat party line, so he was a target:

As an example of the vitriol, we have this tweet from celebrity spokesperson for the Left, Jimmy Kimmel, a late night comedian who demonstrates repeatedly why his audience share is tanking.

Kimmel, like the vast majority of Hollywood glitterati, seems to equate a presence on TV (or the movies) with meaningful accomplishment. Elon Musk, on the other hand, makes things that actually matter—to the hundreds of thousands of people he directly and indirectly employs, to a cleaner planet that progressives like Kimmel tell us they care sooo much about, to real life communication (via SpaceX Starlink), to transportation (via Tesla), and now (via the acquisition of Twitter) to free speech.

Kimmel has accomplished almost nothing that really matters, unless you think that making inane, snarky jokes late at night are somehow a 'contribution' to the human condition. As his shrinking hipster audience laughs at Kimmel's insults, we should all remember that in 20 years he will be remembered as just another has-been Hollywood type—slightly pathetic but mostly just unimportant. That will never happen to Musk, no matter how many contemptible tweets Jimmy [or any other leftist] posts. Maybe that's why Jimmy seems so angry.

Or … to quote the predictably classless Jimmy himself (see his tweet noted earlier), maybe we won’t have to wait 20 years, recognizing that today millions of people view him and the Tesla vandals he supports as “a fully-formed piece of shit.”

1. Sadly, this seems to be a recurring theme on the Left. For example, the BLM riots in 2020 caused massive damage in dozens of U.S cities and included the murder of at least 20 people, yet there was relatively little condemnation by Democratic leaders or their media allies of those violent events.