[] | Action | Argument | Effects |
[] | Support the Civil Service Act of 3053 | The Civil Service provides critical services to the Empire and is the second largest line item in our annual non-discretionary budget. It is also bloated and contains redundancies that in the private sector, and indeed in other government sectors including the military and the Imperial household, would never be allowed. First of all, despite past attempts to centralize and consolidate human resources assets so as to avoid duplication, the Civil Service has managed to nevertheless grow their human resources overhead at almost a third again the rate as their front-end headcount. At the time of the original reform there had been 1 back office human resources officer for every 4 front-end employees doing actual productive work within their respective areas of expertise. That reform shifted the ratio to 1 in 20 with the legislation specifically mandating a long-term target of 1 in 25. Instead we are now at 1 in 3. The Civil Service has been simply administratively redefining these back office positions as front-end for the purposes of compliance with existing reforms, but the work that they are doing is very much back-office. Worse yet, these back-office employees spend upwards of a third of their paid hours engaging in ‘team activities’ rather than their purported duties, said ‘team activities’ seem to take place exclusively at various bars and restaurants with all expenses placed on expense accounts. Second, And in addition to the issues discussed above, the Civil Service has been getting increasingly creative in creating ‘incentive packages’ supposedly for new hires but which seem to always result in senior Civil Service employees receiving bonuses that increase their take-home pay to levels significantly higher than even the various Ministers that sit in your cabinet. The best paid individuals in the entire Empire are the senior Civil Service bureaucrats, with net take-home salaries higher than some corporate CEOs who manage trillion dollar megacorps and who are regularly denounced as obscenely wealthy. Eight ‘Senior Permanent Under Secretaries’ between them net almost ten billion in take home pay annually due to the multiplicative incentives and bonuses that they pay themselves, despite their official pay rates being far lower. Finally, the expense account benefits for the Civil Service have gotten out of control. Every year almost ten billion is spent just on this benefit, more than is spent on the entire Parliament, the entire Special Branch, all of your Minister’s salaries plus benefits, and the Environmental Board… combined. We are not saying that the Civil Service doesn’t do excellent work. They do. We are not claiming that they are corrupt, all of these benefits were set up openly and lawfully, it has just gotten so completely out of control as to be ridiculous. What is being proposed is the following. The administrative redesignation of back-end positions as front-end ones shall be banned and the original ratio limit of 1:30 relaxed to 1:25 but made ironclad. Expense accounts shall be limited to 10% of base salary, while incentives and bonuses shall be limited to 25% of base salary total. Finally no Civil Service bureaucrats take-home pay may exceed that of the Minister that they report to. |
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[] | Oppose the Civil Service Act of 3053 | This legislation is long on emotional appeals to perceived pecuniary imbalances and short on anything resembling reasonable analysis. When adjusted for workload, time investment, and productivity the current Civil Service is the most efficient, cost-effective, and responsive bureaucratic and administrative body in history. While a small number of exceptionally senior bureaucrats do indeed receive extremely high net salaries, these are individuals who have worked for the Civil Service for over a hundred years each, have been critical to many of the great successes that the Empire has enjoyed thanks to their hard work, experience, and expertise, and between them they have saved the Griffon taxpayers over twice their combined salaries based on an external analysis from neutral analysts and auditors. The complaints about violating the back-end ratios set in previous legislation are equally deceptive. The individuals who this supposedly apply to primarily work as front-line employees in precisely the capacities that they were hired for, but have secondary training permitting them to cover for back-line employees during vacations, illnesses, and other absences. They receive no additional pay for receiving this secondary training. External audits show that these supposedly ‘excess bureaucrats’ perform back-end human resources functions less than 1% of the time. The complaints about expense accounts are equally specious. To read the proponents of this legislation's speeches you would think that the civil service employees are enjoying constant champagne lunches with the rarest caviars and most expensive entrees. The truth of the matter is that over 80% of the expense account claims in any given year are for travel expenses. While the Civil Service makes use of military transport assets for travel, by law we are required to account for the costs of such travel using equivalent civil rates for equivalent services. In effect, 80% of the ‘expense account’ expenses cited are paid by the Civil Service to other parts of the Imperial government and thus exist primarily for accounting purposes. |
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[] | Action | Arguments | Effects |
[] | Support the Health Services Act of 3053 | We already have a world class healthcare system… in the Core worlds and our fully established colonies. Many frontier worlds are limited to only one or two medical facilities on the planet for years, resulting in an unfortunate degradation of care. Many times the only medical facilities are located at militia bases and on board naval ships in the various systems rather than actual hospitals or clinics. The mechanism already exists to solve this issue. The existing Healthcare Subsidy has been highly successful in attracting skilled medical professionals to work in frontier medicine and has sped up the establishment of proper medical facilities across the Empire. It has been a great success. However the current funding level was set over a century ago, when the Empire existed only on a single world. The sheer scale of the Empire means that the current model is inadequate to the needs of our rapidly expanding frontiers. This legislation does nothing more than update the funding level to match current requirements to allow what is already a very successful system to thrive into the future. |
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[] | Oppose the Health Services Act of 3053 | <No opposing arguments have been filed for this legislation> |
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On one hand, this is an excellent opportunity to finish them off piecemeal since they are unlikely to back each other up. They are also unlikely to grow more powerful since they are too focused fighting everyone and are too paranoid to make new Black Steel cyborg leaders for more processing power for drones since they might backstab them.Unfortunately, they do inform you that the Black Steel forces you’ve been facing are not the only ones about, that they too are facing significant Black Steel activity despite how far away from you they are. According to them, the Black Steel are behaving in a fairly decentralized manner, with quasi-independent bands doing their own thing. All of them are extremely violent and aggressive, but no two bands are identical in terms of their doctrine, strategy, or tactics. The ones they are facing, for example, are obsessed with carrier operations and primarily employ titanic swarms of ASFs backed up by dropships, while keeping their warships well away from the battle.
That is fairly disturbing in that it is very unlikely you’ll be able to eradicate the Black Steel threat in anything resembling a reasonable time frame. The only silver lining is that according to the Crimson Storm the various Black Steel sub groups fight each other nowadays as much as they fight everybody else, so unless a particularly capable or charismatic leader shows up for the Black Steel they won’t be uniting anytime soon.
IIRC they are actually the remnants of Rim Republic rebels who fought in an uprising against Stefan Amaris btu every time they introduced themselves as being from the Rim Worlds Republic people shot at them so they just started introducing themselves as Amaris Remnants to see who is going to shoot them and who is not.Then again this is Amaris forces so maybe they just started backstabbing each other.
Don't worry; only reason it wasn't in there last turn was because we had too many things going on and it's close to a guaranteed success.@Jarow: Please do include the review of the legal codes in this turn? Pretty please?