June, 2025
Dear Mr. President:
I am responding to your wish as U.S. president to repopulate the federal employee workforce with patriotic recruits from “...land-grant universities... 4-H youth programs, and the... veterans... communities" among others.
Please consider this my application, as I can check those boxes and several others that you mention. I am twice a graduate of a land-grant university, as a youth I was the initial president of the Rock Creek Ranchers 4-H Club of Lancaster County, Nebraska, and I later served as a U.S. Navy officer with officer-of-the-deck (underway) qualifications on one of the Navy's most dangerous ships, USS Rainier (AE-5).
Your vetting process, however, will turn up other information that I hope you will not consider to disqualify my application:
I have a reputation of working well with respectable higher education institutions, including those considered elite. My academic credentials also include a degree from a German university, FU Berlin, and peer-reviewed publications. Among my friends and colleagues is a longtime Harvard lobbyist in Washington and I would expect us to quickly restore good federal-university relations to keep America foremost in the world in higher education and research.
Much of my work over the years in public finance has been devoted to fiscal responsibility at state and federal levels. As Nebraska's chief fiscal officer several years ago, I was responsible for developing balanced budgets. As former staff to the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, I was among those whose work paid off when the federal government balanced its budget in the late 1990s, significantly reducing our crippling interest payments on the federal debt. I would expect to continue that work with an urgency as never before, your BBB proposal notwithstanding as the debt is also a huge national security issue.
I have been a dogged foe of waste, fraud, and abuse in government, wherever it occurs. I have personally brought successful lawsuits against hundreds of millions of dollars of civil fraud in student loans under the federal False Claims Act and, at the state level, against illegal raids of millions from a state environmental trust fund. I would expect to continue working to throw out the trash associated with waste, fraud, and abuse wherever it occurs, based in no small part on important Eleventh and First Amendment victories won in the litigation process.
In recent years I have helped establish Veterans Education Success, an advocacy group for veterans that has had much success in protecting veterans' G.I. Bill benefits from fraudulent schools. I would expect to continue to help veterans through all agencies, including the VA.
My moral and ethical views are shaped by trying to live by the Ten Commandments, by admonitions to follow the Golden Rule, and to love one's neighbor as oneself. I would expect to live and work by those standards.
I earnestly hope you do not consider any this vetting information disqualifying, although I fully understand that you may. My early one-room country school teachers Mrs. Hayes, Miss Mussman, and Miss Murphy would likely consider the above activities commendable, as they hoped all of their students would go on to lives that reflect well on their teaching. They would not look kindly on anyone who suggests, as is implicit in your announcement, that there is somewhere an "elite" that is out of reach for the aspirations of their pupils and that the way to remedy the imagined disparity is to rig federal recruitment. They would surely not stoop to the level of disparaging anyone's patriotism as a basis for discriminating in federal employment, as is unfortunately explicit in your announcement.
As to the position for which I would like to be considered, it is OMB director. Your current director's record is unfathomably bad. Many of his actions are unconstitutional and morally wretched, resulting in untold numbers of deaths from hunger and disease. If I were appointed director, within 18 months I could return the executive branch patriotically to its rightful constitutional position and save lives. I would agree to serve at $1 per year, costing taxpayers $1.50. I would sleep in the office, perhaps on a Navy rack, always ready to "heave out and trice up".
This application is not written tongue-in-cheek. Every word is true and I am ready to serve. My cup of credentials is full and there should be no confirmation obstacles, as my work has always been non-partisan. I can start immediately.
Yours truly,
Jon H. Oberg