Rick Manning Presses His Case with Trump
Fairfax, Va. – Americans for Limited Government president Rick Manning is urging President Trump to take action on two of the group’s top policy priorities, divesting U.S. taxpayer dollars from China and reforming the federal workforce.
Manning, a former Department of Labor appointee under President George W. Bush, is pushing for reforms that would halt all taxpayer pensions from being invested in Chinese companies.
Manning is calling for the Labor Department to immediately impose transparency rules on private pensions and investments. In addition, he is calling on the Labor Department to divest all funds in non-transparent investments under the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a federally chartered corporation designed to encourage voluntary private defined benefit pension plans .Third, Manning is pushing for federal employee defined benefit plans to divest from non-transparent assets as well.
Currently, Americans have an estimated $2.8 billion of PBGC assets in the MSCI Emerging Markets index, which includes about $800 million in China.
In a letter to President Trump this week, Manning wrote, “No President in our lifetimes has been tougher on China than you have been. Your administration has courageously and steadfastly taken on China’s many trade abuses, threats to national security and human rights abuses.”
Manning is also urging the White House to reform the federal civil service, a bloated bureaucracy that has allowed unproductive, incompetent, and outright lazy workers to stay on the government payroll for decades.
“Right now, it can take years just to terminate an employee with cause. In a modern workplace, that is simply ludicrous,” Manning said.
“With the federal government still working from home to a large extent, this is the perfect time to reevaluate the current structure of the civil service with an eye to modernization, flexibility and increasing efficiency,” he concluded.
For more:
Daily Torch, Sept. 16, Catherine Mortensen, Trump needs to clean house in a second term
Daily Torch, Oct. 1, Rick Manning, Advancing Liberty by Divesting from China