After our post yesterday about the USFS absurdly citing AMRA President Shannon Poe for “defrauding an inn keeper”, we wanted to bring up the solution to rogue agents and rogue behavior by agencies such as the USFS and BLM.
A few years ago, AMRA’s COO (Chief Operating Officer) Connie had an epiphany while she was reading about the Veteran’s Administration Accountability Act which the Republicans and President Trump passed.
The V.A. was rampant with fraud, mistreating the veterans and wasting hundreds of millions of dollars. They were exposed to taking lavish trips on the dime of the tax-payer and vets were waiting months and months for treatment. It was horrendous.
The Accountability Act simply stated if you do these fraudulent things, waste money, mistreat veterans or act outside the scope and course of your employment with the V.A., you’re fired, lose your pension and are ineligible for employment with government. In the first few months of this passing, they fired thousands of employees and the culture at the V.A. changed in a matter of those few months. It now appears as though that agency is now a well oiled machine working for the best interests of the vets and their families. A real success story.
Connie had the idea…why don’t we write one to include the USFS and BLM. Brilliant actually. We spent a few months writing this and sent it to a U.S. Senator who loved it. We planned a trip to Washington DC to introduce this to many within the walls of our nations capital and literally 3 days before we were to fly there….Nancy Pelosi shut down DC because of the virus. AMRA never got to go on that trip, then the 2020 election happened and the rest is history.
With where our country is looking like it is heading with the mid-terms, we believe now is again the time to start pushing this again, and we are.
When someone with a government agency openly stomps on a citizens rights, there should be a penalty and it should hurt. They should lose their job, their pension and be relegated to sit at home and rethink their choices to ignore our Constitution and the rights afforded to all of us. Right now, if someone within one of these agencies does something egregious, are caught and called out……they get transferred and nothing happens to their employment. We know, we’ve seen it dozens of times within the USFS and BLM.
So we are moving this Act back to the top of our list because mistreating the public who just wants to use their land should not happen anymore.