Protecting Adulterous Feds, Boosting USPS and Other Ideas From Presidential Candidates

Most of the talk on the on the 2016 campaign trail has been about ways to fire federal employees and trim the bloated bureaucracy.

This week, however, at least two presidential contenders took a different approach.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who made a name for himself through his advocacy for dissolving many of the powers of the federal government, spoke out in favor of protecting some mischievous feds. After hackers released the personal information of those who have accounts on the matchmaking website Ashley Madison, which enables married individuals to have extramarital affairs, many noted that 15,000 accounts were attached to .gov or .mil email addresses.

Many of those were assumed to be fake, but a review by the Associated Press revealed about 1,500 accounts that were accessed from government IP addresses, meaning federal employees were seeking out affairs, or at least exploring the idea, while on the clock. This raised questions of conduct unbecoming of federal workers, or at least misuse of government resources, but Paul still said those employees should not be punished.

“In some states, there are old laws against adultery, but I think if we start going after people and locking people up for adultery we’re headed for a bizarre world,” Paul told the Washington Post when asked if feds using the site should be fired.

But don’t mistake that sympathy for the senator being a fan of the federal bureaucracy.

“Your government has gotten so out of control that we’re not in charge,” Paul said earlier this year. “The executive branch has become this enormous monster with tentacles into every aspect of your life and we can’t stop it.”

No candidate running for the White House is a more ardent defender of the federal government than Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and that support has often been directed at the U.S. Postal Service.

Sanders this week wrote a letter to Postmaster General Megan Brennan, calling on her agency to reinstate delivery standards that were rolled back this year to accommodate a massive reduction in the postal infrastructure. The letter was in response to a report that USPS was increasingly missing even its more lax deadlines.

“It is abundantly clear that the Postal Service’s decision to shut down more than 140 mail processing plants a few years ago and to eliminate overnight delivery standards this year has been a disaster that is negatively impacting Americans all over this country,” Sanders wrote in the letter. The Postal Service was scheduled to close an additional 82 plants this year, but those plans were scuttled as the agency attempted to stabilize operations.

Sanders has long fought for boosting services at the Postal Service in favor of the cuts-based approach management has taken over the last several years. His call for restored standards, similar to a measure approved by a House panel earlier this year, comes despite a Congressional Budget Office finding that the agency cannot afford that approach.

In what has been more typical of the rhetoric from presidential candidates this campaign season, former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla., disparaged what he called a “massive bureaucracy” at a Friday town hall.

Bush has reiterated his call to do away with sequestration at recent events -- but for the Defense budget only. Economic growth and across-the-board cuts to non-Defense spending would account for the difference, he said.

“Grow the economy at a faster rate to generate a lot more revenue than what’s coming into the coffers right now,” Bush said on Friday. “And shift power back to the states on the so-called discretionary spending on the domestic level.”