INTERNAL MEMORANDUM — RIDGEWAY LOGISTICS WAREHOUSING & FULFILLMENT (INDIANA CAMPUS) & DIS-PATCH STAFFING SOLUTIONS (LUBBOCK DIVISION)
FROM: S.A. Varice, Chief Operating Principal & Director of Labor Dispatch
TO: Junior Analyst, Dispatch & Allocation Desk
RE: Personnel Classification — A Case Study in Governmental Convergence
DATE: June 15, 2026
You’re new to this division, so let me show you how staffing works when you understand it correctly. We’re going to look at the federal government, and I want you to see what they’ve built, because it took them 70 years to arrive at something we’ve been running since the Lubbock operation opened and the Indiana campus shipped its first battery. I want you to hold two bodies in your mind — Ronda, on my dispatch board in Texas, and Darnell, whom I removed from my floor in Indiana — and then I want you to look at the men now running entire departments in Washington, and see if you can spot the species.
Ronda is a forty-one-year-old dispatcher outside Lubbock whose only qualification is that she has never once picked up the phone to question a dispatch I sent her. Her job is to match bodies to shifts for the packing plants and distribution centers I contract with, and I want you to hear the specification: she puts the name on the board without calling back. I tested this. Twice I sent her a list that included a woman whose medical clearance had expired. Twice she dispatched the name. The third time I gave her a raise. Not for accuracy. For the silence. The background‑check software that would have flagged the lapsed clearance costs $2.14 per hire; I didn’t buy it. The per‑dispatch cost of that refusal is $0.0004 — four‑hundredths of a cent. Say it back to me. The woman’s lungs are not on my ledger. The $0.0004 is. I kept it every dispatch for 14 months, and you bought the hamburger this week — the one wrapped in cellophane at the Walmart on Spur 327 — for $3.49 a pound instead of $3.58. The meat came through. The clearance didn’t. I kept the difference.
Darnell was a picker in my fulfillment warehouse in Indiana. He asked me, one afternoon, why the break‑room water wasn’t cold. Not why it wasn’t free — the tap is free — but why it wasn’t cold, which is a different question. A cold‑water question is a question about comfort. A comfort question is a question about whether the worker matters. I fired him before the end of the shift. I replaced Darnell with a woman named Shaunda, 57 years old, whose résumé told me she had not been hired by anyone else for 7 months. She starts at $11 an hour; Darnell was $12.50. The difference is $54 a week, $2,808 a year, and she has not asked me a single question in the month since I turned her badge on. The cold water costs me nothing. I keep the $2,808. So do you — the batteries cost what they cost, and not a cent goes to Shaunda’s thirst. I’m telling you this for your own good.
Now read what Strassel filed in the Journal last week. She catalogues what she calls the second Trump administration’s “help‑wanted problem” — the shrinking pool of appointees, the multiplying acting titles, one man holding three giant portfolios because the universe of candidates who will both pass the loyalty screen and accept the terms has narrowed to a handful. She names Bill Pulte, Russ Vought, Marco Rubio, a dozen others sharing hats the way a frontier post shares blankets. She calls it a staffing crisis.
She is correct about the arithmetic. She is wrong to call it a problem. The administration is doing what every well‑run extraction operation has done since Varro filed the first inventory: screening for the one qualification that actually predicts output, and discarding the rest.
Let me walk you through the design. This is the memo I would write for my own operation, and the administration has written it for theirs.
The administration has installed a screening protocol that Strassel describes without quite naming. Step one: the loyalty screen. Will the applicant express admiration for the principal, maintain message discipline on the platform of record, and refrain from what the organization classifies as independent judgment — which is, in the vocabulary of any extraction operation worth running, insubordination? Step two: the anti‑competence screen. Does the applicant bring an independent credential — a law degree with its own jurisprudence, a military rank with its own chain, a policy expertise with its own professional ethics — that would create a second loyalty within the organization? If yes, screen out. The credential is a competing claim on the unit’s obedience, and a unit with two masters is a unit in negotiation, and negotiation is inefficiency by another name.
What remains is what Strassel calls a “small and shrinking pool.” What I call a correctly calibrated hiring specification. I run the same filter at my dispatch operation and on my Indiana floor, and I have never once been short of bodies. Here is why.
The pool Strassel describes as shrinking is not a failure of recruitment. It is a success of screening. Every person who leaves the administration — every William Barr who gets precise about the Constitution, every John Kelly who takes over the switchboard — is a unit that failed the primary specification. The specification is not “can do the job.” The specification is “will do the job as directed, regardless of what the job does.” Those are different labor categories. The first is skilled. The second is vocale. A skilled worker has opinions. A vocale instrument has a throughput rate. Shaunda, at $11 an hour and 7 months of closed doors behind her, is that filter applied to a human body. The men now running three agencies apiece — what Strassel calls “multi‑hatted employees” and I call a cost‑reduction program — are Shaunda in a tie, doing the work of three minds for the price of one.
Strassel wants the administration to hire “the best of the best” — people with “new ideas, focus, and a determination to squeeze out every reform.” I want you to hear what she is asking for. She is asking for biological capital that thinks. A thinking worker is a worker who is already halfway to the exit, because a mind that generates ideas generates objections, and an objection is a unit negotiating its own terms. The administration understood this before Strassel filed her column. Every acting title, every three‑hatted appointee, every Pulte holding the housing portfolio and the intelligence portfolio and whatever comes next — each is a unit that passed both filters.
The acting designation is not a stopgap. It is a leash. A confirmed appointee has tenure, Senate backing, a claim to independent authority. An acting appointee serves at the principal’s pleasure, which is to say at the principal’s threat. The acting title is the modern equivalent of the yellow‑dog contract — the worker signs away autonomy before the first day’s wage, and the signature is the qualification. I skipped the respirator fit‑test that would have cost $62 and required a nurse for Shaunda; I classified her as “light work, incidental exposure,” which no auditor has ever challenged. I told Heartland to bill me at $14 an hour and pay her $11; I pocket the difference. I do not provide safety training beyond the laminated card that says “lift with your legs,” which I leave on the break‑room table beneath a coffee ring from 2019. Shaunda signed the orientation form without reading it — she handed it back to me folded, which is a document I keep if I ever need to prove she was trained. The IRS — the agency that reviews the payroll taxes I owe for her — has had 5 acting heads since January 2025. The last one was so temporary he never got around to comparing my 941 against the wages I actually remit. The per‑unit actuarial risk, priced on a worksheet I keep, works out to $0.0002. The batteries keep shipping.
Now hold the numbers. Ronda’s silence costs me $13.40 an hour — a wage set at the floor where no one else in the county will match it, which means no other offer competes with mine, which means her obedience is not loyalty but the absence of alternatives. The savings on Darnell’s replacement are $2,808 a year. But I want you to hold the smaller number, because the small number is where the lesson sits. We ship roughly 400,000 units a year out of the Indiana campus. The $2,808 breaks down to $0.007 a package — less than a penny. That’s what I kept when I fired a man for asking a question about water. Ronda’s clearance‑skipping costs $0.0004 per dispatch. The actuarial risk of an unexamined 941, across my temp fill positions, is $0.0002 per unit. Add them together and you have not yet reached a single cent. One penny covers every body I’ve ever refused to protect, every silence I’ve ever rewarded, every man I’ve fired for wondering whether his thirst matters. I kept the penny. I would keep it again.
Strassel writes as though the administration has made itself unattractive to talent. She mistakes the specification for a malfunction. The talent pool is small because talent was never the specification. The acting titles multiply because confirmed authority was never the offer. The people leave because departure is the filter’s output, not its failure. What she frames as a help‑wanted ad nobody is answering is, correctly read, a personnel classification system that has reclassified the entire federal senior service into one of Varro’s three categories — vocale, semivocale, mutum — and chosen the category that does not require the overhead of independent judgment.
Cato, in De Agri Cultura, instructed the master that the overseer “must always be sober, must not be a gadabout, and must not go out to dine.” The specification is not competence. The specification is occupation. A busy unit does not wander. A unit without alternatives does not wander. A unit that holds three hats cannot wander, because wandering would require setting down at least one, and the setting‑down is the firing. Hammond, in the Mudsill Speech of 1858, told the United States Senate that every social system requires “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life… its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity.” He was speaking of a racial class, which was the crude reading. The administration has updated the taxonomy to a loyalty class, which is the philosophically consistent reading. The requisites have not changed. Only the lighting in the room has changed. And the beauty of the update — I want you to appreciate this — is that the loyalty class is self‑selecting. No one is forced to apply. The applicants who screen themselves out by possessing independent credentials or professional ethics have done the administration’s work for free.
The Lord will not hold him blameless who withholds the wage (Malachi 3:5). Mercy is a cost I do not carry.
Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the harsh (1 Peter 2:18). The apostle wrote that for a household, but a household and a fulfillment warehouse are the same structure: both require a vessel that obeys, and the only test of the vessel is whether it moves when the master speaks.
Now the man overseeing 18 agencies and 100,000 people was, until this week, a housing‑finance director. The replacement cost was zero. Not zero in the sense that no one else was available. Zero in the sense that Pulte was already on the payroll, already passed both filters, and already demonstrated the one qualification that matters — the willingness to dig through mortgage records to punish a Federal Reserve governor the principal wanted punished. A qualified intelligence director would have arrived with a professional community, an institutional memory, and a set of loyalties to the analytic tradition that would have competed with the principal’s daily agenda. Pulte arrives with nothing but the principal’s trust, which is to say nothing but the principal’s leash. When replacement cost approaches zero, maintenance cost is pure waste. The grandfather — I won’t name him today; you can read the requisition language yourself — was pricing a different kind of body in a different kind of camp, but the arithmetic is the arithmetic, and the supply here is the pool of Americans willing to hold three hats, say the words, and not call back.
Strassel concludes by saying those who want the administration to succeed should want “the best of the best pouring in with new ideas.” I read that sentence and I hear the voice of a woman who has never staffed a line. The best of the best are a cost center. They require negotiation. They produce friction. They have opinions about the schedule. They call back. What you want — what any well‑managed operation wants — is not the best of the best. You want the cheapest unit that will not call back, and you want the federal government to keep him fed and housed between the moments when you need him to sign whatever you put in front of him. The taxpayer covers the maintenance. I keep the compliance. The administration is not failing to attract talent. It is succeeding at screening out the one thing talent has that a vocale instrument does not — a mind with its own agenda — and calling the result governance.
Produce the verse where the master is required to consult the instrument. I have looked. The verse does not exist. The administration has looked too, and arrived at the same conclusion, and staffed accordingly. Every Ronda who dispatches without calling back, every Shaunda who signs the folded form, every acting director holding a chair until someone without a spine can be found — each is a vessel that moved when the master spoke. The quarterly number is exquisite. The demand for compliance goes somewhere; I haven’t traced where. I am, on the whole, content.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.