President Trump has gone about trimming the size of the federal bureaucracy like a berserk butcher on the loose with a meat cleaver. It could have come in an organized, orderly way by analyzing each agency and pinpointing what should go or stay.
But necessary? Yes, and overdue.
I spent over forty years in Washington as my independent news bureau covered bread-and-butter issues for some thirty business and medical magazines. Mostly it meant monitoring federal agencies as they administered laws and issued regulations.
I was there in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson struggled to bring in a balanced $99 billion budget (for the entire government) in hopes of convincing a tightwad Congress that it could afford to fund his proposed War on Poverty.
That was just sixty years ago. How did that budget swell to $7 trillion-plus? I offer three broad reasons:
First, it’s the fault of We The People. We read in the papers about some egregious wrong – plane crashes, securities fraud, faulty products – and we shout, “There Outta be a Law!” Letters pour into congressmen. Heads are scratched, and out comes a law creating another federal regulatory agency
The problem? Over time, the cost of running the agency can exceed whatever it saves the public by chasing wrongdoers. The main reason is that the agency becomes weighted down by bureaus and divisions that have nothing to do with its main mission. Examples: the legislative liaison office, civil rights compliance, office management, staff travel, the staff attorney, and the media relations office (each with an army of clerks to fetch coffee and shuffle paper).
Second, there’s lots more to police than sixty years ago. We moan about bloated bureaucracy, but who would argue that we stop monitoring/regulating auto safety, outer space, nuclear energy, job safety, coronavirus epidemics and bird flu? All of these arrived on the scene since 1964.
Third, there are no built-in brakes on government growth. When a General Motors dips into red ink, it balances the books by firing a thousand workers. It’s never happened in government. If someone tried (as Donald Trump will learn), the 300,000-member Federation of Government Employees will fight each and every dismissal.
Congress is bureaucracy’s biggest booster. Example: I’ve watched our legislators hike the National Institutes of Health budget year after year with few questions asked. Why? Because Congressman Jones, always running for re-election, is proud to tell constituents that he voted more to support the war on cancer, stroke or whatever. If he votes to decrease NIH funding, he knows that his next opponent will scour the voting records and accuse him of gutting research that could cure Grandma’s debilitating disease. And We The People will believe it because we don’t read more deeply than the blurbs on our cellphones.
What, then, can be done to prune the bureaucracy? One way would be for Congress to appoint a commission to identify where Washington could be eliminated from the multitude of federal-state assistance programs. A glaring example is the Federal Emergency Assistance Agency. Hand over FEMA’s disaster recovery work to the states and you’ll get a faster, better response – and more tailored to each state’s climate and geography.
Uncle Sam acts as a middleman who takes a piece of the action. And his regulatory role invariably delays projects. Example: the river I live on is part of federal-state Everglades restoration project that began in 2002 with a projected cost of $8 billion. Twenty-two years later, it’s only half done and the cost is now pegged at $22 billion. Why? Mostly because the feds must approve each stage of construction. Their share of the funding comes from Congress, which invariably finds itself in appropriations gridlock. Florida, with a $2 billion budget surplus, doesn’t need the money, the expertise, or the smothering extra layer of bureaucracy.
Multiply this example by a thousand other programs and projects and you’re finally shrinking the chronic federal budget deficit and the amount we pay for interest on the national debt. Let’s give it a try – civilly.
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