What we’re talking about:
In a century, Big Government transformed an essential and minimalized service, the Federal Highway Administration, into the Department of Where the F*** Do You Think You’re Going, and the above fog machine is just the genetics of one department. I noted earlier that the GAO had “found” massive amounts of redundancy; it was a poor word. The GAO simply took the time to report on the disgust. Any rational man could look at the following, which is nothing more than a collection of current federal agencies, and understand the waste is of a scale difficult to comprehend and inspiring of our worst tendencies to rage.
It’s frightening, really.
I say we simply turn everything off and see how things get along. Aka, government shutdown. We can always turn the functions that actually are “essential” back on later.
I mentioned before – in some other topic, and many weeks ago – that the Fed government is so HUGE that no one knows what the organization is really doing. No single mind encompasses the entirety of the system. I suspect that billions and billions are wasted simply because people who want a task done do not know that five agencies already exist to do it…so they create a sixth. There are layers upon layers of unknown redundancy. And tons of units that the heads of departments don’t even know exist.
Radical chopping of whole departments..Ed, IRS, Energy, Interior, Fannie/Freddie, Fed Highway, Health and human services, etc would be a good start to getting the leviathan down to something that might be comprehensible.
I think it’s less risky to chop a little too much than not enough.
Government is fundamentally NP-Hard.
It was not only that as Executive Government proliferated the authority and prestige of Congress declined; a time came when Congress realized that a fourth entity called Government…was acting in a dimension of its own with a force, a freedom and a momentum beyond any control of the law-making power. Moreover, it was a thing so totally vast, so innumerable in its parts and so apparently shapeless that there was nowhere a mind able to comprehend it. That was when, in 1947, the Congress asked former President Hover to organize a commission to study it scientifically and make it intelligible.
(Three hundred) men and women spent sixteen months exploring and charting the domain of Executive Government. Some of it was jungle, some of it was lawless, here and there were little bureaucratic monarchies that seemed to have grown up by themselves; and yet every part of it was very much alive and exercised powers of government, touching the lives of people.
The full report of the Hoover Commission was never published; its bulk was too repellent–Garet Garrett, 1951
A “shutdown” doesn’t go far enough; as soon as Congress authorizes the money the government would simply pick up where it left off.
What’s needed is to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the original OS, without all the bloatware that’s been added since the first Progressive era.
And for God’s sake, don’t install Norton or anything by Adobe!
</metaphor taken a step too far>
W lost me with the creation of DHS. I understood the failure of communication between the many federal agencies dealing with law enforcement to protect our border, civilians, and air space from terrorist attack. What I didn’t get was the need for an additional agency. Even on the umbrella agency concept, I didn’t understand how the role of DHS differed from that of the NSA. Even now, NSA doesn’t fall under DHS, because NSA is DoD and there’s that Posse Comitatus issue, which is the same reason that NSA and CIA have the same job of intelligence gathering with the latter being civilian based. However, the CIA is also not under DHS. So the two primary agencies for gathering intelligence of potential threats to the US don’t belong to the department that has the role of preventing those threats from happening.
But what about law enforcement to protect us from threats? US Marshall Services is DoJ. FBI is definitely DoJ. BATFE, which I thought was DHS, is also DoJ. And really BATFE was setup as a tax collection enforcement arm for the IRS under DeptTreasury, which was different than the currency protection provided by the Secret Service that was once Treasury. However, the Secret Service is now DHS and BATFE is DoJ. I could get excited that Department of Treasury is no longer in law enforcement, but their law enforcement agencies still exist.
So besides the USSS, what else is in DHS? The US Coast Guard, which like USSS, had no capability to prevent a 9/11 attack. ICE, which might have been able to stop immigration of the terrorist, but currently has a standing order to shoot first with bean bags while being shot at with real bullets. And then there is TSA, which took over a private business of airport security and turned US airports into the laughing stock for the world.
Yeah, that is what is meant by Big Government.
Leland Says:
“The US Coast Guard, which like USSS, had no capability to prevent a 9/11 attack.”
Come on now…if the CG intercepted inflatables stuffed with terrorists, and those terrorists had no lifejackets, the CG could have been very stern with them.
the CG could have been very stern with them.
Yeah, they would have powered up the LRAD and told the terrorist that their actions are unacceptable. Under the current administration, the USCG, like the USN last week, would take the terrorist into custody to await trial only after the terrorists killed every US civilian hostage.
Meanwhile, ICE would still get shot at by illegal border crosses supplied with weapons by the BATFE, who then blames the sell of lawful guns in the US as the cause for firearm violence in Mexico.
Sadly, none of this is parody.
told – tell
It is just a bad grammar day all around…
High Speed Rail!
The Department of Redundancy Department doesn’t believe a word the GAO says, according to two identical reports issued today.
And the true beauty of the current “untangling” of crossed efforts is that it’s only being done to muddy the waters as the Obama Ship of State sinks slowly beneath the waves of world madness, so that for the next two years Barry can say, “…but we’re TRYING to solve the problems, and if we had just 4 MORE years…”
.
As if the untangling and dissolution of agencies could EVER be completed in just 4 years or would EVER be done by Democrats as socialist and hyper-liberal as the Obamanoids truly are.
This completely ignores the fact that we may not exist as a country, much less a world power, at the end of the summer. There is a tipping point in every game of “empire” and only historians get to see exactly when that point WAS reached.
The citizens of said empire having been marched off to either gallows run by their pissed off ex-fellow citizen winners of the uncivil wars. OR they are marched off to the “salt mines” owned by their new masters, having been over run by superior fire power.
Pffft! The writer should have phoned me; I know what MCSAP is. It provides money for the states for use in enforcing federal regulation of commercial vehicles. MCSAP officers are usually specially trained state police personnel, and they sometimes find themselves dealing with interesting situations, in conjunction with HAZMAT, ATF, FBI, etc.
Can’t we fight fire with fire? Say, create a Crimson Permanent Assurance Department and authorize it to randomly attack government offices, fire all the employees, send all the employees into the street after erasing their Federal employment files, then set fire to the building. Agencies nimble enough to get by with a few discreet, smart employees, working out of nondescript cubicle farms, keeping a low profile with the public, would escape.
Wouldn’t that screw up traffic with all the office buildings being sailed down the streets?