The Cost Of Good Intentions **Update
With the upcoming inauguration of the Donald I wondered what real changes could be done by an aggressive administration charged with shrinking the federal government. I fired up the Google machine and looked for a list of all federal agencies, most of the .gov sites gave you links to the main departments that have hundreds of other agencies that fall under their jurisdiction. This Wiki link actually covered the all the agencies with links to smaller departments or bureaus, I scrolled through at a regular pace and it took me five minutes to get through by just scrolling. To read each agencies name I would imagine would take a good half hour, to open each link to other departments on the entire list would take you hours.
Just hit the link and scroll through….I’ll wait.
Staggering isn’t it.
There are over 22 million ***government (state, local, & federal) employees backed by various unions with full benefit packages. This does not include private contractors that feed off the government trough. The size of the monstrosity is astounding and efficiency is underwhelming to say the least.
I checked out a few obscure departments I had never heard of, even read through some of their financials. The amount of money handed these two agencies is hundreds of millions annually. I see no need whatsoever for either one of the departments other than good intentions, both could be eliminated.
There are billions and billions to be saved if a Trump administration has the courage to do so. If a part time blogger like me can glean enough information to determine that a few agencies could be shuttered imagine what people who get paid to put the hammer down could do.
Update:
A strange coincidence, Moobattery posted a story about government waste including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the two departments I mentioned above was a down menu department of the….NIH.
If Big Government were deliberately wasting you money as absurdly as possible to rub it in your face that you are powerless to stop it, what would it do differently from this?
A report released by a Republican senator Tuesday reveals the U.S. government spent over $800,000 to investigate monkey drool.
Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake published the “Wastebook: PORKemon Go,” which highlights 50 examples of government waste that cost taxpayers approximately $5 billion.
One such waste was the taxpayer-funded study of monkey drool that cost $817,000. The government agency, National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided two grants to the State University of New York at Buffalo to look into monkey drool.
***I was informed by a reader that my 22 million workforce of federal employees was incorrect which is true. I should have written all government employees which encompasses state, local, and federal levels. H/T to Dennis for the correction.
6 thoughts on “The Cost Of Good Intentions **Update”
Congress could – easily – hold Trump to his word. Simply make it illegal for the Federal government to perform any service or deliver any product that can be sourced via the private sector.
That would essentially mean – if it ain’t defense or needed regulation (forests, drugs, etc), the feds ain’t doin it. Roads? Private companies competing and, for other than “Post Roads,” State & Local spend, anyway. ATC? Give it to the airlines like they prefer. FBI? Well – the Constitution prohibits “general police powers” to the Feds, so there’s an argument against their existence anyway.
And if the Feds need to do it, prohibit employing personnel – temp, FT or contract – and just provide oversight to a private company doing the work and contracted for that job alone via competitive bidding. That would be a stimulus to the private sector, hugely reduce the federal spend on this stuff, and completely eliminate the Benefit/Pension packages for which we’re on the hook forever – which is arguably the worst part. And, like the gig/project world we are entering, all of these things would be terminated when complete.
Congress also ought to sell-off the land the feds don’t need & get rid of the Antiquities Act that lets them keep taking Utah (as B Clinton did, as well, to lock up American coal to serve one of his foreign cash donors) territory without authorization.
if you want to really get mad, check out the annual budgets of some of those departments. for some of them, the budgets increased by 1,000% in less than 10 years.
now, what person anywhere has their income increase 1,000% in less than 10 years ?
sorry, but even trump cannot stop the monster the govt has become; he may slow it down for a bit; but that’s about it.
Well, that was the *real* effect of that trillion dollar waste of money “stimulus” we got at the Dawn of the *bama era in ’09. It took the automatic increase, “baseline budgeting” nonsense that’s been bankrupting us for 40+ years and dropped a brick on the accelerator.
It’s not even the wasted money, though that’s significant. It’s the wasted productivity, the way it turns citizens into subjects, and the way it’s insulated from the ballot box by unconstitutional delegation of powers that do even more damage.
Actually there are (as of 2014)4.2 million federal personnel, 1.5 million of whom are uniformed military. `The executive branch civilian workforce has ranged from 2.5 million in 1962 to 3.1 million in 1990 (I believe that includes seasonal and temporary employees). It was 2.7 million in 2014.
That said, your point is well taken. While the feds do have important work to do and generally have a high quality workforce to do it, there are far too many agencies and subagencies doing something less than useful and needed government work. Perhaps the 63 thousand legislative and judicial workers are as good an example as any of that.
Dennis – Sorry I should have clarified and I will revise post. Those numbers are for all government state, local, and feds.
Those employed by government in the United States in August of this year outnumbered those employed in the manufacturing sector by almost 1.8 to 1, according to data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There were 21,995,000 employed by federal, state and local government in the United States