Posted on 12/08/2017 10:39:36 AM PST by Kaslin
We’ve been writing at length about the dangers of the new Paul Ryan/Patty Murray bill, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (FEPA), which requires federal agencies to share and analyze Americans’ personal data in the name of “evidence-building.” The theory is that all this new evidence will enable Congress to cut programs that aren’t working and save taxpayers boatloads of money.
As luck would have it, such a demonstrably ineffective program is now up for review in Congress – giving Speaker Ryan, Senator Murray, and their comrades-in-arms a golden opportunity to prove that more “evidence” will lead to better policy.
The program in question is the Bush-initiated and Obamacare-expanded Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program. Given that the federal government destroyed millions of families, especially in minority communities, through its boneheaded welfare policies, the feds enacted MIECHV to try to clean up the mess. MIECHV bureaucrats go into citizens’ homes to “identify and provide comprehensive services to improve outcomes for families who reside in at-risk communities” –defined broadly, even to include families with members who serve or have served in the Armed Forces. The families of these brave men and women are now targeted for “help” coming from that gold standard of helpers, the federal government.
The supposed goal of this and other home-visiting programs is to improve school readiness and health outcomes and reduce pathologies such as child abuse – areas that generally aren’t a problem in intact families. The government is here to make everything better.
As admitted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the “challenges” of replacing stable parents with government bureaucrats in the home include lack of family engagement in the enterprise, cultural and other differences of opinion about child-rearing, and poor qualifications and ineffectiveness of the deputized bureaucrats. Constitutionalists would add to that, the creeping totalitarianism of having federal functionaries invade homes to make sure everyone is behaving according to government preferences.
And of course, the federal busybodies who surveil innocent citizens’ homes are required not only to instruct parents in government-approved child-rearing techniques, but also to collect reams of data about these families and their shortcomings. Under FEPA, that data would then be available to other federal agencies and to outside researchers for analysis.
But significantly, the data from various home-visiting programs has already been analyzed within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And guess what? These programs overwhelmingly fail to achieve their stated goals. Dr. Karen Effrem consulted HHS’s HomVee website and studied the statistics about “primary” and “secondary” effects of home-visiting programs. She found that the programs show “no effect” over 80% of the time (versus favorable or ambiguous effects under 20% of the time).
This is what we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars for? It looks like MIECHV and other home-visiting programs, like so many other federal efforts, are valuable mainly for two things: 1) compiling data on American citizens and families that may be useful for future control; and 2) providing government employment.
Despite the dearth of evidence showing home-visiting effectiveness, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would renew the program through fiscal year 2022. Politico reported that many House Democrats opposed that bill because it put at least modest limits on pouring money down the home-visiting rathole. They prefer the Senate version, which more reliably keeps the spigots flowing. The Senate Finance Committee has expressed some support for extending the Democrats’ preferred program for two years, but the big-spending bureaucracy and the cronies who benefit from it are holding out for five. They hope they can get what they want in an end-of-year “extenders package.”
So here we have a great test case for Ryan and Murray’s claim that, armed with FEPA, they’ll defund programs that evidence proves ineffective. FEPA opponents have expressed skepticism that Congress has the spine to defund anything, evidence-based or not, and that erecting a new data structure to compile that evidence is not only invasive but an enormous waste of time (case in point: the constantly increased funding for Head Start despite hundreds of studies showing that program’s uselessness).
If MIECHV survives the congressional chopping block despite its poor performance, Ryan and Murray can stop preaching about how they need more and more data to weed out bad programs. The goal of FEPA will be revealed, instead, as expanding access to an enormous pool of data for whatever purposes can be concocted by bureaucrats and their allied outside interests. This is not a goal the Founders would have embraced. Nor will the American people.
Trump needs to kill this plan. Ryan is out of line.....Murray is acting like the Communist she is.
Close. But actually, government bureaucrats belong in THEIR home WITHOUT A JOB.
There is no need to measure anything. ALL the federal programs they are talking about should be ended on purely objective constitutional PRINCIPLE. Not based on whether an entirely subjective analysis of data determines something one way or the other.
The central/general govt was designed to be objective and light. The states are the place for subjective and heavy-handed BS. Closer to home. Where you can still use your pitch forks and torches against these socialists if your state leans Right.
For crying out loud, the R's own every branch and level of government right now - the only correct answer for Freedom-lovers/ Constitutionalists / originalists/ etc. is for Ryan to be woke. Nobody remembers this, but he came to DC originally as the Donald Trump of entitlement reform. He wanted to do the right thing and roll fed programs back to the states. He failed miserably to gain traction and now he goes the other way.
If this idiotic notion of his is allowed to stand, then data will in the future show that taking your guns away is beneficial to the family, etc.
I'm a data guy by trade. I know how easy it is to coerce data into lying.
As a former headstart program manager, let me tell you why social service initiative like this always fail.
Because the target population is uncooperative, generally asleep during bureaucrat working hours and lives in very scary, crime-ridden neighborhoods.
So the staff tasked with implementation are going to find ways to meet the stated goals, generally via creative report writing and manipulation of data in order to get paid for doing the job only on paper. Actual in home contact will be few and far between.
Same shit goes on in the mental health profession. All the money is spent on counseling for the chronically anxious and a few bi-polars. But just try to find funding for a treatment bed for the the violently psychotic or delusional schizophrenic.
All this funding is sucked up into salaries and benefits for one of the most reliable democratic voting blocks of government workers, the social work - entitlement manager complex.
6 years ago my daughter had her first baby.
Sometime in the hospital she was asked either if she was ok with a home visit or did she want a home visit, and being the overwhelmed first-time Mom she was, she politely said “ok”.
I was there and stayed for a few weeks. Just days after my daughter came home, around 9 in the morning came a knock on the front door.
Momma and baby were sleeping, I looked like morning hell after the night shift, but I answered the door to find 2 very well dressed, very intimidating, very mature women.
I thought they were Jehovah Witnesses, but they pushed in and said something like “We’re here for the home inspection visit”
.......
I was incredulous and outraged and let them know it. My daughter had gotten up, hearing my raised voice, and stumbled into the living room looking like crap ..... and made nice despite being grilled while feeling and looking awful, while I stood behind her and all but bared my teeth at these effing nosybodies.
How disgustingly unfair of these 2 broads in Roanoke County Virginia, to arrive unannounced, and do everything in their power to make the new mom feel embarrassed, ashamed and in need of help. And they KNEW *I* knew what they were doing. After stating it would take about 45 minutes for them to ask questions and look around, they hauled their behinds out after about 10 minutes or so, without so much as a peek into the kitchen.
Part of me wondered if it wasn’t a ploy to get a beautiful, healthy, white baby girl out of her home and into foster care - or worse. THAT could have easily happened with one bad answer from my daughter during her interrogation.
I believe she was aware that I could embarrass her any minute, and that cleared her head enough to wake up and respond correctly.
I’m getting older and caring less, I’d have no problem taking a b!+ch out for overstepping.
The Feds need to get out of the business entirely.
All welfare should be at the local or state level.
Fifty (or more) laboratories of freedom. Not “one Federal size” fits all.
Yes, more taxes to help the federal government dig in to directly guiding families - (and if we had “single payer” you know such “guidance” would be legally more than mere “guidance) - taxing more money OUT of the private economy that is the real engine of jobs and incomes for improving families.
They only need to be allowed to be examining The House.
Most government bureaucrats deserve to be fired this afternoon. They “belong” nowhere. They are malignancies and parasites on civil society.
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