Posted on 08/22/2024 2:25:59 PM PDT by Heartlander
Years ago as an intern in D.C., and long before the agencies all locked their doors to visitors, I had the occasion to putter around the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
These were obviously not normal workplaces. To my amazement, they were mostly dark, empty, and quiet, and the employees did not seem in the slightest bit busy doing anything at all. It was all kind of spooky.
It then occurred to me that these many hundreds of agencies and millions of employees are not really covered well by the media much at all and certainly not in any detail. They mostly operate without any oversight but for the periodic reporting done for Congress and the sporadic accounting reports from the Government Accounting Office that are mostly ignored.
It’s rather strange, isn’t it? The business pages are packed with details on the hirings and operations of every publicly traded company. We know sales, products, locations, and management structures and changes. But as regards these agencies that are supposed to be responsible to the people, there is a strange lack of curiosity about what they really do and how they do it.
There is at least one organization that takes a deeper look. It is called OpentheBooks, and started with an idealistic idea of telling people what the operations of these agencies are really like. They aren’t trying to unearth classified information or otherwise do whistleblowing. They focus on the mundane accounting and goings-on at normal civilian agencies.
What they found would never be tolerated at any private company.
You are not surprised, right? And you probably assume that this is just the tip of the iceberg also. Indeed, one supposes so. I’m looking at the Federal Register. It lists 429 agencies in the government now, with only a tiny number mentioned in the US Constitution. The rest have been legislated into existence by Congress, going far beyond anything the Founders ever imagined.
Thanks to nearly a century and a half of gradual accumulation, these agencies have a permanent life. The employees cannot be fired except for egregious actions. And the elected president has no control over them. The president can appoint agency heads but then the battle becomes hundreds vs millions, and the hundreds of appointees are new at their jobs and easily driven out with a hint of financial impropriety, real or made up. The permanent class of middle-state bureaucrats with all the institutional knowledge know precisely where the power resides. It is with them.
This system of administrative hegemony has not been seriously tested in court. It is likely contrary to everything the Constitution ever imagined. True, Congress created these agencies but they exist within the executive branch. Congress cannot simply outsource its job to another branch and then wash its hands of the result. That practice makes a mess out of the original Constitutional structure.
Leaving those fundamental issues aside, what’s striking is how little oversight of these agencies really takes place. Very little reporting is done on them at all apart from perfunctory reprinting of agency press releases by major media. The reason is that many reporters rely on the permanent government for information sources and protection after the fact. There is a hand-in-glove relationship going on here and it’s been building for many decades, even dating back to the Great War.
Every once in a while, we get a glimpse of the reality on the ground. The work of OpentheBooks makes life briefly hard for agencies that never like to be in the news but very little if anything is ever done about the problem.
There has been some much-welcome talk lately of untangling the cozy relationships between these hundreds of agencies and the industries they oversee. That’s good. We really should not be building a corporatist system that runs contrary to the ideal of free enterprise. But the idea of ending agency capture is also not a permanent solution to the problem.
We must think more fundamentally. With an ideal president and legislature, we would pursue something like what is going on in Argentina today. Whole agencies need to be deleted entirely from the federal budget. And then let the chips fall where they may. So long as I can remember, every Republican president has promised to get rid of the Department of Education. Great. But why does it never happen? I would like to know the answer. Plus, that is only a starter: there are hundreds of such agencies that should be on the list.
The real solution is a complete rethinking of government itself. Every single candidate should be asked to explain their answer to a basic question: what in your view is the role of government? Whatever the answer is, all existing practices of government need to be assessed in light of that. Also, voters should evaluate their answers with an even more fundamental question: what kind of society do we want to live in, a free or centrally managed one? That’s the core question.
The goings-on at the Department of Commerce provide a slight glimpse but the real scale of the problem is far more vast. I have no doubt that if a serious think tank really looked at the details, provided fully and transparently, we would be astonished at what we find. As some news organization has been saying for a while, democracy dies in darkness. Let’s shine the light of truth on the vast complex of civilian agencies that purport to manage our lives better than we can ourselves.
Final note: this column is dedicated to Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpentheBooks, who has died at the age of 55. He was a good friend to Brownstone and to transparency in government. He ran a different kind of nonprofit, not a puffy do-nothing bureaucracy but a production-driven research institute doing what desperately needs to be done. May he rest in peace and may his legacy inspire many more such visionaries.
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Bkmk- Elon has entered the chat
Thanks to nearly a century and a half of gradual accumulation, these agencies have a permanent life. The employees cannot be fired except for egregious actions. And the elected president has no control over them.
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This is not true. A GOOD President can VETO the entire budget except Defense. At that point maximum PRESSURE is dialed up. NOBODY will be able to cash a check even if they get one. That day will come one way or another no matter what is done or not done.
Once the fire is red hot under everybody’s ass in Congress and out of Congress, let the negotiations begin. “Starting” with these 5:
1. pay cut’s to compensation levels in private industry
2. Hundreds upon Hundreds of Agencies closed for good.
3. Everybody is fired every 8 years and rehired based on merit.
4. Public employee unions and civil service abolished.
5. DEI is abolished
The key is can Congress muster 2/3 vote to over-ride. Trump may be in that position. If so, he will have chance to SAVE the United States of American from 65 years of corruption.
“Most employees would bail in a hurry.”
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Prolly right but many of them would choose to hang on as they can live like kings outside of DC on their more than generous salaries and benefits. Those who simply cannot tolerate the idea of living in Flyover Land will have to face the harsh reality of having to actually produce and compete in the workplace. That bit of reality is a very frightening prospect for most feds.
Nothing? We got us an Election to win and a lot of new voters to get on the rolls, Put Your Backs into it!
I would bet 95% or more of these “employees” vote dem.
“there is a strange lack of curiosity about what they really do and how they do it”
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the ‘civil servants’ workforce is supplemented by an army of contractors who do a lot of the serious work that feds do not want to do, or simply cannot do. Most of this shadow workforce goes largely unnoticed by the public.
Cut their budgets and RIF them! RIFs have been successfully used before - last in first out. Also the FBI the single biggest change needed there is the ending of their ability to do a “process crime” on their interviews. How it should be is if an interview occurs a copy of the recording and all notes are given to the interviewee. Also it most be clear and documented by both parties that the interview is official and not a chat! Any post interview notes are discoverable ( They currently aren’t!) Failure to do so means the interview did not occur all material, information etc is then inadmissible. The fact they held on the interview information is how they trapped Flynn.
Denver is crazy expensive, liberal-centric and military centric
How about expanding the Fresno, CA IRS office? Cheaper living compared to the bay area, and the rural inland could use some jobs. Or even Carson City, NV, also largely rural and the population is ageing out.
Back in the 70s I did an internship at the usda. It was fairly bad back then. Our office publish monthly commodity prices and as such it needed to be on time. When I got there it was done ‘by hand’ and took several hours. To me, it made no sense. So I cranked out a quick script to automate most of the job. I got in loads of trouble for that. Then there was the office of 6 next to mine. On day 1 the first guy got a stack of applications which he read thru and checked. On day 2 he got a new stack and passed off his checked stack to the next person who rechecked them…..and so on until the original stack had been checked 6 times. They used to joke about wearing the forms out. I could go on & on. You get the pic tho. I can only imagine it’s gotten worse in the intervening years.
“So long as I can remember, every Republican president has promised to get rid of the Department of Education. Great. But why does it never happen?”
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The Repukes can’t even manage to defund NPR/PBS. There is little to no chance they will ever eliminate any useless or redundant agencies.
Don’t forget that all those employees suck on the Federal tit and repay it with their votes, mostly Democrat. Creating and expanding Federal bureaucracies has been a primary Democrat vote-insurance project for decades.
Descriptions like this always make me laugh! To determine whether the salary is appropriate, you have to answer a question: "What does the 'average employee' do?" And there is no real answer, because the federal government employs neurosurgeons AND janitors. A few years back, when I actually looked into the federal salary issue, I discovered that many of the higher paid feds (surgeons, engineers, etc) were actually earning less than they would have in the private sector, while the lower paid feds (janitors, secretaries, etc.) were paid more than the private sector (but only a fraction of the $100k figure quoted here).
Anyone actually wanting to get federal spending under control is wasting their time, arguing about salaries. We should be cutting entire departments - shut down Education, Interior, etc., etc., etc, and terminate 100% of their employees. Let the States handle whatever real work they might have been doing, and any of the former feds that want to work can apply for a State job...
Democrap institutions is all they are now.
You don’t pay for any of their salaries or benefits, you pay interest on the loans that finance their salaries and benefits. It was the ability to spend deficits in peacetime that enabled the government to grow so far past their revenues.
Read The Declaration and you will know it applies now more than when it was written. The federal government is out of control, existing only to perpetuate itself.
“The rest have been legislated into existence by Congress, going far beyond anything the Founders ever imagined.“
Not really. When the founders imaginations got into gear they added the second amendment. It was all they could do, really…
Indeed. DC and its VA and MD adjacent environs are immune to the effects bad government policy has on the economy. Construction/improvement is always under way everywhere, commerce is booming, government employees who form the core of its population are oblivious.
It has degenerated into a “us” against “them” attitude and they fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo - even helping the evil parts of government (i.e., Democrat control) commit completely and horrible acts against Americans.
Trump has talked about it. The federal government is the universe's largest monopoly, and the 600,000 or so denizens of its headquarters, Washington, D.C. -- a city the size of Mission Viejo, California -- purport to manage a nation of 333,000,000 people.
Start fixing it by eliminating all federal agencies created during the late-'60s and early '70s mainly to placate rioting hippies. That ship sailed long ago.
Then, after more pruning, quarter the remaining agencies in logical locations. Move Commerce to New York, Interior to Denver, Agriculture to Omaha, Energy to Dallas, etc. Enrich the economies of those cities and states nearest to their function, instead of trying to "govern" them at massive expense from hundreds and thousands of miles away.
You forgot Department of Education which should cease to exist, but if it stays….Fairbanks, Alaska?
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