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.
Adam Andrzejewski died at 55 following a sudden medical emergency. I suppose he could have just had an ordinary heart attack but given his being the founder of a government watchdog group and all the sudden deaths these days, I go “hmmmm”.
That’s one that came under the heading of “more pruning.” :)
Bttt.
5.56mm
Exactly, so much for the failed Newtonian “Contract with America” — could not even get rid of the least important little nothing of those many things done by the Feds that are not enumerated in the US Constitution.
They could not even get a symbolic victory while holding both houses of Congress.
The Repukes are always big on rhetoric, but small on results.
Maybe someone could list them.
It wouldn't work. The powers that be would rather see it all burn down than allow their fiefdoms to be affected.
Some fundamental changes need to be made to the executive branch of government.
Most Federal Employees are not located in Washington DC so moving headquarters would only effect a relative minority of Gov workers.
Bingo.
I witnessed this quite a bit in the military. One of our worst was software that government civilians oversaw that absolutely had to be updated but the GS civilians couldn't get it right for 18 months.
One day we got a heads up that a civilian contractor was coming to the base. The contractor told us, "I don't know who you called as our company NEVER does government work." He was done in three days with the software working perfectly. Three days, one of which was just making sure everyone in that office knew how to use it without all the workarounds.
Unfortunately, Newt’s Contract took effect the same year Bill Clinton became president. While Newt did take up each item in the contract and bring it up for a vote (which is what he promised) he didn’t have the juice to overcome the Clinton admin, the usual rinos, and the democrat caucus, so much of it was blocked.
I give Newt a lot of credit because in addition to bringing a GOP majority for the first time in decades at least he made the effort to do something, unlike his various successors. People who expect everything to be done overnight were of course disappointed.
The government staff looks out the window and says, "There are ten things in this industry, we can't possibly keep up with private industry for seven of those things but we'd love to do them. The other three are a complete loss, a migraine, and require herculean effort for the slightest gain, but we can't ignore them."
The government ends up with military construction, weapon systems, roadways, infrastructure, emergency management, mental health, urban development, waste management, public safety, toxic cleanups, policing, court systems, prisons, etc. and suffers through them.
treason, sedition, assorted skullduggery
There’s always an excuse.
Bill Clinton was actually elected in 1992 and took office January 1993, and “The Contract with America” was in 1994. I paid a lot of attention to it. I was even at a meeting in Washington at the time of the 1994 election.
Newt already knew Clinton was in office when they made their promises.
Stopping the full communist version of Hillary-Care was about the only thing they did, and they barely did that, lifted up that carpet and swept only a little bit of it right under, to dirty our floor again soon.
Taking over both houses of Congress and you don’t have enough horsepower to even get rid of one little symbolic crap “thing” — so much for the 1994, not 1992 promises.
The concrete results? HIPAA (Hillarycare lite, Obamacare-the prequel) and BOB DOLE and his pathetic unnecessary and unconstitutional Federal curb-cutting-where NO ONE even walks “Americans with Disabilities Acts,” pandering yet again to the lawsuit industry, and four more years of BJ Clinton and his hellish wife.
Washington (and its ilk) is the American variety of “the opiate of the people” (really anesthetic of the people) as the continue their fakery.
Here they are — I am not clear which animal is the Rino and which is the Dumkey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECa1toPGth4
I’m betting the USDA is a close second with the DoD as far as corruption & waste.
There’s an innumerable number of agencies that compose the Dept of Agriculture.
It’s bloated, corrupt and wasteful.
The best approach is to eliminate their positions and fire the majority of them. 90% are not needed and is a waste of taxpayer money. In addition, eliminate the government union.
One must argue that is precisely what congress has done. I argue that Congress no longer possesses the power to reign in or dissolve an Agency. As the article states indirectly, Congress is so powerful it cannot ever find out how an agency's funds are disbursed. We have the fig leaf of an elected government and the actuality of hidden tyranny. All protected by marxist revolutionaries under the disguise of the demonrat party and their associated businesses.
I think George Washington probably heard ten times a day ...”it won’t work”.
I’ve been in the business of disbursing large sums of money for 50 years. Attitudes change when the guy signing the checks (in this case Trump) says something like “tough shit boys”....”the game is over”.....”it’s my way or the highway”.
Indeed, cutting off the money is THE ONLY way anything will change and yes a lot of people will be pissed off and I’m sure there will be some gunfire in the streets but that is where this country is.
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