Replies

Sorry to disagree with you but in my opinion Hugh built his case well then sliced his approach shot.

White House personnel needs to get off the dime and begin to staff the senior level of the field bureaucracies. Wise appointments could quickly tame the worst abuses of law and regulation and at the same time could begin the effort to reclaim some key constituencies in the West. The political geography does not favor the President out here. But it is a political dynamic that only gets worse when the Administration does not bother to fix what it could even as it plans longer term relief where its hands are presently tied.

You know as well as I do what really needs to happen here. Take a meat cleaver to these agencies. Don't buy into the federal bureaucracy. Chop em up and dissolve them. As long as a massive federal government and government financed NGOs exist, we are going to continue to have problem. Sure we can man the federal bureaucracy with our boys, but that only works until the next hick from Arkansas comes along who's content to frolic in the collective cesspool.

Gut the federal agencies today. Defund the NGOs immedidately. Nationalize all lands purchased with federal grants and return them to the states. Issue an EO striking down the Heritage River's act. If I'm not mistake it was a Clinton EO that created that devils brew in the first place. It was a flawed concept from the start.

Sorry to disagree with you but in my opinion Hugh built his case well then sliced his approach shot.

Hi, DO - I am no golfer, but I assume that this is a bad thing. ;)

(Sorry I forgot to flag you! Do you listen to Hugh?)

My feelings exactly!

However, its been clear to me since hearing Carl Rove's promotion of an activist federal goverment after one of the primary debates that we're not going to see any major rollbacks of federal government programs. There may be quite a bit of good that will be done to right abuses, but all the structures will remain.

Sigh.

I agree with your observation that, when federal agencies are allowed to remain, they are only one bad election away from abuse. Close the EPA and the Interior Department. While not relevant to this particular article, the Dept of Energy and the Dept of Education can go, too. They do equal harm. As soon as a problem reaches a political entity, it becomes a political problem, and therefore a victim of politic considerations rather than the beneficiary of logical, rational decision making.