Cutting government waste better than “sequester”

A few months ago, I helped a municipality deal with a U.S. government agency that wanted to buy services from the town. 

My experience revealed a lot about why the federal budget is out of control.

The amount of the contract was less than $200,000, but I dealt with five federal officials for about two months to get an agreement that should have taken one person about an hour.

The officials questioned the profit margin in the deal, so I had to convince them that the town charges actual cost and makes no profit.

When we received the federal contract, it referred to about a dozen previously unmentioned requirements that were tacked onto it.  The town would have to agree to them before it could supply the federal government with a municipal service that it usually provided to anybody within its borders – without any contract.

It took some effort to find out what these other documents contained.  When I finally saw them, they were mostly irrelevant.  Under one, the town had to promise that its employees would not text while driving.  There was no driving involved in the contract.

At the end of the process, I was convinced that the federal government could have saved thousands of dollars, if it operated more efficiently.

But presidential appointees heading such agencies are unlikely to spend the time and effort to manage agency operations to eliminate such waste. 

With all the talk about cutting government spending, most critics want to slash entire programs, each with its own constituency, rather than really getting serious about efficiency and wasteful spending.

Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, is an archconservative who would like to cut back government.  But he has come up with a non-ideological idea that could work.

In 2010, he got Congress to ask the non-partisan Government Accountability Office to draw up a list of all government programs.  The GAO was also to show where they overlapped.

It may amaze some that there was no single list of federal government programs.  Less amazing is the fact that of the hundreds of programs, many overlap.

For example, the GAO found 47 job training and employment programs being carried out by nine different agencies.  These programs had budgets totaling $18 billion a year. 

And the politically neutral agency reported that all but three of the programs overlapped one another.

Without proposing that any of the programs should be eliminated, the report showed that there were many duplicative managerial and administrative offices that could be dropped.

One of the major risks when many programs do the same thing is that outside organizations can apply for and receive grants for the same activity from several different agencies that have no idea what others are funding.

Why can’t such overlap be eliminated?

Many federal programs, including those run by the Defense Department, are supported because they create jobs.  For a member of Congress to bring new jobs to his or her state or district is far more important politically than the tasks performed.

And then there’s turf.  Various programs doing just about the same thing are under the jurisdiction of separate congressional committees.  Each is reluctant to give up control of any subject or agency on its agenda.

Even more serious are the turf empires of the major departments themselves.  Power and influence may be measured in Washington by the number of employees in an agency or the size of its budget.

Each agency lobbies congressional committees to preserve its programs, each of which is “essential.”

Shouldn’t there be one central office responsible for reducing the inefficiency that results from duplication?

That should be the White House Office of Management and Budget, which finally got around to looking at Coburn’s initiative last year, but only selected a few agencies for a pilot program.  Since then, nothing more has been heard from OMB.

At the beginning of March, the first automatic cuts in federal spending – called the sequester – went into effect.  They amount to $85 billion in the remaining seven months of the federal fiscal year.

Eliminating duplication in the government programs found by GAO in just the first two years of its review plus requiring greater efficiency might well produce that amount of saving not only this year but every year.

No activity needs to be eliminated, though jobs would be cut and the size of government reduced by simply making it more efficient.

Sequester?  We can do better.  After all the empty political promises about cutting government waste, Coburn has helped us know just what to do.

Hagel Nomination Process Hides Truth

People often complain that politicians don’t tell them the truth.

They are probably right.  The truth is often painful, and politicians usually want to sound positive.

The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, now being filibustered by Senate Republicans, is a prime example.

The senators refusing, for the time being, to let the nomination come to a vote, are trying to use their leverage to get President Obama to admit that he failed to take the necessary steps to prevent the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, Libya.

The GOP tried without success to force that admission during the presidential campaign and later from then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. 

Whatever Obama may have done, nobody wants to state the obvious.  Stevens, a person extremely knowledgeable about Libya, put himself in harm’s way.

He should not have been in Benghazi without more protection, but the State Department went along with his decision.  Nobody says that the victim had significant responsibility for his fate.

While that’s understandable, it puts Obama in an impossible position, which is right where his opponents want him.

Appointments to the Cabinet almost always are free from the filibuster, and that will ultimately be true for Hagel.  If the GOP were to block him, a later Republican president could face the same tactic.

Yet some senators obviously see the opportunity to try to embarrass Obama, even knowing they will eventually let Hagel be confirmed.  Of course, they won’t say that.

Some Republican senators, apparently including Maine’s Susan Collins, seem to have it right.  They will not support a filibuster no matter what they think of Hagel.

But Collins and others will not support him.  Some will say it’s because of his views on Iraq or Israel.  But Collins has at least hinted at the truth.

Hagel’s confirmation hearing went badly.  He did not generate a sense of confidence about his ability to be a vigorous leader of a large and complex government department. 

Even if his personal policy positions don’t really matter and he must follow Obama’s direction, he did not come across as competent.  Nobody wants to speak that truth directly, because he will finally be confirmed and serve in the job.

The Hagel confirmation has also produce the reverse of the truth – an outright lie.

Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican newly arrived in Congress, has accused Hagel of taking money from North Korea.  The senator has no evidence to support his claim.

Cruz wants more financial disclosure by Hagel than has normally been demanded of cabinet nominees of either party.  He does not care that his approach could hamstring GOP appointees in the future.

He says that he has made the charge as a way of forcing Hagel to reveal more of his finances.  In other words, Cruz wants Hagel to be forced to disclose more about his income in order to refute his lie.  It does not matter that Hagel is innocent of the charge.

This tactic was used in the 1950s by the infamous GOP Sen. Joe McCarthy, who repeatedly lied when he claimed to have a list of Communists in the State Department. 

Cruz’s position has come in for strong criticism from members of his own party, including some who oppose Hagel.  Many Republican senators are unhappy to see the specter of McCarthy emerge.

In defending Hagel, the Obama administration says he would be ideal for the position because he would be the first Defense Secretary with military experience as an enlisted person.

But Hagel would not be the first enlisted person to head the Defense Department.  Four others served as enlisted men, though three were made officers while on active duty and the fourth later became an officer in the Army Reserve.  Because they became officers, the White House defended its claim by splitting hairs.

Besides, there is no proof that having served in the enlisted ranks rather than as an officer or not at all makes a person better suited to be Secretary of Defense.  Implicit in that claim is the belief that an enlisted person knows better than anybody that “war is hell.” 

In the 2012 presidential election, neither Obama nor Mitt Romney had served in the military, much less been an enlisted person.  Yet no serious claim was made that either was unsuitable to be commander in chief of the Armed Forces for that reason.

The Hagel affair has more than its share of hidden truths, unfounded assertions, and outright lies, which hardly increases public trust in government.

Split Develops Among House Republicans

Something unusual has begun to happen in Congress.

The House of Representatives has started to look like an American legislative institution instead like the British House of Commons, where strict party discipline is the norm.

After the 1994 elections, the Republican Party, riding to control of the House, imposed party discipline on its members to an almost unprecedented extent.

Historically both parties had hardly been highly disciplined.  Dissenters in each group would readily join with the majority in the other party to pass legislation.

In the 1930s and 40s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to try to peel off Southern Democrats from their informal alliance with Republicans to get them to support him and his Democratic policies.

And over the years moderate Republicans would occasionally line up with the Democrats.

That was the normal rule and how a lot of bipartisan bills were passed.

But House Speaker Newt Gingrich convinced all GOP members of the House to vote as a majority of the Republicans members directed.

In true parliamentary fashion, Gingrich even resigned office after his party lost a few seats in the 1998 elections.  Dennis Hastert, his successor as Speaker, said that it was his job to allow only bills favored by the GOP to pass.

This new discipline hit its peak when House Republicans voted to impeach Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Under the parliamentary system, the legislature can dump the government by subjecting it to defeat on a so-called “vote of confidence.”

While Congress has no such power, the Clinton impeachment could easily be seen as a vote of no confidence.   The Senate, lacking such total discipline, failed to go along with the House.

In 2010, the Republicans surged nationally, capitalizing on voter discontent with the slow pace of economy recovery.

The GOP gains were largely made by so-called “Tea Party” Republicans, who were committed to reducing the size of government and public spending.

The Tea Party wave was so strong that its adherents toppled some senior GOP officeholders in party primaries.

Following the 2010 elections, the Republican-controlled House passed Tea Party bills that had no hope of gaining Senate approval.  But they staked out a clear party position.

It seemed like Tea Party Republicans could take over the party in many states and in Congress after the 2012 elections. They believed that with economic recovery progressing slowly, Democrat Barack Obama and his supporters in Congress would suffer defeat.

Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential candidate, was forced to transform himself from a moderate into a conservative.

Instead of winning a sweeping victory, Republicans saw Obama re-elected and the Democrats stronger in both the House and Senate.

Although election post-mortems tend to be unduly alarmist about the future of the losers, Republicans were quick to draw lessons from the results.

They had lost the rapidly growing Latino vote and a majority of women voters.  If the trend continued, the party could spend a long time as a minority.

When Congress reconvened last month, parliamentary style discipline was clearly waning.   

Many Republicans, reading the party’s low poll standings, seemed to recognize that voters wanted results more than ideological purity.

The New York Times selected three recent votes to show the increased influence of House Democrats.  But they also showed a remarkable change: the split among House Republicans.

Speaker John Boehner has led his troops into compromises that the Tea Party would not make.

In the vote to avoid the fiscal cliff, about a third of the GOP went along the vast majority of Democrats.  (The Democrats are incapable of complete discipline, so they had some defectors.)

And the GOP itself proposed a three-month extension in the debt ceiling battle, though Republicans could not have passed it without some Democratic votes.

These votes represented the Republicans’ recognition that they would get the blame and possibly pay a price at election time, if they threw the country into a financial crisis undermining economic recovery.

On aid for Hurricane Sandy victims, a few Republicans supplied votes needed for a majority.

A relative but essential handful recognized that it was unfair to assist disaster victims in Republican areas but block it for the Northeast.

And in the wake of the strong Latino support of the Democrats, some Republicans were ready to join their opponents to pass new legislation to deal with illegal or undocumented immigrants.

Such unusual cooperation may mark the end of the GOP experiment with parliamentary style government.

This year should show if strict party discipline has finally given way to the demands of practical politics.