UNDERSTANDING GOVERNMENT AT WORK
Ronald Reagan
“…… government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
For regular readers of my articles, many might get the impression that I dislike government in general and also those who work in government. This is not the case. Most of the people who work in government are like you and I; working at a job to support our families with a hope of someday a comfortable retirement in our “golden years” with an adequate pension for our needs. Most government workers endeavor to do a good job and should be thanked for doing so. They are not the problem.
The “problem” with most government agencies is structural. I will explain: In my perfect world government should be responsible for National Defense, limited International Diplomacy and as a mediator to provide cohesion in those cases where there are conflicting interests between the individual states. (Move the United Nations Headquarters to North Korea and cancel our membership). Almost all other matters should be handled by the individual states and many of their functions should be contracted out with specific requirements, results and limitations – not the “blank checks” we often give to Government Departments and Services. Police and Fire Protection, Public Education, Health and Sanitation services, Emergency Services, Highway Maintenance, Water and Waste Management Services etc.
With government, not just Federal but all too often State and Local, a perceived problem is not handled with a meeting, finding a solution and then a plan to solve the problem on a contract basis at a specific cost within a specified time period by an independent contractor. Government invariably decides the “problem” is a crisis that demands the creation of a whole new Branch of Government headed up by a Czar or Cabinet Secretary, a big new budget, buildings, employees, office furniture, a fleet of vehicles, endless new regulations, an annual budget with a built in annual increase of usually 10% or more. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “A Government Agency is the nearest thing to eternal life we will experience on earth”. Once such a Branch of Government is created it has no incentive whatever to actually solve a problem and put all these people out of work. That does not make them evil, just self serving which is a natural human trait. The end result is horribly inefficient and these agencies end up going on year after year, growing in size and budget and too often not producing any tangible result.
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A True Example from an article I wrote and originally published in 2012
(April 2012) Does anybody remember the reason given for the establishment of the Department of Energy during the Carter Administration? Bottom line is, we’ve spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency…. the reason for which not many who read this can remember!
The Department of Energy was instituted on 8/04/1977, TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL. Now it’s 2012 —- 35 years later —- and the budget for this “necessary” department is $24.2 Billion a year. It has 16,000 Federal Employees and approximately 100,000 contract employees and look at the job it has done! 35 years ago 30% of our oil consumption was foreign imports. Today 70% of our oil consumption is foreign imports….. Great job! Good old Federal bureaucracy. (And we could supply all our oil needs from the USA)….
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(2023 update) The Department of Energy proposed budget for 2023 is $48.2 Billion Dollars and it has 14,000 full time employees.
Let us assume as a given that all 14,000 of these Department of Energy employees (and their families) are all wonderful, dedicated to the Departments Mission of making the the United States Energy Independent and you would just love to live next door to them and share a Bar-B-Que on the weekends. Ever wonder what these 14,000 employees do every day? Is there power flowing out of the Department of Energy Headquarters Building into the nations power grid? Maybe you could ask them at your next Bar-B-Que?
The Administration is now running around the world begging for oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Canada, “whoever”, while our current Administration has sold a million barrels of oil out of our National Strategic (Emergency) Oil Reserve to China.
The Department of Energy was formed in 1977 with the mission to make the United States less dependent on Foreign Oil. If we kind of average out their annual budget over the last 46 years they have spent something in the lofty neighborhood of a Trillion Taxpayer Dollars and the U.S. is now going “hat in hand” to unfriendly nations begging for them to produce more oil for us. This despite the fact the United States has enough energy reserves to supply our needs for at least 200 years. We just need to pump it out of the ground. This appears a little too complicated for these 14,000 employees to figure out. Guess they will need to write a few more hundred pages of “Regulations”.
In all those near 46 years the United States reached Energy Independence for a brief period of time near the end of the Trump Administration when the Government got the, excuse me, “hell out of the way”, and gave the nation’s energy producers a window to produce not only enough energy for our own use but also excess energy we could export to the world.
I’m still waiting to hold in my hand the bright, shiny thing produced for me by the Department of Energy!
This is your Government at Work. How do you like it so far? Want more Government Agencies on a “Mission”?
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OTHER GOVERNMENT “SUCCESS” PROGRAMS
Government Poverty Programs have produced, you guessed it, Poverty. In California programs for the Homeless have, you guessed it again, produced more Homelessness.
In FY 2023 total US government spending on welfare — federal, state, and local — is “guesstimated” to be $1,494 billion, (That is near 1 .5 Trillion Dollars) including $890 billion for Medicaid, and $604 billion in other welfare. Have we seen any improvement in our inner-city ghettos, homelessness, reductions in crime or drug use?
In the meantime our $68 Billion Dollar Federal Department of Education Public Schools programs are focusing on Indoctrination and not Education. While children in China are learning about math and science our children are being taught about personal pro-nouns and being groomed for trans-gender medical procedures in the third, forth and fifth grades by activist teachers and a curriculum that their parents are denied access to.
I could go on and on. So you see, it is not the people who work in government, it is just the nature of too many available/deficit borrowed taxpayer dollars and not enough fiscal discipline and common sense.
Bob Bandy – June 2023
