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Human Events...
Runaway Trains of
Bureaucracy
Unstoppable machinery produces disaster when it crashes.
by John Hayward
03/01/2011
The General Accounting Office is preparing to drop a devastating
financial report on Congress, identifying hundreds of billions in
government waste due to “duplication, overlap, and
fragmentation.” Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is not
surprised. “Go study that report,” he advised Trish Turner of Fox
News. “It will show why we’re $14 trillion in debt. Anybody
that says we don’t look like fools up here hasn’t read the
report. We don’t know what we’re doing.”
More precisely, every aspect of a gigantic bureaucracy does only what
it knows, unto eternity. I read about this report right after I
watched the movie Unstoppable, in which Denzel Washington and Chris
Pine try to halt a runaway locomotive that so huge and powerful it
simply obliterates everything in its path. Government
bureaucracies are all runaway trains.
Big private companies have ridiculous administrative nightmares, to be
sure, but they tend to fly off the rails before they reach the pure,
thundering power of billion-dollar government machinery. A
corporation which becomes as blind and hidebound as the government
tends to be overtaken by quicker, more agile competitors, or crushed
beneath the weight of its overhead. Fueled by an inexhaustible
supply of tax dollars, the locomotives of Washington rattle down their
tracks forever.
Government programs succeed through failure. A program that
actually “solved” whatever problem prompted its creation would be wiped
out. A bureaucrat who runs a tight ship, and brings his operation
in under budget, will be “rewarded” with a smaller budget. Every
single organ of our federal government is working tirelessly to solve a
problem that is much worse than originally anticipated, and therefore
requires increased funding. When was the last time you heard of a
big federal program that was shut down ahead of schedule and under
budget, because it completed its mission?
Bureaucracies also discover new problems requiring their attention and
funding along the way. That’s one reason there is so much
duplication in the federal budget. For example, according to the
GAO report, 18 different programs across three federal agencies work to
“ensure the needy have access to food,” producing an estimated $62.5
billion in overlap. Every one of these eighteen programs found an
ample supply of needy mouths to feed, and set about requesting an
ever-larger cornucopia from Congress. None of the bureaucrats
involved was going to spend his valuable time searching the massive
federal flowchart to see if any other agency might already be working
to assist prospective clients. There was no incentive for them to
make their agencies less useful, and less worthy of a funding increase
in the next budget.
Likewise, the legislators who create these programs are not interested
in discovering if someone else already thought of their great idea to
spend billions Helping The Downtrodden. The GAO report states
that 44 out of 47 federal job training and employment programs “overlap
with at least one other program”… but you can rest assured someone in
Congress was already dreaming up the 48th employment program, trembling
with excitement at the prospect of spending billions to “create jobs”
and “put Americans back to work.”
ObamaCare will spawn hundreds of new bureaucracies, and every one of
them will begin chugging down the tracks, picking up steam and finding
new challenges that require broader powers and increased funding.
Each one will produce a billowing cloud of paperwork to justify its
existence, and acquire Congressional engineers who believe its
acceleration is a moral imperative. Demanding restraint from any
bureaucracy is considered an act of heartless cruelty to its intended
beneficiaries.
The only force that could conceivably halt the runaway trains of
bureaucracy is the debt ceiling, and it will soon be obliterated by the
unstoppable force of engines which even most of the “fiscally
responsible” Republicans are terrified to derail. Who knows what
will happen if those monster trains crash? Better to let them
rumble a few trillion dollars further down the tracks, until a sensible
plan for slowing them down can be devised by some future Congress.
No engine of Big Government will ever slow down on its own, much less
stop or go into reverse. “Progress” means moving forward, after
all.
Read it at Human Events
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