The biggest problem plaguing our federal government is ballooning bureaucracy and bureaucratic bungling. The latest scandal to hit the public eye is the ineptness of the CDC (Center for Disease Control) and its lack of preparation for the Ebola virus, even though they had to know that sooner or later it would be here and they would have to deal with it. But the list of recent bureaucratic failures and scandals goes on and on. Here is a list of just a few recent ones:
— FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Administration) and the Katrina flood.
— Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association) and the collapse of the secondary mortgage market.
— The SEC (Security and Exchange Commission, not the college football conference) and the Madoff scandal.
— The ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) and the fast and furious fiasco.
— The GSA (General Services Administration) with its overspending, parties and general lack of accountability.
— The IRS (the Internal Revenue Service) and its targeting of conservative organizations.
— The VA (Veteran’s Administration) falsifying waiting lists in order to get personal bonuses.
— The State Department and its confusion and misinformation about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
— The NSA (National Security Agency) and electronic monitoring of U.S. citizens and foreign officials.
— The INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and its failure to prevent undocumented children from Latin America entering the U.S.
— The DHS (Department Homeland Security) that oversees the Secret Service and its partying with prostitutes.
— The HHS (Health and Human Services) and the botched launching of the Affordable Care Act.
— The DOE (Department of Energy) and its funding of clean energy firms with political connections such as Solyndra.
These scandals may be more apparent under the Obama administration, partly because bureaucracy has grown larger and more intrusive, but they are not the product of a particular political party or president. They are inherent in the bureaucratic process. Bureaucrats are not bad people; they are just employed in a system that provides them with the wrong incentives. In the private sector businesses grow and their employees receive promotions and wage increases when they attract more customers by providing better products and better service. But bureaucracies often grow and their employees receive promotions, pay increases, perquisites and cushy assignments when the problems they are supposed to solve get worse.
While liberals tend to believe government can fix anything and everything, conservatives are not immune from the government fix-it bug. Back in 1973, polls showed that 78 percent of Americans thought marijuana should be illegal, so President Nixon created the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and staffed it with 600 special agents to stamp out the drug problem. Today, the DEA has a budget of $2.5 billion, maintains 21 domestic field divisions with 227 field offices and 86 foreign offices in 62 countries, and employs over 10,800 people, including 5,500 Special Agents to enforce a myriad of drug laws and regulations. There are now 1.5 million people in prison in the U.S. for non-violent drug offenses — half of them for marijuana — while our last three presidents are known to have used it and polls show 58 percent of Americans now favor legalizing “the devil’s weed.” How are we to assess the “success” of the DEA: does it just need a little more money and tougher laws to eradicate drug abuse, or is this perhaps a job that only parents and families can do?
Ronald Reagan famously said “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” But that assumes someone from the government actually shows up and offers to help. Today, one is more likely to be sent a 20-page form to fill out and mail in, then they might receive a pamphlet a month later full of confusing and misleading information or, worse yet, be sent to a government web site that doesn’t work.
Bureaucracies are like a virus, taking on a life of their own seeking new ways to justify their existence and expand. When their ineptitude and misdeeds become apparent, we are told there will be an investigation (often by the agency itself), that those responsible will be held accountable, and reforms will be implemented — yet no one ever seems to get fired, punished or legally prosecuted, and in the end nothing changes. It’s as if they believe if they stonewall long enough, their scandal will be eclipsed by a new scandal in a different agency and their scandal will soon be forgotten as yesterday’s news.
Bureaucracy in the U.S. has grown so large and intrusive that now just about everything we say, do or consume falls within the domain of some federal agency. President Obama is famous for saying this of various bureaucratic scandals: “I didn’t know about it until I read it in the newspaper.” I believe him. The labyrinth of red tape and regulations in Washington is beyond the supervision and control of any individual.
The economist Friedrich Hayek, in accepting his Nobel Prize in 1974, warned about the danger of what he called “the pretense of knowledge” and the belief that bureaucrats possess the wisdom and ability to create a better world, and their willingness to use the coercive power of government to achieve their grand visions. Social life is too complex to be understood by — much less be managed by — any central political authority, and attempts to do so generally have negative consequences.
The Washington bureaucracy is beyond reform; some agencies simply need to go. In this age of email and cell phones, do we really need the post office to deliver advertising and compete with private companies like FedEx and UPS? Can we replace the IRS with a national sales tax? Can we replace the VA with medical vouchers for our military veterans? Do we need a federal Department of Education to tell us how to run our local schools?
The solution is not to simply put a different person in the Oval Office. We must stop borrowing money from overseas to feed these bureaucracies. But that requires us to elect politicians who will be honest and stop telling us that government can solve all our problems.
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