A Quick Fix for Slashing Government Bloat
As America’s budget deficit takes center stage, Republicans that want to regain their party’s rightful place as the guardian of fiscal discipline need to present realistic, achievable ways of bringing the budget into balance. Doing this could start with a simple, bold, commonsense stand: abolish government programs that don’t work.
Finding a list of such government waste is surprisingly easy: Every few years, the Office of Management and Budget subjects each government program to the analysis of a something called the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) . And, according to OMB, fully 20 percent of all federal programs are definitively ineffective or have no way to measure what they attempt to accomplish. A single legislative proposal that restructured or eliminated almost all of these “not performing” programs at once could, if properly defined and sold to the American public have a good chance of playing a major role in balancing the budget. Selling it to the public and Congress, however, will require clear definitions of what kinds of programs are being eliminated and separate, convincing cases made for each category of programs. Essentially, the programs can be grouped into three categories.
First off, a few programs are wasteful efforts that the government can easily shed entirely in their current form. Even if the government has a role in providing inter-city rail transport (Amtrak) or building levees that destroy wetlands (Army Corps of Engineers projects), nearly everyone who has looked at them agrees current programs to do these things don’t work at all. In tight fiscal times, it should be reasonably easy to argue that the government should simply get out of these businesses altogether.
Far more programs on OMB’s “naughty list,” however, are simply duplicative: The Safe and Drug Free Schools Program, for example, is one of dozens of anti-drug initiatives and the National Bioterrorism Preparedness Program duplicates many other efforts to deal with biological weapons. Since other efforts to accomplish the same goals work better, these programs can also go entirely with minimal harm to the public welfare. Since most Americans say they support spending cuts, these types of cuts are much easier to justify than cuts that get government entirely out of one area or another.
Third, a few not-performing programs with high profiles and very broad impacts (public housing, air force base operations) could not be eliminated in the short term. In these cases, Republicans should demand significant restructuring, coupled, in most cases, with budget cuts. Carrying this out correctly will require a wonkish interest in the business of governing that too few Republicans possess. But taking such an interest is part and parcel of true fiscal discipline and Republicans needs to develop it.
OMB’s list, of course, would need to be tweaked. The most expensive single program on the not-performing list, providing benefits for disabled veterans, is an obvious core government function and may need restructuring. But savings probably wouldn’t come from a restructuring. Likewise, “adequate” (C grade) programs on the “performing list” -- such as the twenty or so separate housing programs the government runs -- are almost certainly duplicative and could be phased down quite easily.
The important thing about such a proposal, however, is that it should be made in one fell swoop and done without regard to political likes and dislikes. All of the “not performing” government programs, after all, needed a constituency to get implemented in the first place. Eliminating or restructuring them all at once would spread the pain evenly and make it much harder to fight. Balancing the budget is going to require a lot of hard choices and, by comparison, eliminating programs that don’t work should be pretty easy.