Easy Budget Cuts the GOP Forgot
Eventually, Congress will need to spend serious political capital to make tough budget cuts. But for now, there are plenty of easy cuts the House has overlooked.
As Congress cuts the federal budget, attention has focused on truly easy cuts—programs that are clearly outdated or needless but still remain funded. Eventually, other cuts, much harder ones, are going to have to take place. That said, Congress has not exhausted the reasonably easy cuts. Here are three programs—all of them decently sized--that could be eliminated tomorrow with, yes, plenty of moaning but, in the end, hardly anybody noticing:
Most Project Based Housing Assistance ($4 billion in potential savings): The Department of Housing and Urban Development gives grants to landlords so they will rent housing units to low-income people. Since the subsidies go to the landlords rather than the tenants, the renters typically have to pay vastly higher rates if they move and, thus, end up trapped. This approach does serve a need for the small portion of people who both qualify for public housing assistance and for some reason need specially retrofitted or specifically located units. But for most people, it’s a worst-of-all-worlds situation: the landlords (like public housing authorities) are insulated from market forces and, unlike public housing authorities, don’t have to answer to voters or elected leaders. The result: poor people get trapped in lousy housing run by landlords who have no reason to care. Some of the savings from eliminating most of this program should go to increased funding for housing vouchers but, on balance, society would be better off without this approach to housing the poor.
Veterans Disability Compensation (Several billion in potential savings quickly; much more over time): The government’s system for dealing with service members injured on the job is awful. Veterans with bona fide war injuries often have to face huge bureaucratic hurdles before they get benefits they have earned and deserve. On the other hand, service members who develop acne scars during military service (yes, some 18 and 19 year olds develop pimples!) or strain their hands typing on computer keyboards in air-conditioned Northern Virginia offices receive lifetime benefits far more generous than those of any private or public workers’ compensation system. Although doing so will take lots of political haggling—much of it with sympathetic, powerful veterans groups—the Pentagon should move compensation for most future military job-related injuries into the cheaper, less generous, but faster and less bureaucratic Federal Employees Compensation System. This would be fairer both to service members (who could get benefits more quickly) and to taxpayers. A separate “combat disability” system should continue to exist but, to the extent practicable, it should focus on helping those actually injured in war.
Highway Spending (Several billion now; more over time): Since it planned, funded, and oversaw building of most of the Interstate highway system, the federal government has done little or nothing to oversee the way Interstate highway money gets spent. Well-governed states, mostly, spend their federal largess well and poorly governed ones spend it poorly. If the federal government made some modest cuts to overall highway spending and, in consultation with states, centrally decided where the money got spent, it could probably do a better job than the states collectively in running the system. It could achieve some savings simply through purchasing volume. (It is, after all, an interstate system.) States that want to fund projects that the federal government doesn’t support, of course, would remain perfectly free to do so with money they raise themselves.
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