Dissecting D.C.
Over at American Thinker, writer, Peter Skurkiss, has a piece with the interesting premise that one way to limit the out of control growth of federal government, Trump’s draining the swamp, is to decentralize it by moving various federal agencies out of the bloated federal district and into more geographically centralized and mainstream American locations. While many of the commenters agree this could help return some sanity to federal bureaucrats by making them live among those their edicts affect, others point out the risk, noting that Californians moving to Oregon, Washington and Colorado were like metastasizing political cancer cells. Many other commenters are of a mind that severely reducing the bloated agencies in size is more important, while others think that both moves have merit.
Whaddaya think here at TAH?
Category: Politics
Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out !!!
Reduce the size of these agencies, combine some of them as they were splits from others a while back, and cut the number of USGOV employees. And get rid of the union influence, if there is any at all, period.
Move ’em to Detroit.
Detroit has a 25%+ locality bump, so that might go over a bit better than expected.
Reduce their size by budget starvation and attrition. Most Gubberment agencies and beauracracies (sp?) are unConstitutional, so I won’t shed any tears at their loss.
What do you do with dead wood? You burn it!!
Get rid of some of them. Severely curtail the size and power of others. Move some out of DC, for sure.
Moving them to Detroit would be a great start. Moving others, for example ICE, to, say, Arizona, would be a good thing.
And get rid of the Government Unions. No one, and I mean NO ONE who draws their pay from the tax payers should be a part of a union.
I have mixed feelings re government employee unions but on balance feel their need has passed. I worked 11 years for VA after Navy, and there were a few times the union protected a deserving employee. However … I saw more instances in which the union served as little more than an enabler for a crappy employee. Of course I did not have knowledge of all union activity. Employees often acted with impunity, knowing they had union support, regardless of circumstances. IMO the time for government unions has passed. Does it occasionally perform a useful function? Yes. Does it more frequently serve as a hit squad for marginal-and-worse employees? Youbetcha. It is a corrosive agency whose need, on balance, has come and gone. IMO … Thoughts?
Unions work best when they act as partners with the “owners” in an endeavor where both management and unions want the best people.
Unfortunately, far too often unions have come to think they should be running a company without any skin in the game.
There are lots / many / few decisions that managers make that are bad. There are some managers who should not be managers. But you cannot hamstring a company by saying all management is bad and all workers are good.
Adversarial relationships never turn out well.
Quite true, and history proves it. Many was the time when management and unions had a relationship not unlike the proverbial octopus versus the squid and both sides suffered.
Move ICE to a border town? I like it!
Move HUD to Detroit or Chicago, if it doesn’t get disbanded altogether.
HHS should go away with Obamacare.
Why not? Most coordination meetings between different executive departments could be done by teleconference. Bureaucrats might feel more restrained if they were physically farther from the “seat of power”, actually having to live amongst the Omahans or Topekans or Louisvillians.who are affected by the rules that they make Once upon a time almost every Federal function was carried out by those who occupied just five executive departments. Today the federal bureaucracy occupies row upon row of giant office buildings in the greater D.C. area. Break it up and dispatch the Federal horde to the hinterlands. It won’t happen, but a man can dream.
Reduce their numbers. Hey didn’t a number of Government bureaucrats say they were gonna quit if Trump got elected? DEEDS NOT WORDS, but I put them in the same category as the celebs that said they were gonna leave and reneged, ditto with the muzzies that promised to GO HOME.
Can you just imagine the expense of relocating all those agencies? It might coast $trillions to do that. Not unlike all the wasted $’s each time they close a military installation – first you have to honor all those renovation and building contracts at the old place, then spend even move building the new one.
Then you get to make new communities dependent upon big G. Oh, goody.
Spreading it around isn’t “decentralized government.”
IMO, the only legitimate function of the federal government is national defense. EVERYTHING else should be dismantled.
My perspective is from a state governmental employee of > 20 years. 1) No governmental employee needs a union. None. IMHO any workers union has become nothing more than legalized gangsters. 2) The is very little that a governmental agency can do that cannot be done better at less cost by a for-profit agency. It may be counterintuitive, but I adamantly oppose “out-sourcing” what an agency must do because that usually increases the inefficiency and cost exponentially. 3) Governmental employees frequently – even without unions – are culturally less motivated toward efficiency. Perversely enough, governmental attempts to assure efficiency and productivity have the reverse effect (see #2 above) with the consequence that employees become better at defending their turf and avoiding responsibility. 4) Any draining of a governmental swamp will require determining what are non-necessary functions and eliminating (not outsourcing) those functions; getting rid of employees that supported those functions; and ensuring that the revolving door doesn’t just bring them right back in. I have been through multiple RIFs over the last 2+ decades. Very seldom has a RIF-ed employee been out of a job for long, they are re-hired for some new necessary function. The few exceptions were people everyone wanted to get rid of. On the flip side, often the RIF was mandated without a corresponding reduction in work expected out of the agency. As for moving agencies outside the beltway: I like the concept as it breaks the insular nature of the DC environment. There is the concern that a move will work like a metastasizing cancer and corrupt the area to which the agency is moved. We would have to hope and work to ensure (to continue the analogy) that the local culture would serve as an environment in which the cancer was naturally attacked and killed. Perhaps equally important would be a move to putting business leaders, people who have had to make a profit and cut waste and inefficiency, over all governmental agencies. This appears to be what Trump is working toward and – if successful – this model may be our best hope… Read more »
Get rid of unions or put them on a short leash with new contracts that are maybe 5 pages long which demand performance or else. Let them only cover issues of work harassment and not performance. Move the few needed agencies into the heartland where most or all of their concern lies.
Or do as Thunderstixx wrote in comment 1.
Start with the postal workers union.
Flame throwers.
Trump is clearly not nor does he have any intention of draining the swamp.
He will just make the corruption more efficient so there is less oversight and red tape interfering with pay to play politics.
Moving the agencies is just a way to get those monitoring the swamp out of Washington.
They won’t move the crony corrupting agencies. Or lobbyists.
Too bad the Old Commie didn’t win, eh middle-aged commie? He really would have showed us how to clean up gov’t and make it more efficient, right? Say, what sort of load are you on us taxpayers? Got a job yet or did you quit again?
Yeah, we all know how “principled” Comrade Bernie Sellout is!
Coffee shop is probably empty again. Kids going home for the holidays. He’s lonesome.
There is one thing about you that amazes me, Commissar Poodledick. You’ve gone all through life being the intolerable pain in the ass that you are and to this day NO ONE has yet hit you in the face with a shovel, MAZEL TOV, SCMUCK!!!
I can think of several agencies that should be relocated to Ft. Wainwright or even further north to Barrow.
Eliminating a few of them and de-clawing some others would be a good start.
The EPA is a good example. They *should* serve an important purpose. Instead they’re a damn-near all-powerful agency with no oversight that fucks with private citizens just because they can. Cut them down to size, curtail their authority, and eliminate their ability to tell people what they can and can’t do with their own property. If it doesn’t verifiably affect anyone downstream, the EPA can fuck off.
Disband the IRS, abolish income taxes, and establish a sales tax to replace it.
Why the hell can’t the Marshalls, FBI, DEA, BATFE, and other federal alphabet-soup law enforcement agencies be streamlined into two or three? Coordination gets a lot easier when you reduce the number of cooks in the kitchen.
And most importantly, the president, senators, congressmen, and cabinet members can get the same pay and benefits as an E-4. Hell, just about all of ’em are millionaires anyway. Not like they can’t afford it.
Remove the protections for lying and disinforming while in congress (House and Senate) (more specifically, on congress grounds.
Also make the laws to enforce adherence to the oath of office.
And, apply grand theft laws to each and every count of pork barreling.
This one is simply practical and easy to put into effect.
Return US Savings Bonds to their original interest/compound interest rates and use the sales of them to pay for infrastructure repairs and replacements. I am NOT talking about municipal bonds, nor about floating loans through US Treasuries.
Savings bonds used to be a good way to save money. The interest rates were good and continued after the bonds matured. The bonds themselves came in several denominations starting at $25 up through $500. I bought a bunch of them starting in recruti training and going on for a while that I redeemed when I needed them, and did not stop using them until the interest rates were so badly slashed that they were nearly worthless and the maturity dates were lengthened enough to make them a waste of money.
This is one way to teach kids to save money, but the interest rate and maturity dates need to be returned to what they were before they were devalued. And if the interest rates and maturity dates were restored to what they used to be, kids could set aside money for college through these bonds and not be burdened with costly loans when they graduate.
Also, take the US out of the IMF. It is badly mismanaged and I don’t know why we as taxpayers should be expected to support it any more.
Not only should all federal agencies stay within the confines of DC, all federal employees should be forced to live within that city as well. Turn Arlington, VA back into the District would help.
Keep ’em all in one place, where they will stop flipping Virginia into the Blue column.
First of all, they should bring in the Fair Tax, read about it at Neal Boortz, it would save the economy and get rid of the IRS! It is not a sales tax and it would bring trillions back to the US economy. It is the best thing I have ever read.
I like what I’ve read/heard of the Fair Tax, as well.
Please don’t pretend you have the slightest clue what he might do, since no one, not even Trump himself, has a clue.
I spent the last couple months watching tons of video clips of congressional hearings on youtube. My mind was absolutely boggled. Every agency. Every. Single. Agency. Was being led by people who were — so obviously it hurt to see — corrupt, incompetent, and worse. The amount of evasive weasel defensive doubletalk BS was just incredible. There were some who might have been exceptions given a different situation, but they were clearly in a Dilbertian-system that made any competence impossible. The worst by far was the DOJ of course — because they are the ones who should be acting on egregious problems in the others, found by much of this — and did jack under O. (Well they did punish more whistleblowers. That’s apparently the only crime not willing to be supported — exposing corruption.) I despaired. It really makes it seem like the country is so far gone there is no hope. Maybe this administration will change it — it is the only chance, the last chance, the last straw, at this point of devoluted mess. (Yes I made that word up. It works.) Clearly every agency is way too big and bloated to be competent, and has clearly been able to grow immensely interiorly corrupt. I initially thought, “Oh, but you can’t kill the EPA! We can’t have people just dumping toxic waste in the rivers!” But then I found out just what a F’d up situation that agency has going on, and I take it back. Keep temporarily the rules as they are, get rid of anybody high enough to matter, promote after review selections from the rest, and make a point to get rid of or combine as much work and policy as possible. Otherwise it never gets better, it’d just change to a new set of faces. This goes for EVERY federal agency. Because those hearings in congress make it clear they all have very severe issues. But I would do the things above to the DOJ, and then expand them slightly and assumedly temporarily (maybe that written in) to actually help deal with finding,… Read more »
The first agency Trump should clean house on is the DOJ. He should do what Clinton did in his first term, demand the resignation of every US Attorney in the country.
Hey Joe. Thanks for the comment. Because of it, I just increased my holdings in KMB. I figure I’ll be making a killing over the next four years with you and yours. BTW, KMB is Kimberly-Clark, makers of Kleenex.
I would like to know how the recruiting is going to be conducted for the Death Squads that the Left says are coming. Soldier of Fortune? CraigsList?