Author: photog

I was thinking about the second Trump administration as you know.  I asked folks what they thought would happen and they gave some feedback (thank you).  And folks have some confidence from what I can tell, that Trump will probably get some stuff done.  Maybe he’ll purge the FBI and Justice Department of the die-hard Democrat partisans.  And maybe he’ll reform some of the policies and rules at some of the other agencies like the IRS, ATF, EPA and the DOD.  Good.

But what happens going forward?  Is it possible to “fix” a giant bureaucracy permanently?  I think we all have to agree you can’t.  The closest to that that can be achieved is specifying a procedure to prune the bureaucracy on a regular schedule.

One idea I read of that makes a lot of sense is to separate the bureaucracy into two buckets.  In one bucket is stuff that is permanently necessary like the Post Office (?) and the military.  For these things that have easily defined scope, normal control methods can be used to keep their size in check.  For everything else, their charters from Congress include sunset provisions such that if they need to be extended the Congress has to explain exactly why and exactly how much money they will need to continue.  And then Congress will have to approve this reauthorization and the president will have to sign it.

I think there may be a state that handles their bureaucracy this way.  I think it’s a brilliant idea.  I mean, who really believes that 80% of the workers and the rules being made are necessary?  Even necessary agencies like the Defense Department are oceans of waste and corruption.

And for that reason, I see the value in having people from the private sector looking at the “books” and recommending cuts and changes to this empire of waste.  I know it’s probably mostly a pipe dream but I get a little giddy thinking about what could be done if an honest auditor looked at the government from an efficiency perspective and took a chainsaw to the federal government.  How many billions of dollars could be eliminated in salaries and contractors’ fees?  It staggers the imagination.  Look at the damage that California’s local environmental protection agency just caused because of their ridiculous regulations banning controlled burning.  Because of their insane laws some of the richest and most beautiful neighborhoods in Los Angeles were torched to the ground at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate.  Imagine the gains if the federal EPA were evaluated regularly and pared down to only the functions that need to exist.  Land owners and communities would regain millions of hours a year that go into the endless paperwork needed to propitiate the stupid acolytes of the idiot goddess Gaia.

So, it seems clear to me that trimming the federal bureaucracy is a permanent part of every administration’s workload.   And this should be one of the selling points that Republicans use to justify hiring them every four years.  And the way to sell this is to publish the fact that they reduce the federal budget and the debt every four years.  Just like a CEO has to publish the annual report to declare how much the company made in profits or losses the president of the United States should have to give a shareholders meeting to all of us telling us whether he shrank or grew the budget and the debt.

Trump is a businessman of sorts.  His is not a public corporation so mostly he’s responsible to himself but he knows the realities of a balance sheet and how awful the United States’ balance sheet currently looks.  What he needs to do is teach the voters that they are small shareholders in a runaway corporation that is hemorrhaging money into the ground and the president is the CEO who has to justify his leadership every four years.

I’m really hoping that buying Greenland isn’t his first order of business.  I hope a controlled burn of about 80% of the FBI (and the rest of the dead wood) is.