I read (or heard) that Donald Trump was talking about getting input from Elon Musk on streamlining or pruning the federal government.\u00a0 Now why Elon Musk would be a qualified individual for such an endeavor is far from clear to me.\u00a0 It is true that he reduced the headcount at Twitter by something like 70-80% after he bought it but since the social media platform is mostly an automated business, he probably just asked his direct reports to terminate everyone who couldn\u2019t code.\u00a0 End of story.<\/p>\n
But all of this brings up a good point.\u00a0 Why does the federal government employ millions of people to do clerical work?\u00a0 Just as banks and insurance companies shed millions of paper-pushing positions when they eliminated the paper, shouldn\u2019t the various departments, bureaus and agencies do the same?\u00a0 And how about the fact that it seems there are multiple agencies working on the same \u201cproblems.\u201d\u00a0 For instance:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Administration for Native Americans (ANA)<\/p>\n Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)<\/p>\n Or how about:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)<\/p>\n The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)<\/p>\n And finally:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE)<\/p>\n The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)<\/p>\n The Office of Environmental Management (no acronym!)<\/p>\n The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)<\/p>\n The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How much you want to bet that you have to get all these agencies placated before you can get anything done that they have staked out as their turf?<\/p>\n I think Donald Trump is absolutely correct that streamlining the federal government (or more felicitously expressed, \u201ctaking a chainsaw to it\u201d) is one of the greatest public services that any president could perform for this country.\u00a0 He has my whole-hearted support in such an endeavor.\u00a0 But will he be able to do it?\u00a0 Didn\u2019t the Obama administration distribute tanks and automatic weapons to everybody from the IRS to the post office?\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t be surprised to hear that some IRS guys would go postal after being fired.\u00a0 But the real trick will be performing surgery on the FBI and the other intelligence agencies.\u00a0 Those guys are vicious.\u00a0 And that\u2019s not mentioning the CIA.\u00a0 After all most people think they actually did kill Kennedy and all he did was abort the Bay of Pigs fiasco.\u00a0 Imagine what they\u2019ll do if you try to take the food out of their mouths.\u00a0 They\u2019d probably break out a suitcase nuke.<\/p>\n But almost as much fun as firing everyone, would be to impose an across the board 25% reduction in pay for the whole federal bureaucracy (except the armed forces).\u00a0 For the armed forces the trick would be a reduction in the number of generals by a factor of five.\u00a0 That should keep them out of trouble.<\/p>\n Trump is definitely onto something.\u00a0 And the idea of enlisting actual businessmen to help identify the dead wood in the federal government is a good idea.\u00a0 Bloated bureaucracy has been the cause of over taxation and inefficiency since the Han dynasty ruled China.\u00a0 I would guess that reducing the size of the federal government by 10% would balance the budget immediately.<\/p>\n Now granted these fired individuals would be mostly permanently unemployed.\u00a0 They would initially cause a burden on our economy.\u00a0 Basically, they would have no usable skills and no work ethic.\u00a0 But this would eventually come off the books as they quickly starved to death.\u00a0 And after all these government departments were neutered the rest of the American workforce would surge forward in productivity, no longer hampered by the stupidity and malevolence of the vast government bureaucracy.<\/p>\n On second thought, Trump should consult with Javier Milei.\u00a0 If it worked in Argentina, it should work twice as well here.\u00a0 Just double whatever he did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I read (or heard) that Donald Trump was talking about getting input from Elon Musk on streamlining or pruning the federal government.\u00a0 Now why Elon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4667,143,4237],"class_list":["post-30329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-bloated-bureaucracy","tag-drain-the-swamp","tag-javier-milei"],"yoast_head":"\n