More Than Meets the Eye

The polls suggest that only 10% of the citizenry believe Congress is doing a good job.  I’m not certain what they say about the President, but I think his figure is something in the high 30% range, maybe even 40%.   These numbers, of course, reflect the frustration many feel following the Washington DC drama of the last month.

But they also tell a different story, if we care to peel back things and take a closer look.  And that means putting all this in the context of everything else that is going on around us.

The first item to note is this: there has not been a real budget passed by the ‘Government’ since the last Bush budget.  (That budget, submitted as President Bush was leaving office, was passed in 2009.)  How then have we been grinding forward for nearly 5 years?  Several processes are in work: First, we have had a long series of ‘continuing resolutions,’ bills passed by both the House and the Senate, and then signed by the President, that basically say ‘same as before.’  Spending continues as before overall.  No new projects can be started, no changes can be made to any particular element of the huge federal budget except by specific action.  So, everyone keeps getting paid, for example.  If there is a desire to raise the pay for folks in uniform, for example, that must be specifically addressed.

Now, from the outside, that probably seems like some sort of budgeting process, and it is.  But the big difference is this: at no point in this whole churn is there a comprehensive look at what the whole government is doing, and the necessary trade-offs between this and that.  Instead, we see a long stream of disconnected bills that make their way through various committees, get voted on, eventually pass both the House and Senate, and then are signed into law by the President.  (There are more steps then that, but you get the point.)

The second side of it is that it leaves so much ‘up in the air’ that it is nearly impossible to figure out what is really happening.  You may have read the frustration that some folks have with the Department of Defense budget, and the call for an across the department audit to see where the money is going.  The issue is both comical and trivial; comical because anyone who has spent any time in the military knows just how much waste there is – even of the technically legal kind (you know, where a piece of gear (from pencil sharpener to jet-fighter) is ‘written off’ and a new one requested because ‘it’s just too hard to fix this one’) – across the entire DOD.  So, even without looking for some sort of illegal waste or abuse of the federal monies, there is a mountain of waste in just the way DOD does business.  But, the simple truth is this: of all the executive departments DOD is just about the most diligent in trying to wisely spend the people’s money.  Anyone who has had to deal with several departments at once will recognize this to be the case.  And DOD is only 1/5^th of the federal government.  So how much waste is there?

The answer, of course, is ‘A LOT.’  But it is going to be essentially impossible to know if we don’t even have a budget. 

The problem with doing things this way is simple: No one, least of all the President, need sit down and work out a comprehensive plan.  Has the President submitted comprehensive budgets?  Yes, every year.  In several of those years the budget was so clearly not serious, so different from what reality said was possible, that even in the Reid controlled Senate – one of the most liberal in our history – no one – not one single senator – supported the whole budget.  And Senator Reid, a clear devotee of the President, has several times over the past few years expressed clear apathy to the budget process.

And the sad part of it is this: without real budgets, without a need for the President to propose serious budgets, and for members of the House and Senate to sit down and talk across various departments, to make hard decisions about what gets more money and what gets less, there is no real possibility of our getting our debt under control.  But, there is more to it then that.

The real issue here is that without real, regular budgets, and real, independent audits – across the breadth and depth of the federal government – there is no real way to see depth of inefficiency in the government.  We have all seen pieces, but just to take a look at some items that have appeared in the news recently:

Obamacare registration: the system does not work.  After three years of preparation – for a program that will affect the entire $2 trillion healthcare system - the system is a mess.  How much did we pay for this?  Well, the original contract was for something on the order of $100 million, but the Department of Health and Human Services has already spent in excess of $600 million.  And it does not work.

Here are other examples of truly bizarre waste (From Sen. Coburn of Oklahoma, who identified more than $18 billion of similar waste in last years spending):

Moroccan Pottery Training Program – for Moroccans: $27 million

A Boutique Brewery: $750,970 in federal funds to build three new brew tanks

Beef jerky: $639,884 technology

Pet shampoo: $505,000

Lake Murray airport (averages 1 flight per month): $450,000

Robotic squirrel San Diego State University: $325,000

Smokey Bear promotions: $49,447

Fullerton Public Library Vending machine for library books: $35,000

Alabama Watermelon Queen tour: $25,000

Circus classes: $20,000

But these are truly insignificant when we take a look at major pieces of the government.  Consider two major issues (if only to keep this short): energy and education.  Under President Carter the government created two new federal departments: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. 

The Department of Energy was created to do two things: reduce US energy dependence on foreign energy – oil, and to manage the maintenance of US nuclear weapons programs.  Since the creation of the Department US dependence on foreign oil increased steadily for 30 years – only turning downward during the last few years because of oil and gas development in South Dakota and elsewhere utilizing new technology.  This development has taken place almost completely on private lands, and over the objections, and sometimes strong objections, of: the Department of Energy.  At the same time, as US consumption of oil has increased, US refining capacity has not kept pace with growth – a direct result of Departmental policies, forcing the US to import not only crude oil but often more expensive refined products.  Meanwhile, the maintenance of our nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal has slowed to a crawl, much has been delayed and pushed off – making future maintenance even more expensive, and there is nearly universal concern – outside the Department’s senior management – that future maintenance will be even more expensive then planned.

And how much will the Department of Energy receive in 2013? $30 billion

Or consider the Department of Education, also started during the Carter Administration.  Charged with improving the performance of US students in all grades, the Department has mainly been successful in increasing the cost of education.  Over the past 30 years there has been no substantive change in graduation rates or in literacy, and US performance in math sciences has dropped.  But cost of education has increased at more than twice the rate of inflation.  In short, we are getting less for a lot more.  In fact, the US now spends more per capita on education then virtually any other country. 

And leading that charge, the Department will spend $70 billion in 2013.

Several weeks ago the President said that ‘raising the debt ceiling does not mean raising the debt.’  The debt ceiling was raised a couple of days ago and the debt climbed more than $300 billion yesterday – as the President’s Department of Treasury played clever accounting games and reshuffled some debt that it has been keeping off the books for the past few months.

The President is sitting on top of an executive branch that knows how to spend, but seemingly little else.  It is not efficient, and it is often not effective.  We all know that something is wrong, that this beast that we are funding – the ‘government’ – is massively wasteful and nearly out of control.  The Congress is doing little to control it, the President even less.  Deep down I suspect that is what everyone is saying.  But until we do something definitive, until we insist that the President and Congress get OUR ‘books’ in order, this economy – OUR economy – will continue to move further down the road to ruin.