By Free Republic | Created at 2024-11-15 11:51:21 | Updated at 2024-11-15 14:55:13
3 hours ago
DOGE: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in Government are Not the Problem -- Bureaucratic Power is
American Thinker ^ | John F. Di Leo
Posted on 11/15/2024 3:45:03 AM PST by RoosterRedux
Many are dancing an Irish jig – even non-Irishmen whom one would not expect to know such dances – over the prospect of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy heading up a new “Grace Commission 2.0” of sorts, cheerfully nicknamed a Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
They intend an 18-month project, hopefully to conclude by our nation’s 250th anniversary, in which they will apply standard American manufacturing cost-cutting techniques such as LEAN and Six Sigma tools, to find out how much fat is in every federal department, bureau and agency, and cut it out as fast as possible.
...
However, if all the government does is continue to do what it does today with just 80%, or 70%, or even 50% of the employees, that will still not be a victory.
Why not? Because the usual targets of such a project – “waste, fraud and abuse” – are not America’s main problem with our federal government.
Our problem isn’t that the government is too big or too costly.
Our problem is that it has gone rogue.
...
Legally, every federal agency is limited in two ways: the agency can only exercise the powers granted to it by Congress, and Congress itself had to have the Constitutional authority to grant it such power in the first place.
But the government stopped honoring these two restrictions over a century ago.
Once Congress sets up an agency, it loses interest in what that agency does, so its oversight is usually limited to a brief moment of funding discussion when the annual budget fight comes along. Because of this lack of real oversight, far too many of the nation’s bureaucrats soon discover that their power to overregulate is limited only by their own Napoleonic imagination.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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1 posted on 11/15/2024 3:45:03 AM PST by RoosterRedux
To: RoosterRedux
On more point from the article:
There is no need, incidentally, to feel sorry for the people to be cut in this process. The DOGE team knows the law, and fully understands the rules about terminating civil servants. These people will likely get an enviable mix of cash buyouts and federal pensions that reward them more handsomely than they deserve for their years of bureaucratic pencil pushing.2 posted on 11/15/2024 3:49:27 AM PST by RoosterRedux (Emerson paraphrased, "If you strike at the king, don't fail." They failed. )
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