TRUMPING GOVERNMENT

[Also published at http://www.newsmax.com/ScotFaulkner/trump-federal-government-presidency/2016/11/24/id/760573/ ] #TRUMPING #DRAINTHESWAMP

President-Elect Trump can revolutionize governing as he revolutionized campaigning.

Trump is uniquely positioned as the first nonmilitary, nongovernment, person to ever be elected President.  His mandate for change will overwhelm those wanting an ever expanding and dysfunctional government to prevail. 

The Washington Establishment defends the status quo by asserting: “we have always done it this way”; “you can never run government like a business”; “we are unique”; “we have already cut what can be cut”, and “cutting anything will harm Americans”.

Trump is already doing things his way, breaking new ground as he goes.  The media and the Establishment were against Trump since he announced his candidacy and were consistently wrong about everything relating to Trump and the 2016 elections.  They are now foolishly attempting to second guess Trump, hold him to some arbitrary transition schedule, and giving him unsolicited advice.

These unrelenting, but always wrong, voices ignore that President-Elect Ronald Reagan named his core cabinet on or after December 10, 1980, thirty-six days past his landslide election.  They also refuse to mention that none of Trump’s appointments can be confirmed until the new 115^th Congress convenes on January 3, 2017. The first Senate confirmation hearings cannot take place until that first day of the new Congress.  Trump can take his time and get things right from the start.

Trump is crafting his own way of governing.  His only requirement is to seamlessly transition to power.  Think of a relay race where one runner is completing their segment while the other is beginning theirs.  Ideally, both runners achieve stride for stride coordination until one passes the baton to the other.  America’s civic culture is tested and proven strong every time this peaceful hand-off occurs between opposing parties.

Once the “baton is in hand” President Trump will end the Obama era.  Ronald Reagan took time, immediately after his Inaugural Address, to sign Executive Orders ending the Carter era. Trump should move this decisively.

Realigning and mobilizing the Executive Branch to achieve his top priorities will be the first test of Trump’s ability to lead. 

Trump must instill a “sense of urgency”. November 8 was a massive Taser blast to the heart of the Washington Establishment.  They remain stunned, dazed, and confused.  Trump must move swiftly to achieve his goals before the Establishment awakes. 

Revolution’s worst enemy is delay.  Trump is an intuitive thinker and doer. He must act aggressively on his instincts and not let over analysis paralyze his cause.

The federal government is ridiculously huge.  Its size and growth are unnecessary.  In its first 129 years, America became a world power, the leader in technology innovation, and an industrial juggernaut, with only six Cabinet Departments.  All Cabinet Departments, except Treasury, fit into the Old Executive Office Building until World War I.  The door knobs in the building still display the Departmental seals.

Rethinking the role of government can be Trump’s greatest contribution to America.  Private initiative makes America great, so government should only exist when an overwhelmingly compelling case can be made.  Even then, incentives and sanctions through regulation, taxes, or fees, should be exhausted before a new government program is created.  Except for Coolidge and Reagan to varying degrees, no incoming President has ever conducted such a fundamental review.

Much of what sent America over the fiscal cliff were the actions of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s. LBJ cynically established the modern welfare state to entrap large swathes of the electorate in an ever expanding federal leviathan. LBJ’s “great society” programs drove millions into voting for Democrats and drove America trillions into debt.

Trump knows government growth can be reversed. Personnel and costs can be dramatically cut.  Agencies can be abolished, like the Civil Aeronautics Board.

Under President Reagan, the General Services Administration invoked a hiring freeze and radical reorganization that reduced employment from 34,000 to 12,000 in three years.  Costs plummeted while the quality and responsiveness of services skyrocketed.  Under Speaker Gingrich, all non-parliamentary and non-security operations were consolidated within a new Chief Administrative Officer. Aggressive outsourcing and business based operations cut employment in half.  Once again, costs plummeted while quality and responsiveness of services skyrocketed.

As President Trump reshapes the Federal Government he needs to take to heart the immortal words of two of America’s most successful Presidents.  Calvin Coolidge directed his appointees to “Trim wherever you can”.  Ronald Reagan had a sign on his desk that inspired his team, “It CAN be done".

TRUMPING THE BUDGET

[Published in http://www.newsmax.com/ScotFaulkner/budget-congress-cronies-omb/2016/08/23/id/744737/ ]

It is time for Trump to do what he does best – expose how the Washington, DC Establishment lies its way to expanding government and helping its cronies.

Donald Trump has an historic opportunity to reframe and reset the budget battles that have plagued Washington, DC for years.

Members of Congress, when they return after their longest summer break in over fifty years, will be teetering on a chasm of their own making.  They will have only seventeen legislative days to pass twelve Appropriation bills.  Only a handful cleared the House prior to its long recess and none were considered in the Senate.  This guarantees much “sound and fury” ending in an Omnibus Appropriations bill, with several continuing resolutions to avoid a government shutdown.

Posturing by the Congress, the White House, candidates, and the media will reach fever pitch around the time of the first Presidential Debate on September 26.

Trump’s role in defusing this latest fiscal bomb can take several forms.

First, reveal how $2.405 trillion is just laying around doing nothing. 

Since President Obama took office, $914.8 billion in unexpended, unobligated, funds have piled up across the federal government. Obama never conducted the “budget sweeps” done by all his predecessors. The details are reported under “Assets and Balance Sheets” on page ten of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) budget. 

Another $1.028 trillion remains unexpended among general accounts and $461 billion remains unspent in trust funds.  While these funds are technically obligated, the fact that they have languished for years raises questions about their use and their management.

Second, reveal the red herring of entitlements.  Everyone knows that the only way to truly stop massive federal spending and debt is to reform entitlements.  The trap is that the required radical reform will not happen anytime soon.  It is like asking an overweight “couch potato” to suddenly jump up and win the Olympics’ Marathon.  No one in Congress, the Executive Branch, or the multitude of stakeholders is ready or willing to make entitlement reform happen.

The alternative is to prepare for tackling entitlements by first working on those budget issues that are long overdue.  This should appeal to anyone not lining their, and their cronies, pockets with federal favors.

The first move is slamming the door shut on filling federal vacancies.  This would cut $350 billion a year in personnel costs. This freeze would take advantage of Executive Branch attrition of 60,000+ employees a year through retirements and voluntary departures. Each agency head could submit waivers to OMB for those jobs they consider essential for their missions.

Not every retired government worker needs to be replaced. In fact, the Defense Department has already begun to leverage selective hiring freezes for a five year “delayering” initiative to eliminate 1,260 positions and save $1.9 billion over five years.  Even under Obama, officials admit not every layer of management (up to 23 layers in some agencies) is needed. Just think how much they could save if they were sincere.

The second way to immediate fiscal sanity is to cut $650 billion in government waste.  Every year, the General Accountability Office (GAO) and 73 Inspector General Offices find over $650 billion in ongoing waste. This waste is documented in 768 GAO reports containing hundreds of recommendations for operational improvement, and 8,760 audits and investigations conducted by the 73 Inspector General Offices among the Cabinet departments and independent agencies of the Executive Branch. 

That translates into $6.5 trillion in possible spending cuts or cost avoidance, over the next ten years, without harming one legitimate beneficiary of government services. Unfortunately, these findings and recommendations are regularly ignored by the Washington Establishment.

Congress, the Executive Branch, and the media are ignoring 9,528 ways to cut government waste every year.

Trump can make the professionals at the GAO and Inspector General offices “rock stars”.  He can look into the camera and say, “No matter how liberal or how conservative you are – you want the government to stop wasting your money.” 

These could be the first steps in shaping Trump’s management revolution as President. They are all bi-partisan issues.  Trump can then build upon these successes to solve the more divisive issue of entitlement reform.

Exposing the truth, and saving billions of dollars, “what do you have to lose?”

CONGRESSIONAL COINSTAR

The annual spending fight is looming once again on Congress’ autumn horizon. This ritualized partisan combat over the debt and the deficit will once again dominate the news. Politicians and pundits will once again use dueling calculations to fuel their heated rhetoric without any hope of common ground or real results. This year may even feature dueling scholarly analyses on how rampant government spending may be a good thing. http://www.imf.org/external/np/seminars/eng/2013/fiscal/pdf/barro.pdf

There is a way for Congress to break out of this dismal cycle.

Every year the federal government has money left over. Lots of money.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) documented this in his “Money for Nothing” report:

"In total, the federal government is projected to end fiscal 2012 with more than $2 trillion in unexpended funds that will be carried over to next year, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. While more than two-thirds of this amount is obligated for specific purposes, $687 billion remains unobligated, meaning it is essentially money for nothing."

http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=612f09e3-e950-480e-84f8-1e54d2e6bc30  [pages 1-2]

Detailed charts on this phenomenon can be found at: “Balances of Budget Authority; Budget of the U.S. Government Fiscal Year 2012,” White House Office of Management and Budget, page 8; http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BUDGET-2012BALANCES/pdf/BUDGET-2012-BALANCES.pdf .

I first encountered this in 2007, when a project team was promoting development of a museum for the National Park Service. NPS leaders contended that they would need new funding to cover Phase I design costs. A few minutes reviewing OMB’s public documents uncovered NPS holding onto $73 million in “Unobligated balances carried forward”. This was more than enough to cover the $12.5 million in Phase I costs.

Welcome to Washington’s most secret budget game. Every Department and Agency, and program units within every Department and Agency, have unobligated funds squirreled away. This adds up to the $687 billion identified by Senator Coburn.

It would be an easy act of Congress to include a mandate for returning every agencies’ “Unobligated balances carried forward” as part of a budget resolution, continuing resolution, or within each appropriation bill.

Such a return of “Unobligated balances carried forward” to general use would immediately cut the annual federal deficit in half. It would also delay any increase in the federal debt limit by at least ten months. Most importantly, it would be an easy bi-partisan vote for sound fiscal management.

Think of these “Unobligated balances carried forward” as the coins every family has stashed in drawers, under couches, in the glove compartments of cars, and maybe in a piggy bank or pickle jar. Many years ago Coinstar https://www.coinstar.com/  found a way to make money by installing machines to sort coins and turn these extraneous “found funds” into usable dollars.

Bringing $685 billion of our unused tax dollars back into use, and avoiding the need for $685 billion in new spending, is as simple as a family taking their pickle jar of coins to a sorting machine.

Why can’t Members of Congress, or their staff, figure this stuff out?

The Budget Bunker

President Obama has the Republicans, and the nation, right where he wants them. Everyone is talking about how budget cuts hurt people.

Obama has embraced the advice given by his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” The Sequester was not supposed to have happened. Now that it has, Obama and the Democrats are doing all they can to eradicate opposition to government’s eternal growth.

The Sequester was supposed to be the “mutually assured destruction” of sacred cows for both Democrats and Republicans. This intentional apocalypse was designed to force all sides in the budget debate to find common ground. However, in the summer of 2011, both sides assumed they would completely triumph in the November 2012 elections. This would have given either side the ability to move their agenda unfettered by their opponents. The electorate voted to maintain the status quo, leaving gridlock and the Sequester to move all sides to a crisis of their own making.

The Democrats figured out how to make gourmet lemonade from this pile of lemons, while the Republicans retreated into their Budget Bunker.

Democrats had the home field advantage. They had just spent two years painting Republicans as only interested in protecting the very wealthy. They also spent months building their case that the only thing wrong with the Federal Government was that it did not have enough money. The expiration of the Bush era tax cuts on January 1, 2013 allowed the first post-election battle to occur on turf most friendly to Democrats. Republicans were forced to give ground or lose all their ground on the revenue issue.

Sequester visuals also favor the Democrats. There are plenty of compelling back drops for scaring people into believing soldiers, first responders, teachers, daycare workers, and park rangers are going to vanish. Even though the actual Sequester legislation, the Budget Control Act of 2011, only sets general budget targets, both sides agreed to implement the bureaucratic equivalent of losing weight by cutting off fingers instead of dieting.

Republicans could have countered all of this. They had the capability. Senator Tom Coburn’s annual Waste Book detailed many ways to reduce hundred of billions in government spending without pain. Agency Inspector Generals and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) publish over 9,500 reports a year detailing over $650 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse. However, the GOP remains in their Budget Bunker, content to fall into the sequester impact trap by scrabbling to move funds around and making overly vague pronouncements about spending.

There are other missed opportunities. The Executive Branch normally has attrition of 60,000+ employees a year. Much of this occurs due to retirement. Currently, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has a retirement processing backlog of 41,103. There were an additional 20,374 retirement applications just in the month of February. This acceleration of aging and retiring federal civilian workers provides an historic opportunity to rethink positions and reduce costs. Does every retired worker need to be replaced? Is every layer of management (up to 23 layers in some agencies) really needed in the 21st Century? Can functions and offices be consolidated as staffs dwindle and information age technology improves span of control for supervisors?

The answer to all these questions is yes. However, only a few Republicans, notably Senators Tom Coburn and Rand Paul, are drawing attention to vacancies being posted since the Sequester. However, even here Republicans miss the point. They offer up low level front line positions for a hiring freeze when they should also be blocking new senior executives and managers who would not be missed and generate far more savings.

Republicans are squandering their precious few on air moments. There is no message discipline. What common points they do make either offer up conspiracy theories, blamestorming, or finding ways to protect the Defense Department. They refuse to admit that the Defense Department is just another bloated bureaucracy. By spending time protecting DOD waste they prove Obama’s case that any cut, not matter what size, is harmful.

Obama is playing the long game. He is not just looking at shaping the 2014 battlefield or even the 2016 one. Obama and the Democrats are using Sequester, and all the other budget battles, to reverse the Reagan Revolution. Reagan strategically shifted America’s political landscape when he declared, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government IS the problem." With every comment, every action, every minute, Obama and the Democrats are countering this with “Government is not just the solution to our problem it is our salvation for everything.”

Republicans need to leave their bunker and start offering up ideas and solutions that appeal to common sense and common ground.

9,528 Opportunities Ignored

America should be having a serious discussion on the size and cost of our Federal Government, and what to do about a debt burden that has already sailed our nation off the fiscal cliff. Instead, disinformation has buried what little integrity is left among the participants.

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) recently spoke on the Senate floor: "I am not going to keep cutting the discretionary budget, which by the way is not out of control, despite what you hear on Fox News."

There are many reasons why Senator Landrieu is wrong. In fact, there are 9,528 reasons. That is the approximate number of audits and investigations conducted by career employees during 2012 on federal programs, projects, agencies, and contracts. The General Accountability Office (GAO) issued 768 reports, which contained 1,807 recommendations for operational improvement. One can also glean from public documents approximately 8,760 audits and investigations conducted by the 73 Inspector General Offices among the cabinet departments and independent agencies of the Executive Branch.

Every one of these 9,528 efforts found waste, fraud, and abuse. Every one of these reports identified opportunities for improving operations and made specific recommendations. The Department of Labor’s Inspector General’s Office conducted 66 audits that identified $2.4 billion in waste. The office also opened 585 investigative cases, obtaining 633 indictments and 433 convictions. They also recovered $398 million that had been criminally diverted. There is similar documentation of mismanagement, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness within every report issued by the GAO and the 73 Inspectors Generals. In 2012, these reports documented over $650 billion in waste. That translates into at least $6.5 trillion in possible spending cuts, over the next ten years, without harming one legitimate beneficiary of government services.

It is time for every politician and pundit to admit that there is definitely “room for improvement” in the way the federal government manages our tax dollars. Tragically for America, very few of these 9,528 reports receive any public airing in Congress. Liberals do not want to admit there is “room for improvement” because that will pull the rug out from under their argument for more taxes. Conservatives do not want to admit there is “room for improvement” because that will pull the rug out from under their argument for ideological cuts. Conservatives would also have to admit that there is more than $100 billion wasted annually in the Defense Department. This waste has nothing to do with keeping America safe, in fact, it degrades our safety.

Everyone should be upset that even one penny of tax dollars is misspent. That goes for whether you love a program/project or hate it. Unfortunately, no politician or pundit is willing to rise above their partisan mud-wrestling to think about our country. In rare situations the level of corruption and dysfunction created a bipartisan mandate for strategic change. This happened at the General Services Administration in the early 1980s when years of multi-million dollar criminal activity, and 48 convictions, allowed for a top to bottom rethinking of the agency. The result reduced staff by 20,000 and saved $3 billion. This also happened in the House of Representatives in the mid-1990s when high profile scandals, and the first change in party control in forty years, allowed for a fundamental reinventing of Congressional operations. The result cut support staff by 48%, established financial integrity, and saved $148 million.

Times have become too partisan to start with strategically rethinking Executive functions and management. It would be horrendous to wait for epic scandal or corruption to trigger another brief moment of bipartisan cooperation. What we are left with is cajoling everyone to admit there is “room for improvement”. Senators and Congressmen have 9,528 reports, generated by objective, nonpolitical, professionals to guide where and how to cut waste. Once the recommendations are implemented, and the management improvements are in place, they can debate whether to reallocate the savings. In the meantime, America’s debt bomb will be partially defused without harming programs, services, or recipients.

Can we all agree that this would be a great way for Congress to spend the next two years?

...Pants on Fire

Elvis and reality have left the building.

The hyper-partisan rants over the fiscal cliff were just the warm-up act for the triple play looming on the horizon. The triple issues of reining-in the debt limit, resolving the sequester, and extending the FY2013 Continuing Resolution seem to require triple the hyperbole.

Obama and Congressional Democrats are filling the air waves with victorious declarations about already reducing the federal deficit by $2.4 trillion. There are many creative tunes being played for this Conga Line.

The first is the timetable. Those who trumpet the $2.4 trillion only whisper “over the next ten years”. The trillion dollar number sounds large until you compare it to total federal spending of $44 trillion over the next ten years. That is a “whopping” 5.4% reduction in total spending. This assumes that the current decisions somehow bind four future Congresses and the next President.

Let’s look at the spending “cuts”. Obama and his supporters cite the Budget Control Act of 2010, which reinstates some of the spending targets from the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act. This is supposedly reducing various discretionary expenditures by $850 billion over the next ten years. Unfortunately, for the past 28 years, the spending targets of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings has been systematically ignored while the federal budget has tripled in size.

Obama supporters also assert that Congressional inaction and gridlock have resulted in Continuing Resolutions that leveled-off spending for a ten-year savings of $585 billion or $58.5 billion a year. This is creative bookkeeping at its best. Just one appropriation bill pushing for more than an inflationary increase in spending would erase these bogus budget savings.

Let’s take a moment to discuss inflation. Buried deep in the analytical tables of the Federal Budget is something called the “Current Services Analysis”. This is where zero-based budgets of the past went to die. “Current Services” is what budgeting should be, but never is. It is how much it would cost for the Federal Government to do exactly next year what it did the pervious year factoring in inflation escalators built into contracts and projects. This tracks to every person, project, program, office, vehicle, and building. The dirty little secret of Washington is that no one uses these numbers. The annual baseline offered by the Administration is well above “Current Services”. Both parties, while in the White House, play this game. Congress and interest groups then wail about budgets being cut when the Administration’s budget request is reduced even though these cuts never fully reduce the increase above “Current Services”. Thus spending ratchets higher no matter who is in charge.

This brings us to “Sequestration”. This $1.2 trillion over the next ten years poison pill of spending cuts was never designed to be real. Back in the summer of 2011, when raising the debt ceiling became a policy act instead of an administrative one, Congress and the Administration agreed to a “doomsday option” – the Sequester. The Sequester was designed to be so horrific that no one would ever want it to occur – thus forcing a real budget solution. Since everyone decided to avoid a real solution the Sequester looms large on the near horizon. Congress can always reverse itself and eliminate the Sequester with a “we were just kidding” floor vote. So trumpeting the Sequester as part of the $2.4 trillion over the next ten years reduction is also bending reality.

The other part of the victory dance is taking more money from Americans and giving it to the federal government. Believing that the federal government’s major problem is lack of our money is foundational to the Administration and Congressional Democrats. The recent tax increase generates $630 billion over the next ten years. In the past, any increase in federal receipts removed pressure to cut spending while increasing the urge to spend more.

The final assertion is that ripple effects of all these “savings” will reduce interest paid on the national debt $300 billion over the next ten years have as much to do with international money markets as they do on the total balance owed.

America braces for the next act in this most irresponsible fiscal fantasy.

FISCAL FOLLIES

Washington policy officials and pundits take note – you have all flunked Governing 101, Management 101, Civil Discourse 101, Budgeting 101, Accountability 101, and Reality 101. Republicans also failed Communications 101 & Politics 101. Democrats passed these courses with honors in creative fiction writing.

No one is telling the truth about anything relating to the Fiscal Cliff. Americans will begin suffering from Washington’s mass delusion and hysteria by mid January 2012. Wage earners will see a reduction in take home pay with their first pay checks. Some government contractors will get termination notices around the same time because of the consciously severe cuts under the Sequester.

The damage from going over the Fiscal Cliff will remain limited because of the possibility of retroactive fixes being dated back to January 1, 2013. However, this expectation unravels at the end of February if there is no budget deal. Even a superficial, “kick the can down the road again” deal would avoid this expectation cliff. This gives everyone two months to do something before the bottom really falls out.

How did America get in this mess?

Blame the Republicans – starting in 1995, the Republicans in Congress could have held wall-to-wall hearings exposing trillions of dollars in ongoing waste, fraud, and abuse. Mountains of Inspector General Reports, Government Accountability Office Reports, and watch dog organization reports would have been easy pickings for years. By exposing the mind-boggling array of how Americans’ money is squandered would have built a mandate for real change. Republicans never pursued this course. In fact, they remained tongue-tied on how to cut spending through the 2012 elections. When they did offer ideas, they went for ideological cuts, like Public Broadcasting.

Republicans also made every effort to box themselves into a stereotype of defending the rich and abandoning the poor. They never explained that every penny wasted hurts everyone. These pennies include nearly $1 trillion a year in outrageous tax loopholes for corporations, the wealthy, and even foreign gamblers.

Blame the Democrats – the Democrats have refused to focus on spending because the moment they acknowledge that spending can be cut they lose their argument that the federal government needs more of our money. They made budget cutting a partisan issue. This is truly sad for America. Way back in the 1970s, Senator Proxmire (D-WI) issued “Gold Fleece Awards” exposing government waste. Liberal journalists like Jack Anderson railed against waste where ever it was found. Even the National Enquirer had fun with “goofy grants”. Waste was waste and the public embraced aggressive oversight across the political spectrum. This all ended during the Administration of George HW Bush when Democrats realized extorting more taxes required silence on how the money was really being spent.

Blame the media – reporters and commentators love a crisis. They embrace false deadlines and refuse to discuss that these deadlines are based upon fiction, because their countdown clocks and their breathlessly chasing after every rumor attracts viewers and readers. There is no incentive for telling the truth - that everything could be avoided within seconds if everyone sobered up and grew-up.

America is confronted with a parade of “naked emperors” who trumpet that what they are doing is real, and that we are fools if we do not comprehend how hard it is to get off the treadmill of more debt, more taxes, and more spending. Who will be the first voice in the crowd to begin laughing at them and demanding honesty?

Madness

To understand the current deadlock on the Fiscal Cliff one should read Barbara Tuchman’s masterpiece “The Guns of August”.

http://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-Outbreak/dp/0345476093

In “The Guns of August” Tuchman vividly describes how institutionalized bias and determinism led to an avoidable world war and unnecessary carnage.  Her work offers lessons for the current political combatants, who are spending their time digging deeper trenches rather than finding common ground.

The Republican world view –

Republicans assumed that they would be welcoming the incoming Romney Administration and a new Republican majority in the U.S. Senate.  From this vantage point spending and taxes would be cut and entitlements would be reformed.  How they were going to get past January 1, 2013 to the promised land of the Romney era on January 20, 2013 was never discussed.  How the voters were supposed to support a new Republican era based upon no details was also left off the table.  What details there were included a tepid embrace of the “Ryan Plan”, cherry picking of the Bowles Simpson plan, some partisan swipes at Public Broadcasting, an overall sense that the current tax code was just fine as is, and an unwavering belief that there is not one penny of waste or inefficiency in the Defense Department.

Was it possible that Congressional Republicans hoped that anti-Obama barrages from the movie “2016”, Fox News, and conservative talk radio would get them over the finish line?  How would they have sorted things out had victory been theirs? 

The Democratic world view –

Democrats assumed that Obama would win by a landslide allowing them to retake the House of Representatives and surge to 60+ seats in the Senate.  They assumed Republicans would be so shell-shocked by their overwhelming defeat that there would be no effective opposition to whatever the Democrats wanted to do.  The Democrats firmly believe that the main problem with the federal government is that it does not have enough money.  They also believe that the tax code’s main deficiency is that it does not take enough money from people making over $250,000.  Coupled with this is a fundamental orthodoxy that the federal government is a well oiled efficient machine that only wastes money in the Defense Department, that the fiscal cliff is only real when discussing revenue, and that the economic and moral future of America depends on expanding government’s role.

Just like the English, French, Germans, and Russians in the years leading to World War I, the opposing political forces in Washington, DC, assume their facts are facts no matter the real facts. They also assume that the tactics they have used over the previous decades are sufficient to help them prevail in changing circumstances.  The devastation of August 1914 proved the madness of the political and military leadership among the great powers.  The gridlock and impending chaos of December 2012 is now proving the undoing of the political parties and eliminating the last shred of trust Americans hold for their elected officials. 

The Mayan Calendar predicts the end of their 13^th b'ak'tun on December 21, 2012.  America’s fiscal cliff calendar runs out on midnight December 31, 2012.  Only time will tell which date denotes the end of an era.

Raising Revenue Responsibly

This article was published on the History News Network

 http://hnn.us/articles/how-solve-fiscal-cliff-problem-responsibly

There are three legs to the stool of Federal Fiscal Solvency - Cut spending, entitlement reform, and revenue generation. Few of the Washington power players are realistically discussing any of these, but revenue has generated the most polarized rhetoric.

All our lives are impacted by the way our Federal Government raises the $2.9 trillion it needs to function. That is why it is important that any revenue element of a “Fiscal Cliff” deal is weighed not only for the amount, but for its “tax incidence”.

“Tax incidence” charts the various ways government amasses its revenue and how these ways impact individuals, industries, demographics, and “geographics”. Our current “progressive rate” income tax system and the strategic reform proposals of the flat tax, fair tax, and Value Added Tax (VAT) all generate significantly different impacts on our individual spending habits and our overall national economy.

Tax policy punishes or promotes economic activity either with intended or unintended consequences. Government tax policy has become social policy, resulting in an amazingly complex and voluminous tax code. The federal tax code is over 5.6 million words or 3,458 pages – seven times longer than the Bible, depending on the edition. Each page, sentence, phrase, and punctuation of this Tax Code, and its countless regulations, instructions, and manuals, determine winners and losers within the economy. These regulations are further subject to equally voluminous interpretation through administrative and judicial rulings.

There are nearly an infinite number of ways individuals, companies, and an array of other entities, can navigate this tax landscape. Lost in this morass is the original intent for many of these pathways and how they are supposed to positively guide economic behavior while raising desired revenue.

Democrats obsess over raising tax rates on the wealthy, and Republicans remain vague about “tax reform”. Thankfully, one person has conducted a detailed review of the Federal Tax Code and found $992 billion in possible tax saving/new revenue over the next ten years – without raising tax rates.

In July 2011, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) issued his “Back in Black” report. http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/?p=deficit-reduction

“Back in Black” is a 624-page detailed, line by line, analysis of how the Federal Government can cut waste, achieve operational efficiency, and find the revenue needed to get out of debt.

Coburn’s final section (pages 558-624) addresses how decades of tax policy decisions have created a multitude of opportunities for special interests to avoid taxes, or obtain tax incentives and subsidies, while harming the general populace (pushing the tax burden onto others and driving up the debt).

Reviewing some of Senator Coburn’s examples of how our tax code runs amok is instructive and sobering. Coburn’s ideas represent the most economically neutral opportunities for new revenue and should be part of any strategic “Fiscal Cliff” agreement.

Subsidizing millionaires - Individuals with over a million dollars in income benefit from more than $7 billion in tax relief annually through the mortgage interest deduction. Under current law, homeowners can deduct the interest paid on home mortgages for primary residences and vacation homes loans of up to $1 million, resulting in lost federal revenue of nearly $88 billion. Even a yacht can be considered a second residence—as long as the luxury boat has a “sleeping, cooking, and toilet facility” and an individual lives in it for at least two weeks a year.

Subsidizing foreigner gamblers - Americans must pay taxes on their winnings at horse and dog tracks in the United States, but not foreigners. This deprives the Federal Government of $30 million over the next ten years.

Subsidizing Hollywood – In order to encourage Hollywood to produce feature films and television programs in the United States, entertainment companies may deduct up to $15 million in certain costs associated with the production of television episodes and movies where at least 75 percent of the compensation costs are for work performed on U.S. soil. Allowing Hollywood to benefit from this accelerated cost recovery results in federal revenue losses of at least $30 million a year.

Allowing fraud - Within the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC), individuals without a valid Social Security Number (SSN) claim $1.780 billion a year, or $17.8 billion over ten years. Congress has not provided the IRS with adequate authority to deny these fraudulent claimants.

No documented impact – The 1993 Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) is supposed to hold every federal activity accountable for actually achieving intended results. GPRA is routinely ignored, not only for federal expenditures, but for tax expenditures. Two examples are Empowerment Zones (EZs) and Renewal Communities (RCs). EZs and RCs are federally designated poverty or distressed areas where businesses and local governments receive federal grants and tax incentives in exchange for locating and developing in these zones. Nearly $1.8 billion in grant incentives provided to EZs and RCs have been allocated since 1993. However, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Inspector General at Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have not found any tangible improvement in community outcomes.

Bailouts without end - The IRS has excluded major Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) recipients from certain tax obligations for potentially the next 20 years. These TARP recipients may avoid paying more than $90 billion combined in taxes because of this special tax treatment. This includes AIG, which has accumulated over $25.6 billion in carry-forwards and other tax-deferred assets; New GM, which will avoid as much as $45.4 billion in taxes because of the Treasury Department‘s exemptions; and Citi, which will use $23.2 billion in carry-forwards and other credit carryovers in just one year.

Malfeasance - The Internal Revenue Service found nearly 100,000 civilian federal employees were delinquent on their federal income taxes, owing over $1 billion in unpaid federal income taxes. The federal government has also failed to collect more than $62 billion in penalties owed by swindlers, criminals and others cited for violating federal laws and regulations and this amount has increased dramatically.

It is truly sad that none of these issues were discussed during the 2012 campaign. Republicans, in particular, could have avoided being branded as coddling millionaires. Each side is equally guilty of over politicizing these serious management and economic issues. The fact that Senator Coburn’s published report has remained in the policy wilderness for the last seventeen months is unconscionable.

Conservatives at a crossroads: Harold Hill vs. William F. Buckley

Published in Politico
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/84101.html
By: Scot Faulkner and Jonathan Riehl


The GOP’s trouncing has triggered a wave of “soul searching” typical in its post-election timing, but more significant in its impact for our politics and for the conservative movement — if there is one. We think not. The conservative crisis of 2012 is not just a crisis of messaging; it is a crisis of conscience.


The cast of characters now presenting themselves as conservative leaders bear nothing in common with the intellectual cadre that brought the movement to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. For months we watched in horror as a parade of Harold Hill hucksters mouthed empty tea party phraseology, followed the advice of Dick Morris and Karl Rove, and parroted Frank Luntz’s magic words — all the while selling a boy’s band that simply does not exist. Their polls, their news, their understanding of America, are a façade. The people of River City — the conservative base — were willingly sold a bill of goods. They got their reality check on Nov. 6.

Like the traveling salesman from “The Music Man,” the right’s media echo chamber has captivated the townsfolk. It is full of rapid-fire talkers, fearless pugilists and moralistic re-enforcers. To be clear, media access and its persuasive power have always been central to the conservative cause. But how far we have come from the days when William F. Buckley, Jr. hosted a PBS program called “Firing Line,” where conservatives of all stripes, liberal intellectuals and policymakers debated issues in depth. Today the conservative base prefers the endless recitation of things it already believes.

In a larger sense, the problem extends far beyond the “dumbing down” of a noble policy movement into cartoonish diatribes mouthed by one-dimensional personalities. It’s not about bad messaging. It’s the lack of any coherent framework or foundation for that message.

The movement, once a coalition of cold warriors, traditionalists and free marketeers, no longer exists. Buckley did not preach an ideology; he helped maintain a fusion of different factions. The key players, and candidates, came from very different camps but were united in a fundamental understanding of the limited role of government and the power of the individual. These groups often disagreed. But their differences were worked out through reasoned debate and exchange, guided by a 300-year provenance dating to John Locke and earlier.

What we see today, in contrast, is a dialogue of empty sets of talking points with no intellectual content or critical thinking to back them up — epitomized by Mitt Romney’s foundationless candidacy that pandered to a shrinking and ideologically extreme base. But conservatism, as it was understood by those who built the movement in the postwar years, was never an ideology. The great conservative philosopher Russell Kirk wrote in the early days that properly understood conservatism is not an ideology, but rather “a mood.”

Ideology and ideologues were imported into the party in recent years, especially by extreme theocratic types whose embrace of an intrusive Big Government is in fact antithetical to Republicanism and conservatism. Others, including the neoconservatives, embrace expanding government for their adventurist war agenda abroad and anti-libertarian activism at home.

A different conservative intellectual legacy extends back to Edmund Burke and beyond, a legacy emphasizing the long view over the short one, which thrived not on political marching orders but on debate and diversity. It is a tradition that dates to the dawn of Western civilization and the invention of democracy grounded in the practice of rhetoric. The modern conservative media machine, in its vapid self-congratulation, is a total negation of this tradition. While a few survivors still try nobly to maintain the real conservative tradition, their voices are drowned out by those who want to blame the media, demographics, Obama flimflams, and anything else — except themselves.

The two authors here come from different generations and our own politics are not in line with each other all of the time. Still, we have both studied conservatism, and share an admiration for the movement built over the past 60 years. We are saddened to observe what has become of its legacy — and its cast of pretenders to the throne. If you are a Republican, it is a sad day for your party and the movement that built it. If you are a believer in American democracy, it is a sad day for the country.

Scot Faulkner was Director of Personnel for Reagan-Bush 1980 and Chief Administrative Officer of the U.S. House of Representatives under Speaker Newt Gingrich. Jonathan Riehl, J.D., Ph.D., is a communications consultant for political campaigns and national nonprofit organizations.

What were they thinking?

Elephants supposed to “never forget”, but do they ever learn? They didn’t learn much from being defeated in 2008 [see http://citizenoversight.blogspot.com/2008/11/perdition.html  ]


The 2012 elections provide a new cornucopia of lessons learned. Only time will tell if any of them sink in. Here are just a few of them…

Getting out the Vote
Project ORCA was a dismal failure. It was supposed to either supplement or supplant local Republican GOTV efforts. It did neither. Poorly trained and clueless ORCA workers siphoned resources away from real voter efforts. Worse – ORCA was an ill-conceived band-aid for the decades-long decline of Republican precinct capabilities.

Democrats figured out years ago that early voting would be a boon to their cause. Republican leaders hung onto getting out their vote on Election Day – ceding up to thirty days of voting opportunities to the Democrats. Worse – if Republican rhetoric is to be believed – that their supporters work for a living and are family focused – then why assume that these busy working people will either get up early to stand in long voter lines before going to work, or delay being with their families after work to stand in long voter lines? OCRA not only shrunk GOP voting efforts to one day – it shrunk it to the first and last hours of the voting day. No wonder 3 million less Republicans voted in 2012 than 2008.

Voter Fraud
There is always some voter fraud. This happens in the original voter registration or in counting the votes. Republicans chose to ignore these facts to focus on possible irregularities during actual voting. Countless days and weeks of activism, along with mountains of political capital, was spent on solving the one part of the process that worked. Imagine if all this Republican effort was spent on early voting. It also gave the Main Stream Media (MSM) an easy and ongoing target to pummel the GOP.

War on Women/Gays/Science/Privacy
No matter how much conservative talk radio and Fox News denies it, there are large swaths of Republican activists and elected officials, especially at the state level, who yearn for the 10th Century over the 21st. It is a fundamental contradiction to real conservatism and Republicanism to selectively promote unwarranted and aggressive government intervention into personal lives. You cannot assert there is either no or only a limited role for government in society and then create a huge “BUT” flashing in neon lights for imposing narrow theocratic-based dogma.

Originally, faith-based activists within the conservative and Republican movements stood for getting liberal dogma out of schools, homes, and churches. Sometime in the late 1980s things flipped around to replacing left-wing onerous government interventions with right wing ones. Outbursts by Republican Senate candidates were not isolated incidents. They were a mere sampling of a tragically obtuse thread of anti-intellectual totalitarianism that undermines both the movement and the party.

It is long overdue for Republican and conservative leaders to have their own “Sister Souljah” moment with fanatical theocrats. This moment is named for the pivotal Bill Clinton speech where he sealed-off racial hatred in rap music from mainstream public discourse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment

Bush Legacy
The Bush dynasty diverted the conservative movement and the Republican Party into an agnostic pandering abyss. [See my earlier post http://citizenoversight.blogspot.com/2012/06/wrong-track.html  ]

Bush 41 purged conservatives from the Executive branch, raised taxes, expanded government, bungled the end of the Cold War, bungled Iraq, and undermined everything Reagan stood for. Why revere him?

Bush 43 turned conservativism and Republicanism into micro-targeted pandering mush. He bungled Afghanistan, launched a totally unnecessary and dilatory war in Iraq, reduced America’s influence in the rest of the world to fixate on Iraq, undermined civil liberties, and expanded government. Why revere him?

Conservatives and Republicans can and should revere true the leaders of our movement as timeless role models – Presidents Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Coolidge, Reagan; intellectual leaders Buckley, Goldwater, and countless other thinkers ranging back to the Enlightenment. None were perfect, and true independent thought requires critically assessing their legacies, but their writings, speeches, and actions will always remain the touch stones from which 21st Century conservatives and Republicans get their bearings.

A few words about Romney

Romney could have won. His flawed campaign was no where near the fool’s errand of McCain 2008. However, there were numerous opportunities lost and self-inflicted wounds that sank him.

No theme – the conventional wisdom was that 2012 had to be about Obama or Romney would lose. How many think 1980 was only about Carter? Americans in 2012 felt powerless. They were being harmed by an out of control economy. They feared a world spinning out of control. They no longer trusted an unaccountable government. Romney could have spoken to these issues, but didn’t.

Bain – What the federal government needs most are Bain-like teams tearing apart, rethinking, and restructuring every agency and program. Romney could have proudly asserted his value proposition of committing to this long overdue weeding of the federal garden. Instead, he ran from Bain and its positive impacts, ceding the field for his opponents to demonize his strongest credential. When pressed on cutting federal programs Romney opted for going after Big Bird instead of using the question to discuss $650 billion in annually documented waste and how his management background could do something real.

Rope a dope – Why did Romney allow Obama to carpet bomb him from April through August? This period of negative ads created a deficit that was almost insurmountable. Why didn’t Romney run ads about his saving the Olympic movement during the Olympics? Why did he make this historic accomplishment a pre-primetime throw-away at the National Convention? Why did it take a pre-convention Fox news interview at his home to finally show he was a normal human? It is sad that highly intelligent and successful Republican business people (Steve Forbes, Pete DuPont, and now Mitt Romney) cannot connect with the party of business. They should all go back and read about how successful utility tycoon Wendell Willkie became a folk hero during his presidential run in 1940.

Class warfare – Republicans chided Obama and the Democrats for fermenting class warfare. Why oh why then did Romney spew his own version of class warfare? “47%” was a gift that kept on giving to the MSM and the Democrats. First, who in their right mind today, thinks that in this world of smart phones anything they do or say outside of their own home will not be documented and shared if it is deemed stupid enough? The “47%” comment is the antithesis of the type of empowering and inclusive conservatism espoused by the late Rep. Jack Kemp. His world view was that everyone can and will become a conservative once they realize how the free market is in their best interest. This positive message has been drowned out by vapid negativity among the so-called conservative and Republican leaders.

2016 & Beyond
There remains a small hope that (1) Obama and the Democrats will overplay their hand, creating backlashes and opportunities, and (2) that the next generation of Republican leaders – Jindal, Christie, Martinez, Fallin, Haley, Rubio, and others at all levels of government, learn from the past while shaping the future.

Breaking Bad – Avoiding the Fiscal Cliff

A shorter verison of this column appeared in the Washington Examiner

http://washingtonexaminer.com/breaking-bad-avoiding-the-fiscal-cliff/article/2512227

The impending “fiscal cliff” is the most thoroughly predicted disaster since the end of the Mayan Calendar. The problem is no one is willing to design and implement a real solution that has any chance of bipartisan support.

The cycle of dysfunction has existed for decades. The Federal Budget Act of 1974 created what was supposed to be a rational process for planning, approving, and implementing government spending. It quickly became an empty paper exercise as appropriations ignored the Budget Resolutions. When the difference became embarrassingly stark, the Senate simply gave up on passing one at all. Additional budget reform legislation was passed and immediately ignored. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, Budget Reconciliation, and the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), all gather dust. Annual budget deals, and continuing resolutions, put off the day of reckoning. Reagan’s 1982 budget deal resulted in more revenue and no spending cuts.

Administrations annually create a new budget. Hidden inside the hundreds of pages is the “Current Services Budget”, or “Baseline”. This outlines how much it costs to maintain existing services at current levels. It factors in various cost drivers - cost of living increases, escalation clauses in contracts, etc. Budget battles are fought over the increase above current service levels. When officials propose budget cuts they are talking about cutting the increase, not cutting current service funding levels. Therefore, there is a built in “ratchet effect” to expanding government spending.

The latest looming cliff is supposed to wrench the Washington policy players out of denial and avoidance, forcing them to actually do something real. This will not happen unless certain things change.

Start with the basics – Use the “Current Service Analysis” levels as the budget framework. Administration and opposing budgets can be aspirations compared against the true baseline. That will level the playing field and keep everyone honest about what is really an increase and what is really a reduction.

Rise above ideology - Both Democrats and Republicans contributed to the cliff. Both sides spend like there is no tomorrow. Both sides embrace “sacred cows”. Both sides live in a world where their people are angels and their opponents are demons. A good first step is to admit that each side has some good ideas and each side has looney ones.

Democrats need to understand that even their most cherished domestic assistance programs are riddled with waste and inefficiency. Republicans need to realize that the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are just as bloated and dysfunctional as the liberal programs they assail.

Make Inspector Generals and the GAO “rock stars” – The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has 3,100 employees. There are also 73 Inspector General Offices embedded in Cabinet Departments and major agencies. All these offices are filled with highly trained, dedicated, objective civil servants who document waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency as well as recommend actions to eradicate and prevent future squandering of public resources. They document over $650 billion in waste annually. That is $6.5 trillion in cost avoidance and direct spending reductions over the ten years everyone uses to discuss the fiscal cliff. Except for a rare instance, these reports, and their detailed recommendations, are universally ignored.

The next Congress will be as grid locked as the last few. Partisan votes in the House will die in a Senate unable to muster sixty votes to move legislation. Then there are possible White House vetoes.

Therefore, why not check ideology at the door and embrace stewarding public funds? One hopes overwhelming numbers of Members from both parties, as well as the White House, would agree that waste is waste. Pass budget bills that specifically mandate GAO and IG recommendations are implemented and corresponding amounts of documented waste, fraud, and abuse are cut from programs and agencies. Resurrecting effective Congressional Oversight is long over due.

Having everyone discover that they can all agree on something will shift from the culture of confrontation to a culture of collaboration. Beginning swimmers start in the shallow end of a pool and then move into deeper waters as their skills and confidence improve. Congress and the White House could move into more complex and contentious waters as their ability to respectfully and constructively disagree improves.

Allow for public input - “Crowd sourcing” is being successfully used in several European countries to harness collective wisdom for public policy. Using either an ongoing “crowd sourcing” process, or an annual referendum tied to tax returns (like the Presidential Campaign fund check-off), citizens could either identify what to cut or what to fund. Their input would initially be advisory and mature into binding guidance as seriousness and sincerity are displayed by all involved.

If Congress, the White House, the agencies, and the media, do not explore these ideas, America faces a crisis that will dwarf the chaos in Greece.

[Scot Faulkner was Chief Administrative Officer for the U.S. House of Representatives. http://citizenoversight.blogspot.com/]



Deficit Disorder

The following was written for the History News Network.

http://hnn.us/articles/deficit-disorder

“We are heading for the fiscal cliff!” is the current warning in political circles. Unfortunately, Washington policy makers are like Wile-E-Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons – we are already over this fiscal cliff – but few people have looked down.


How did the Federal Government end up in this situation? How can we scramble back on to solid ground?

Both answers are complex and long term.
How did we end up over the fiscal cliff?

Our reality check starts with the progressive era [1877-1920]. The definitive book on this era is Robert H. Wiebe’s brilliant The Search of Order. His masterful work reviewed how and why the Progressive Movement began and then explains how this complex movement proceeded to shape the politics of the 20th century.

Wiebe discusses how President Woodrow Wilson formulated the “New Freedom” to bring together all the diverse interests and agendas of the emerging factions within the Progressive movement:

“Scarcely a significant question of the era did not fall somewhere within its scope, and no well-organized group was denied...the Democrats could take pride in a most dexterous management. The new majority had proved surprisingly sensitive to organized pressures from all sources, and the President had shown exceptional talent for administrative compromise, the essence of bureaucratic leadership.” [1]

Wiebe then writes:

“In Washington and in the major cities, executive direction was an accomplished fact by the war years [1914-1918]. Although many of the bureaus and departments of the progressive era had yet to define their functions precisely, they were at least entrenched. Nineteen sixteen marked “the completion of the federal scientific establishment” covering industry, agriculture, and an assortment of public services, and much the same was true of the basic regulatory mechanisms in both Federal and state governments” [2]

Wiebe summarizes the legacy of the era: “Progressivism contained an inherent expansive thrust, partly from its need for ever-broader legislation, partly from its all-conquering optimism, but even more from its faith in method. If the right technique guaranteed the right results, no problem, whatever the size and scope, could withstand its magic.” [3]

For those in the TEA Party who assert we must “reverse the last four years”, they need to realize that lasting governmental change requires addressing core dogma from the last 98 years.

The New Deal of the 1930s took the Progressives’ governmental expansionist concept even further. President Franklin Roosevelt instilled into the maturing Progressive movement his belief that “it was the permanent duty of modern government to exert its managerial hand in widespread places to regulate, compensate, and control, protecting the public interest and ensuring stability along with progress.” [4]. Amity Shlaes’ comprehensive history of the New Deal goes into even more detail on how the political culture of America fundamentally shifted toward institutionalized statism. [5]

This meant that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the 1960s and Jimmy Carter’s domestic activism of the 1970s were simply logical outgrowths of an already solidly institutionalized core. Over the decades this righteous view for government activism was left in the hands of an ever larger and less accountable career bureaucracy. The idealism of the Progressives morphed into expanding governmental efforts regardless of results.

Johnson’s Great Society had one more legacy – entitlements. Except for Social Security, which is arguably a pension program based on designated contributions, Congress had to annually appropriate funds for all government activities. The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare and Medicaid as entitlements. This meant that federal funds are automatically allocated without Congressional action, based upon projected eligibility. This added a booster rocket to America’s journey over the fiscal cliff.

These stunning facts mean that the elements of the modern governmental culture had decades to grow, refine, and entrench themselves. To confront the reality of America’s modern bureaucratic state, now in its fourth generation, requires a long-term struggle.

No one election, or series of elections, will fully reverse this entrenched public sector culture. Conservatives and Republicans focus on tactical not strategic ends. These political players can achieve victories for or against various policies, but everything they do can be swept away with the next vote. Through it all the entrenched bureaucracy lives on. It was like a great ocean. The top may be turbulent and storms may churn the top few feet, but in the miles of water below these upper reaches, life goes on, unaffected. Few know what lies below these top few feet. Even less understand how institutionalized and embedded this core culture has become. Fewer still have the knowledge, or the stamina, to confront and vanquish it.

As a member of the Reagan Transition Team of 1980-81, I had a front row seat for viewing this phenomenon. Hundreds of conservative activists poured into the transition and then fanned-out into the agencies. Volumes of reports and recommendations lined the reference center at the Transition Headquarters. Major think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, published comprehensive manifestos and circulated them to the new elected and appointed officials. Conservative-focused revolutionary fervor permeated the air at every Washington cocktail party and political strategy meeting.

The sad reality is that an overwhelming number of those great ideas died in someone’s in box. Either a gatekeeper for a powerful agency head or a career head of a program simply ignored the input and decided to not pass it on. Not a one of these nameless public servants was ever held accountable for their acts of unilateral veto. Great political and policy minds spent the eight years of the Reagan Administration trying to figure out why their domestic revolution did not happen. To this day no one has fully analyzed how the failure to effectively plan and control administrative implementation contributed to its demise.

It will take a diverse group of committed revolutionaries to finally perfect methods of changing entrenched bureaucracies. Some of these successes were compiled by David Osborne in his groundbreaking book, Reinventing Government [6], and his follow-up book, Banishing Bureaucracy [7]. Yet, while citizens and public officials outside the Washington beltway have finally begun to rethink the role of government in their lives, and actually make substantive changes, the federal government remains unchanged. In Washington, only the names of the top officials and their rhetoric change. In the miles of bureaucratic ocean beneath them, the cycle of life continues as unaffected as ever.
How do we get back on solid ground?

Hyper-partisanship has created a level of government gridlock not seen since the days before the American Civil War. Even facts are created and filtered through a partisan prism.

All sides in this hyper-partisan environment refuse to cede credibility or rational thought to those with whom they disagree. Even those who seek a middle ground remain oblivious to the structural challenges that need to be overcome if America is to pull back from the fiscal precipice.

Budgeting is only part of governing. This was clear from the debt battles of 2011 and those that lie ahead. Those in the budget policy arena think that macro-level spending targets and pronouncements will turn things around. They forget that the operation of the Federal government is made-up of minute to minute micro-decisions made by over four million functionaries. [8] Winning their sincere commitment to reining in government spending and rationally managing public resources will only occur if they embrace a completely new approach to leading the Executive Branch.

The first step is to understand that most government workers want to be left alone. They will oppose any disruption of their daily routine in countless ways. The most insidious is “malicious compliance”. This is when a functionary takes policy or management guidance to a logical extreme with the intention of creating failure. This happens all the time. Front line service personnel are laid-off or deprived resources with the intention of causing the most pain for those directly impacted by government. This causes a public and/or media backlash against the cuts or reforms. The functionaries remain untouched and wait for their policy leaders in the Executive and Legislative Branches to “come to their senses” and retreat from the initiative in question.

Recently, “malicious compliance” combined with “street theater” as the National Park Service staged a small crisis to convince the public that budget cuts were already harming operations. During a tour at a National Park, the grass was not mowed in the tour area. The ranger conducting the tour repeatedly explained that this unsightly unmowed grass was because of recent budget cuts. Three days later the grass was perfectly mowed. There was no real budget issue, but a vivid visual was intentionally embedded in those on that tour.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) recently unearthed a government-wide effort at “malicious compliance”: “In total, the federal government is projected to end 2012 with more than $2 trillion in unexpended funds that will be carried over to next year, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. While more than two-thirds of this amount is obligated for specific purposes, $687 billion remains unobligated, meaning it is essentially money for nothing.” [9]

Remember that the next time Congressional leaders anguish over how to cut just $60 billion a year from the Federal Budget.

In addition to unexpended balances there are nearly $500 billion a year in waste documented by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the 73 Inspector General offices [10]. Few, if any, of these thousands of detailed findings and recommendations are ever acted upon.

Remember that the next time a pundit talks about how any sized cut from a given program, department, or agency will cripple America.

Another aspect of government managerial dysfunction borders on malfeasance. This is the amount of inefficiency built into every endeavor.

Back in 1978, my Master’s thesis analyzed social expenditures for Native Americans on three reservations in northern Minnesota for FY77. In that fiscal year, the federal government poured $70,384,937 into these reservations on behalf of their 8,153 inhabitants. When all those funds rattled through the labyrinth of administrative layers and duplicative offices the Native Americans benefited at only $991 per capita, 11.5 percent of the original value. The rest had disappeared in administrative overhead, duplication of effort, and basic mismanagement. In essence, $62.3 million taxpayer dollars, 88.5 percent of the total, went to benefit government workers and contractors, not the Native Americans. The tribal leaders I interviewed described this phenomenon as “White Tape.” [11]

While some Federal programs may provide more than 11.5 percent of value for effort, it gives one pause about the stewardship of our public resources.

One would think that anyone truly supportive of a given program would be appalled that even one penny was squandered. The ugly truth is that politicians, across the ideological spectrum, would rather rally around sending good money after bad, than manage what they have.

Those who govern us need to be honest with us. Solving America’s fiscal problems is a matter of will, not way. Politicians and pundits need to admit that they really would rather have America wastefully spend itself into oblivion than to take on the unglamorous and very hard task of reforming government operations.

There is another way. A President could lead a top to bottom recreation of how government operates. This would not be another lengthy study that is ignored, but rather sending in fully empowered teams of skilled managers to immediately change things, real time, on an office by office, program by program, day by day, action-oriented basis. Their mandate would be the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) [12], which has been around since 1993 and has been routinely ignored. If properly enforced, and by preventing “malicious compliance”, GPRA can be the battering ram used by a President and his teams to fundamentally and permanently make over the Federal Government.

[Mr. Faulkner was Chief Administrative Officer for the U.S. House of Representatives and served as a federal executive during all eight years of the Reagan Administration.]

NOTES

[1] Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877-1920. (Hill and Wang, New York, 1967), page 221. http://www.amazon.com/Search-Order-1877-1920-Robert-Wiebe/dp/0809001047/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345923643&sr=1-1&keywords=Robert+H.+Wiebe

[2] Ibid., pages 294-295.

[3] Ibid., page 198.

[4] Otis Graham, Jr., Toward A Planned Society; From Roosevelt to Nixon, (Oxford University Press, New York, 1977), page 21. http://www.amazon.com/Toward-Planned-Society-Roosevelt-Nixon/dp/0195019857/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345923613&sr=1-5&keywords=Otis+Graham%2C+Jr

[5] Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (Harper, New York, 2007) http://www.amazon.com/The-Forgotten-Man-History-Depression/dp/0066211700

[6] David Osborne, (Plume / Penguin Books, 1993) Reinventing Government: How The Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming The Public Sector http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Government-Enrepreneurial-Spirit-Transforming/dp/B000IWAV2C/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345923791&sr=1-4&keywords=David+Osborne+Reinventing+Government

[7] David Osborne, Banishing Bureaucracy (Plume / Penguin Books, 2005). http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=David+Osborne+Banishing+Bureaucracy

[8] http://www.opm.gov/feddata/historicaltables/totalgovernmentsince1962.asp

[9] http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=612f09e3-e950-480e-84f8-1e54d2e6bc30

[10] http://citizenoversight.blogspot.com/2012/04/federal-budget-inferno.html

[11] Scot Faulkner, unpublished manuscript: “The Government Labyrinth: The Delivery of Indian Social Programs in the Seventh District of Minnesota”; American University, March 1978.

[12] http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/mgmt-gpra/index-gpra

Republicans in Freefall

This was published in The Washington Times

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jun/03/opinion-republicans-in-freefall/

Things could not be bleaker for the Republican Party. Its fund raising fell apart over a year ago as a backlash to immigration reform. Regularly, President Bush sets new record lows for how much a modern president can be disliked and how completely his policies can be rejected. Three special election defeats in Republican strongholds are proving that there will be no safe-havens in November. The latest polls show voters preferring Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 53 percent to 32 percent. This is nearly twice the deficit the Republicans faced going into the disastrous 2006 elections.

This is a portrait of a party in freefall, yet many Republicans remain in denial. They grasp at straws about America’s racial undercurrents and the Democratic Party’s uncanny ability to lose elections. These retreats into fantasy will not prevent the tsunami that is heading toward the party on Nov. 4.

Republicans I speak with are just as fed up with their party as Americans in general. The Republican Party seems like a random collection of egos and personal agendas. Many of these personal agendas have embraced Big Government and Big Brother with more zeal than the most ardent leftist. They see dispensing favors and funds as their ticket to electoral bliss. They ignore the epic failures of the Bush presidency, and those of the recent Republican era in Congress, in the hopes that Americans will somehow do the same.

The Republicans have a razor-thin window of opportunity before all is lost. The November elections are just over five months away. Voters want something real, and their skepticism and cynicism are reaching record levels. They know the campaign calendar dictates that everything said by a politician is suspect from now through the election. Candidates from across the political spectrum prove this during every campaign cycle when they say anything, including fabricate and outright lie, in order to dupe voters into supporting them. Voters want to see real actions that back up the words.

The Republicans can still do something that could save them. They could treat the Bush administration like it was the opposition party. Can you honestly envision Republican members of Congress, as well as their pundits and activists, letting Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton get away with the corruption, incompetence, waste and abuse regularly displayed during the last seven years by the Bush administration? Of course not. Republicans would have scrambled to the microphones attacking every moment of the administration and hauling every official they could before their oversight committees.

The strategic error made by Republicans is that they began looking at everything through a partisan lens. If a Democrat does it - it is fundamentally bad. If Mr. Bush or another Republican does the exact same thing - it is fundamentally good. Most Democrats suffer from this same myopia, but they are not the ones perceived to be in power. Oversight hearings and spirited attacks by Rep. Henry Waxman and others are viewed as holding our government accountable. Republican efforts to hamper these actions are rightly viewed as a conspiracy to shield the Bush Administration from accountability.

This is a no-win situation for Republicans. Their only hope is to begin exposing the foibles of the Bush administration with even more zeal than Mr. Waxman and his Democratic colleagues. This should be easy for a real Republican or real conservative. There is very little worth preserving from the last seven years. Except for some excellent appointments to the federal courts, Bush and his acolytes have been the antithesis of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater on everything that matters. The sooner their legacy is erased the better for the Republican Party.

The Republicans can start their return from the dead by returning to their roots - displaying a healthy skepticism of Big Government and fighting government waste. Waste is waste and corruption is corruption, no matter which party is in charge. Republicans must recover their moral compass.

Members of Congress should begin their resurrection by aggressively conducting investigations and oversight of waste and mismanagement in the federal government. In recent weeks, $7.8 billion was reported spent in Iraq without adequate documentation. There are reports of highly unethical and possibly illegal procurement and contracting actions at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Coast Guard is not adequately investigating and preventing marine accidents. The list of improvement opportunities is endless. Criticizing these, and other examples of mismanagement, is a good first step for the Republicans in Congress to show some real concern about government integrity. Republican journalists should also be aggressively pursuing and reporting on incompetence and wrongdoing in every other nook and cranny of the current administration.

The Republican Party must take this kind of substantive action if it wants to convince voters that it is mending its ways. With the August recess, national conventions, Olympics and probably an early adjournment, there are only a few precious weeks left for the Republicans in Congress to avoid electoral oblivion.