FUNDING THE WALL

[Published on Newsmax]

The solution to America’s Border Wall is hiding in plain sight.

Instead of fighting what may be a losing battle with Congress, President Trump should trigger a well-established, legal, and proven good management practice of “reallocating unused federal funds” to build America’s Border Wall.

All it will take to complete the next phase of the Border Wall is the stroke of President Trump’s pen and a push of a button from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The simple solution is mining “unobligated balances” throughout the Executive Branch.

Every year funds are allocated for federal projects and programs based on estimates. Congress adds money when those estimates fall short, even if caused by waste and fraud. Funds sit idle when spending is less than expected.

Families face this situation all the time. You take cash to buy fast food and have change left over. That change ends up in a coin jar. A family member eventually takes the coin jar to a bank or Coinstar to turn pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters into easier spent dollars.

Presidents, since Lyndon Johnson, have funded their priorities mining these unobligated balances through the mechanism of a “budget sweep”. The President authorizes the Director of OMB to request Executive Branch Departments and Agencies to return unobligated and unexpended funds back to the Treasury.

Johnson funded his Great Society and the Vietnam War with the billions in “loose change” lying around Executive Branch Agencies. Nixon funded the Vietnam War. Carter funded expanding domestic programs. Reagan brought down the Soviet Empire. The Bushes fought their Iraq wars. Clinton juggled funds to stay within Republican Congressional budget limits.

Then something changed. During his eight years in office, President Obama allowed $914.8 billion in unexpended, unobligated, funds to pile-up across the federal government. He never did a budget sweep. This number continues to climb under President Trump, who has also not authorized a budget sweep.

Unexpended, unobligated funds are dutifully reported under “Assets and Balance Sheets” of the federal budget released each year by the Office of Management and Budget. These funds are documented, in detail, in every Department and Agency budget under the accounting code “1941”. For the current fiscal year, there is over $150 billion in “1941” unexpended, unobligated balances in the Defense Department alone.

An additional $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 languish for years raises questions about their use, management, and relevance.

There is, therefore, a total of $2.651 trillion in existing Executive Branch funds potentially available for immediate reallocation.

In June 2012, to his eternal credit, former Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn issued a blistering report, “Money for Nothing” that exposed these funds for the first time. Unfortunately, not even conservative media covered it.

Senator Coburn 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."

The existence, processes, and uses of unexpended, unobligated funds were reported by the few conservatives among Trump’s Transition Team, to no avail. OMB officials were given detailed 1941 account spread sheets, as were several Cabinet Secretaries and their staffs. Nothing happened.

Trump must take control of the Border Wall project with processes and funds that already exist and are in plain sight.

TRUMPING ZIKA

[Originally published at:http://www.newsmax.com/ScotFaulkner/budget/2016/09/14/id/748321/ ]

How do you spell fiscal fiasco? “Z-I-K-A”.

The battle over funding necessary research to combat the spreading Zika Virus has ground Congress to a halt.

The Obama Administration has plead poverty and asked for $1.9 billion in additional funds. Congress decided to exploit this urgency and necessity by loading up the legislation with politically charged amendments. Votes on such amendments are used by both parties to fuel fund-raising appeals.

Once again, the Washington, DC Establishment is putting partisan fund-raising ahead of the health and safety of Americans.

It gets worse – $21 billion in unspent unobligated funds are already laying around the very programs and agencies charged with fighting Zika.

On August 26, Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and James Lankford (R-OK) sent a letter to the Secretary Burwell of Health and Human Services (HHS) calling her out on these unexpended balances. She responded back on September 1, asserting she had already “repurposed” $374 million and could not do anything more.

Unfortunately, Burwell’s response contradicts President Obama’s declaration that $589 million has been “repurposed”, and the fact that only $180 million has actually been spent.

Washington’s budgetary “hide and seek” needs to stop.

Every Federal Department and Agency ends the fiscal year with unspent funds. Former Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) exposed this in his ground breaking report “Money for Nothing” issued in June 2012. Since his report, the amount of federal funds sitting doing nothing, and because they are unobligated will continue to do nothing, has soared to $909 billion.

This nearly $1 trillion in tax dollars are hiding in plain site. Go to the Office of Management and Budget website. Look up “budget” and “assets”. Every penny of federal spending is reported and categorized. Accounting code “1941” is for “unexpired unobligated balances”. Fiscal years 2015 (actual) and 2016 & 2017 (projected) are listed.

It does not take a certified accountant to realize there are a lot of “1941” line items in every part of the federal budget, each totaling millions of dollars. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) uncovered 7,500 expired grant accounts spread through HHS’s Payment Management System, all with funds that will never be used.

The two front line agencies charged with researching and fighting Zika are the Center for Disease Control (CDC), with $1.27 billion in unobligated funds, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with $722 million in unobligated funds. Both program directors have testified that they are completely out of money.

It is unseemly to play bureaucratic and partisan games with peoples’ lives.

16,000 Americans have become infected by Zika, mostly in Puerto Rico. So far 17 American babies have been born with birth defects and another 5 died in miscarriages. This is just the beginning. Zika has substantially impacted Brazil, with approximately 1.5 million cases. Encephalitis type illnesses are causing memory loss and depression in adults, while neurological birth defects (such as smaller frontal lobes) have risen 400% since 2014.

Congress is racing the clock on funding the federal government past September 30, 2016. Members spent more time this year in Republican and Democrat fund-raising call centers than doing their job.

This Congressional negligence means yet another fiscal cliff, with the usual government shutdown hysteria ending in a Continuing Resolution (CR). This year’s battleground is already strewn with political explosives. Conservatives want to ban Planned Parenthood from using federal funds to screen pregnant women for Zika. Liberals somehow think banning Confederate Flags has something to do with public health.

Washington, DC is infested with political parasites and infected with arrogant opportunism.

It is time to consider a revolutionary cure, which includes stopping the budget games and spending tax dollars wisely.

Both sides should listen to Trump’s call for putting America, and Americans, first.

MANAGEMENT REVOLUTION

Published in http://washingtonexaminer.com/a-modest-proposal-to-abolish-11-federal-departments/article/2540473

Ideological battles over the budget have proven to be non-starters. To paraphrase an earlier political maxim – It’s the Management stupid!

Republicans must regain their credibility. They are opposing reasonable cuts to the bureaucratically bloated Defense Department while squandering political capital for ideological raids on microscopic programs. This may play well with their shrinking base, but it cripples their strategic return to governance.

The debacle of Obamacare’s rollout has even forced the President to blame “big agencies, some of which are outdated”. Here is where Republicans can pounce. The federal government is too large and too outdated. This is the Republicans traditional “sweet spot”. Debating the role of government is useful during campaigns, but the cost and effectiveness of government is useful now. Charting a course that cuts waste and inefficiency will prove Republicans can think and act like adults.

The key is that, no matter which federal programs Americans love or hate, no one wants even one penny wasted. Senator Tom Coburn, John Stossel, and others have published countless columns detailing specific opportunities to cut costs. Most importantly, these administrative cuts will not harm programs. Actually, cutting waste and streamlining operations will improve government services. Who can be against that?

Republicans need to focus. They need to return to a time when “Republican management” was not an Oxymoron.

Here are some examples:

[1] Cut overseas bases. Even George W. Bush wanted to close 300 of America’s nearly 1,000 overseas bases. Defense Department careerists outflanked him during his last year in office. It is time to revisit this plan. Bringing bases and military families back to U.S. soil while stimulate local economies and cut overall costs by hundreds of billions over ten years.

[2] Implement Inspector General Reports. Every year over 9,000 official reports are issued identifying $600+ billion a year in ongoing waste. Congress should conduct real oversight and force federal managers to actually address this waste.

[3] Implement a government-wide hiring freeze. Slamming the door shut on filling federal vacancies would cut $350 billion a year in personnel costs. Each agency head could submit waivers to OMB for those jobs they consider essential for agency missions. This list could be published in the Federal Register for public input before the waivers are granted.

[4] Get real about government overhead. It is time to abolish all Cabinet Departments except: Defense, Justice, State, and Treasury. This is not about eliminating programs – it is about eliminating countless layers of unproductive operations. Except for the four core Departments, every other of the eleven remaining Cabinet Departments are federations of programs and independent agencies. Each was formed under the obsolete assumption that everyone would work together in perfect harmony if only they had the same logo. These previously independent programs and agencies are already run by Presidential appointees. They will run better, and be more accountable, if returned to their prior independence.

Each of the eleven Cabinet Departments has amassed huge overhead budgets to conduct vast arrays of duplicative and dilatory actions. For example, the Office of Education needed $47.5 million a year to run its programs within the Department of Health Education and Welfare. Just one year after this office became its own Department overhead costs ballooned to $187 million. In 2011, Departmental overhead (not including program administration) was $1.7 billion! The Department of Education is one of the smaller Departments. Eliminating Departmental overheads from all eleven could net over $300 billion in savings over ten years.

These four proposals do not address the larger entitlement issues. They form the basis for bold and decisive actions that will win American hearts and minds across the political spectrum.

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

MESSAGE DISCIPLINE

Republicans need a remedial communications course. They have flunked every test during the budget/shut down battle.

Republicans have also failed political strategy 101. They are fighting the wrong battle, in the wrong way, at the wrong time. A key element to any political struggle is advocating viable alternative actions and/or policies to those you oppose. Kicking the table over is not a policy.

The most embarrassing aspect of the government shutdown is how it is undoing Republican assertions. This shutdown was supposed to stop Obamacare in its tracks, when, in fact, Obamacare is being implemented. Signing-up on health exchanges opened the very day the government shut down to stop Obamacare. Worse, media coverage of the shut down drowned-out news stories on the wobbly start to Obamacare. Media 101 – you never step on your own headline. Obamacare’s glitches would have helped build the Republican case for strategic action toward a complete overhaul or repeal. That story is now lost to the ages.

The embarrassments continue hourly. Republicans rail against Public Broadcasting - voting to defund it every year. The government is shut down and PBS and National Public Radio are providing full programming. Such disconnects between rhetoric and reality makes the GOP look clueless on how government is actually funded. That is not the best place from which to launch a fiscal fight over the debt.

Republicans are also displaying their utter powerlessness to impact the Executive Branch. President Obama can pick and choose what to shut down with impunity. He knows it will be months before the House Oversight Committee or the Government Accountability Office (GAO) will second guess his actions. So what if they find he was arbitrary and capricious? There will be no consequences, political or legal. So America gets to watch as National Parks are shut down (a list of the more over the top closings may be found at: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/05/list-obama-closures-for-shutdown), while pro-Obama political rallies are allowed on the “closed” National Mall (immigration reform). Government websites that serve Americans are offline (even Pandacam), but the primary government website that serves the government – www.USAJobs.gov is still scooping up applications for currently unfunded federal jobs.

The current budget battle began in the summer of 2011. Republicans have always been on shaky ground because of their own 14-year binge of spending and earmarking (1997-2011). They have never done anything to counter their fundamental lapse in Republican fiscal orthodoxy. Shouting within the conservative media echo chamber is not winning the broader argument with all of America.

One major Republican mistake was making reasonable fiscal management a partisan issue. In the 1970’s, Rep. John Ashbrook, one of the most conservative members of Congress, and Senator William Proxmire, one of the Senate’s most liberal members, coordinated their exposing of government waste. Ashbrook spoofed “goofy grants” while Proxmire issued monthly “Golden Fleece” awards. They both understood that “waste is waste” no matter which Party is responsible. Today only a handful of politicians and pundits transcend partisanship for true spending oversight and accountability, notably Senator Tom Coburn and journalist John Stossel. Unfortunately, neither receives the attention they deserve.

Many so-called conservative pundits and think tanks remained silently complicit during the Republican spending binge and the gross mismanagement of the executive branch under George W. Bush. The moment a Democratic President and Congress picked up where Bush and his GOP Congressional allies left off it was like Rip van Winkle awakening from a long slumber and wondering how things got so bad.

The Tea Party is filled with Rip van Winkles. They poured into Congressional town hall meetings in August 2009 screeching about a health program that was originally the Republican’s multi-payer alternative to Hillarycare’s single-payer system. Multi-payer healthcare was trumpeted by the Heritage Foundation and implemented by Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. It was the preferred GOP way forward – until Obama’s name was attached to it. Even now, the “Affordable Care Act” polls better than “Obamacare” even though they are different names for the same program. One’s arguments lose all credibility and integrity when it is all about who proposes something, not what is being proposed.

So what can Republicans do?

First, they can get off their treadmill to oblivion. As proposed in [http://citizenoversight.blogspot.com/2013/09/kamikaze-congress.html], Speaker Boehner can allow a clean Continuing Resolution to be voted on in the House. He can hold his Republicans off the Floor and not have them vote on it. This means the Democrats “own” the CR and Obamacare funding. The focus shifts back to the flawed launch of the Affordable Care Act and making a reasonable case for reform or repeal.

Second, shift the focus to raising the debt ceiling. Cede the fact that the debt ceiling is driven by previous spending actions. America has to pay the bills it rang up. That said, there are ways to add reasonable and rational provisions to rein-in spending.

Three ideas come to mind.

- Control the fourth quarter spending binge. Put a 25% of fiscal year spending cap on the 4th quarter of each fiscal year. [http://citizenoversight.blogspot.com/2013/08/budget-bacchanal.html]
- Mandate a budget sweep of unspent and unobligated accounts. [http://citizenoversight.blogspot.com/2013/07/congressional-coinstar.html] Over $687 billion sits unused in accounts across the government. Put it to use.
- Start managing the federal workforce. [http://citizenoversight.blogspot.com/2013/02/fear-loathing-in-washington-dc.html ] As referenced earlier in the column, federal jobs are still being advertized and applications being collected. How many of these jobs are considered “non-essential”? Instead of furloughs, do hiring freezes, and job eliminations via the 60,000 retirements each year. Over $350 billion would be saved from these actions.

No thinking human being will be able to counter these prudent nonpartisan steps toward fiscal sanity. The only exception is Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who recently declared the cupboard bare of places to cut spending.

These simple and immediate acts would help Republicans reclaim the high ground of sound fiscal management, transcending partisanship. Whether you love a program or hate it, you should not want even one penny misspent. Accountability, transparency, and efficiency attract adherents across the entire political spectrum.

Finding and eradicating waste is just the first step. After recovering their footing, Republicans could revisit the Simpson Bowles debt reduction plan and Senator Coburn’s annual “Waste Book”. Some of these items are more partisan, but these vetted ideas can guide the foray into deeper political waters. Those who lead such a realistic and rational effort will find followers among the 230 million registered voters, not just the Tea Party and Fox News. Republicans – the choice is yours.

KAMIKAZE CONGRESS

Republicans in Congress are once again in a bind over how to fund the Federal Government while not acquiescing to policies and programs they dislike.

Many House Republicans want to sink Obamacare. They point to selective implementation delays, waivers, and the general erosion of public support for the program. However, House Republicans only control one of three components needed to make laws and pass a budget. Democrats hold the Senate and the White House. Any defunding of Obamacare dies in the Senate and on the President’s desk.

Threats to block continuing resolutions to fund the Federal Government revisits the sorry record of Republican led government shut downs. Except for the November 23, 1981 shutdown, ushered in by President Reagan vetoing a continuing resolution, none have ended well for Republicans.

The most infamous was the back to back shutdowns in November 1995 through January 1996. The newly resurgent Republicans wanted to flex their muscle against a President they assumed was a spent force. The GOP fully controlled the Legislative Branch for the first time since 1954. Speaker Gingrich thirsted for a budget show down that would reshape the budget battles. He failed miserably because he and House Republicans did not make their case for such brinksmanship. This flawed messaging took a bizarre turn when Gingrich went completely off topic to complain about having to sit in the rear of Air Force One on the return flight from the funeral of Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. Republicans now confronted the perception that the budget meltdown was about personal grudges not real policy.

After the 1995-96 shutdowns, Clinton shifted to the center for his domestic agenda, a slight victory for Republicans. However, Clinton regained his pre-1994 election momentum while Republicans faltered. It would take until the summer of 2011 for budget “hawks” to once again dominate Republican fiscal policy. During the fifteen year hiatus, Republicans lost all credibility on spending as they outdid the Democrats on appropriation earmarks, government growth, and executive branch waste. Obama has certainly added to the deficit and the growth of government, but Republicans, both in Congress and the White House, gave him a running start.

Republicans now have a dilemma of their own making. Since the budget battles of mid-2011, they have done a terrible job at making the case for cutting the size of government. Except for Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), Republicans and their media allies have defended Defense Department spending (which is as wasteful as any domestic program), and proposed ideological cuts not management based cuts. The moment you select which sacred cows to slaughter, while protecting others, you slide onto ideological thin ice. The public’s wide spread cynicism of politics is currently hurting Republicans far more than Democrats.

The other dilemma is Republicans assailing Obamacare without proposing a viable alternative. America is the best country in the world if you need shock-trauma treatment or complex diagnostics. It falls to 30th or worse if you need chronic care or are uninsured. Demographics are driving chronic care. Americans are getting older and living longer. Medicare is already sailing over the fiscal cliff. The economy is driving the other crisis. The era of forty hour a week “W2” employment is giving way to part time “1099” jobs where benefits do not exist. A real mature discussion about standards of care, alternative treatments, and family caregiving should have occurred prior to debating the role of government. Unfortunately, the hyperpartisan environment poisoned that potential dialogue in the early 1990s. It has been a snake pit of snark and snipe ever since.

So where does this leave Republicans? Defunding Obamacare and forcing a government shut down is a “kamikaze” mission. It will only end with Republicans self-immolating. A better course of action is the following:

[1] Republicans in the House not do show up to vote on any fiscal legislation. Except for House leaders and a few other Republicans, let the Democrats casts all the votes. You establish a quorum and let the Democrats vote through the continuing resolution. That way the Democrats “own” Obamacare.

[2] If Obamacare is as dysfunctional as many now think, then it will fail on its own. President Obama, the Democrats in Congress, or their key constituencies will blink and seek ways to either fix or scrap Obamacare.

[3] Republicans spend their time and political capital developing a viable alternative to Obamacare. An aging America filled with “1099” part time workers is a reality and must be addressed. Looking for real solutions and building positive consensus around those solutions would re-energize the Republican brand as caring and rational.

[4] Republicans need to revisit Simpson-Bowles http://www.fiscalcommission.gov/ and the various reports developed by Senator Coburn. Putting forward a management based budget that addresses underlying fiscal issues would also help rebrand Republicans as caring, rational, and reasonable.

These four steps will be anathema to the “conservative” pundits and their audience of zealots. They will all rail against anything less than Republican Members crashing into public opinion. On the other hand, the rest of the 230 million voting Americans may take a second look at a rational Republican movement and reward it not only in 2014, but 2016 and beyond.

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?

Congress Heal Thyself

Thank you, Senator Tom Coburn, for once again shining light on how much of our tax dollars are wasted.

Senator Coburn’s has now turned his flood lights on Congress itself. The U.S. Senate remains mired in the 19th Century - providing taxpayer subsidized services to its Members and staff. Millions of dollars are spent underwriting substandard consumer services with no end or accountability in sight.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/30/should-congress-take-haircut-senator-says-barbershop-other-perks-ripe-for/

The same situation existed in the U.S. House of Representatives until the revolution of the 104th Congress (1995-1997). In the first few months of 1995, the newly created Office of the Chief Administrative Officer led the way in privatizing and downsizing everything possible in House operations.

Opening of Privatized House Beauty Parlor - October 17, 1995

There is a good reason to have personal services located within the buildings of Capitol Hill. Nearly 20,000 employees work, sometimes 24-7, to support the Congressional process. Long hours make it very difficult to schedule personal mail runs, haircuts, shoe repair & shines, and meals. Thousands of “captive customers”, along with 3 million tourists a year, should be “manna from heaven” for enterprising vendors. However, until the election of 1994, these vendor operations were composed of highly prized patronage positions. Members from both parties carved-up these petty fiefdoms and brokered positions for votes and kickbacks. Mistresses and dysfunctional nephews were stashed in these ever more bloated and subsidized services.

The network of unaccountable, corrupt, and wasteful services institutionalized a kleptocracy that found increasingly ingenious ways to steal public funds. This culture began to fall apart as the thievery and sexual misconduct became too much for many of its protectors. One scandal after another erupted in the early 1990s, leading to the downfall of the forty-year rule by the Democrats in the House.

Incoming Republican leaders, including Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Jim Nussle, and Ron Packard, knew that they had limited time to end these abuses before their cynical colleagues created their own version of the kleptocracy. The early months of 1995 witnessed a vicious internal struggle as Republican kleptomaniac wannabes battled with reformers over privatization, downsizing, and accountability. Thankfully for America, the reformers won. House services were forever changed. Bloated operations that wasted millions turned into private operations paying 4+% of their gross sales back to the House. Along with it came a business-based culture focused on service excellence and profit. In the process $184 million was saved in less than 18 months, of which $36 million was reprogrammed to create a 21st Century “CyberCongress”.

Opening of Privatized House Shoe Repair and Shine Services - October 2, 1995

These radical changes were supported by many reform-minded Democrats, like Rep. Steny Hoyer. Hoyer had led a similar effort during his tenure as President of the Maryland State Senate. The impacts of ongoing savings, improved services, and accountability were so overwhelming positive that Speaker Nancy Pelosi not only embraced them, but consulted with the former Republican CAO’s team on how to continue the reform process. When Speaker Boehner took the helm, he enthusiastically continued the business focused operations.

So what happened in the U.S. Senate? Nothing! It took until 2008 for the Senate to finally vote to privatize its food services - ending over $2 million in annual waste. Now Senator Coburn is blowing the whistle on the Senate’s barber shops, beauty parlors, and other wasteful and subsidized service operations.

Media scrutiny is also ratcheting-up http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/supercuts_707691.html.

Unfortunately, these are only voices in the wilderness as Senate Leaders and key managers dither while our tax dollars burn.

Republican Opportunities Lost

This was published in RollCall

http://www.rollcall.com/news/faulkner_and_riehl_republican_opportunities_lost-222193-1.html?pg=1

By Scot Faulkner & Jonathan Riehl

Republicans are wondering how to confront President Obama’s second term “second wind”. In recent weeks, Obama has proven he is no Lame duck. His new initiatives, new appointments, and winning the word wars on the budget, have overwhelmed Republicans both in Congress and among their pundits. After ceding 789 days of political positioning to their opponents since the GOP’s 2010 victories, Republicans have now spent the first weeks of 2013 contemplating their navels while bungling opportunities to make a difference.

Only in the Republican’s parallel universe could supposedly intelligent people sift through the electoral debris of 2012 and think that their only challenge is creating better campaign ads with better media soundbites. Worse, they arrived at this epiphany after listening to political consultants, who derive their income from creating these campaign ads and soundbites. These are the same consultants who spent hundreds of millions the GOP’s money being 100% wrong in their assumptions, polls, and predictions throughout 2012.

Congressional Republicans in particular should look into the mirror to find who to blame for their current predicament.

Since decisively winning the November 2, 2010 elections, Republicans in Congress and their acolytes in the conservative media, have missed hundreds of days of opportunity to define themselves and present compelling alternative policies. The reality is that Republicans have no platform. In fact, they no longer have a coherent idea of who they are. They are also so “inbred” in their politics that they no longer see the need for making a rational case for any of their stands. There is simply no content behind their message.

The dreadful examination of Sen. Chuck Hagel is a case in point. Hectoring diatribes from fellow Republicans over the war in Iraq only perpetuate the image of conservatives unwilling to reflect on their actions in light of the facts. Never mind that as a traditional conservative, Hagel’s view on the Iraqi misadventure was much more in line with decades of conservative thinking prior to the NeoCon takeover of GOP foreign policy.

The recent Pew Survey shows Americans disapprove of Republican Congressional leadership by 66% while only 19% approved. That is a staggering 47 point negative. Gallup’s survey is equally horrific, with 25% approving and 67% disapproving for a 42 point negative gap.

These dreadful scores are only part of the problem. President Obama and Congressional Democrats are framing the Fiscal Cliff/Debt Ceiling/Budget battle in ways highly favorable to their cause while painting Republicans into a microscopic corner. This is smart rhetorical strategy, and stands to marginalize the GOP into oblivion.

Politics often comes down to defining the terms of battle, something both parties have excelled at during different moments in history. Democrats have the upper hand at this particular moment. Republicans, even moderates (those few that remain), are now called “extremists.” Democrats, even radicals, are now called “Progressives." Government spending is now called “investment,” thanks to a spin factory gem from Bill Clinton. Spending cuts of any magnitude are dismissed as damaging to America’s economic recovery. The Republican response is either mired in bureaucratic language unknowable to normal people, or piled up with hyperpartisan rhetoric that leaves no room for compromise.

As the Hagel hearing demonstrated, Republicans have been vague about government waste and the need to cut spending. They trumpet their ideology, but ideology is not governance -- and Americans continue to see the President as more competent in that task. The problem is that the GOP never issued a meaningful indictment or offered a prosecution brief. It is also sad that Republicans refuse to admit that the bureaucracy and spending at the Pentagon are as bloated as any other department. Republicans seem to fixate on shiny objects, like rows of medals on uniforms, instead of targeting wasteful spending and management at the DOD.

Perhaps this is what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance -- Republicans are now mostly unwilling to hold serious hearings on government spending or mismanagement, because many of them blindly supported Bush-era spending boondoggles both foreign and domestic. Bereft of principle, and caught in hypocrisy of their own making, Republicans have little to stand on. The GOP did not even hold hearings on Senator Tom Coburn’s annual Waste Report, a longtime staple of reasonable oversight. Only CSPAN’s BookTV gave Coburn a proper forum to discuss his exhaustive and highly credible research on government waste.

Having one party dominate policy and legislation while the other retreats into mindless and sporadic venting of anger is unhealthy for America. Those who wish to hold power accountable, and desire a reasonable dialogue on the role and cost of government in the 21st Century, must stage an intervention. The elephant is sick and its infirmity harms all of us.