Maybe it’s time for Congress to wake up and get involved
During my federal service, I lived through two major attempts to broadly cut federal spending, balance the budget and reform government.
The first, Gramm-Rodman-Hollings in 1985 (named for the bipartisan trio of senators who authored the bill), tried to cap federal spending and that resulted in across-the-board cuts to federal agencies. So, it made no distinction between important programs and those that could be cut back without harm.
The original bill was found to be unconstitutional, but revised versions of the law tried other methods. In the end, it did not work. What worked was a perfect storm.
The George (Papa) Bush administration raised taxes (remember “read my lips — no new taxes”?) and that broken promise contributed to his defeat in 1992 but helped balance the budget.
During the Clinton administration the combination of strong growth fueled by the dot.com boom, the post-Cold War reduction in defense spending, welfare reform that cut the rolls by more than 50%, and that tax increase not only balanced the federal budget but resulted in surpluses that lowered the national debt from 47.4% of GDP to 31.4%.
The second major effort to reform the government also contributed to reduced spending. Led by Vice President Al Gore, the program was called Reinventing Government. It reduced the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands (mainly through a controlled program of attrition), cut overhead costs, tried to make government consumer-oriented, and bring to bear the emerging digital technologies to make government more efficient. For example, the electronic filing of tax returns started under the program.
However, over the past 25 years you might say that it has just been one damn thing after another.
President George W. Bush cut taxes, but then 9/11 happened and thus followed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a hike in defense spending and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Baby Boom generation started to retire. Then came the housing crash and the Great Recession. The Obama administration started to bring deficit spending down, but then President Trump cut taxes and revenue substantially. Then came the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and then the war in the Mideast.
Peeking over the horizon, the funds that support Social Security and Medicare are projected to go bust in the next decade. So, getting the federal books in order would seem to be a job for serious people.
As many have reported, the young engineers who work for Elon Musk have an abundance of confidence and a stunning lack of understanding of what the federal government does and how it works.
The stated goal of cutting 10% of the federal workforce (or about 200,000 positions) seems to be an arbitrary number that is not based on some sort of grand plan besides animus toward the federal bureaucracy and making room for tax cuts for the well-off. The firings (most held up in court cases) go after watchdogs, probationary employees (who don’t yet have civil service protections), employees involved with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, and those involved with the prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters and President Trump himself.
When the dust settles a couple of years from now, we could have a damaged government that will have saved few dollars and wasted more, or, depending on what the courts do, a vast expansion of executive power and a much more political federal government that harkens back to the spoils system earlier in our nation’s history.
Perhaps it might be time for our gutless, cowardly, craven, spineless, wimpish, weak, lazy, supine, shiftless, (I could go on) Congress to assume its oversight responsibilities.
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86. His new book “American Dreams: The Story of the Cyprus Fulbright Commission” is available from Amazon.com.