Shrinking the size of the U.S. government of leviathan proportions is something the Trump Administration has been attempting to do along with deregulation and refusing to fill what some would call “useless” jobs within the executive branch. Currently, the President is looking at another measure of overhauling the structure of the federal government and setting quite lofty goals after a proposed merger of the Department of Labor and the Department of Education as been announced, now to be called the Department of Education and Workforce.
While many headlines have codified this, the overall plan will also consolidate the federal government’s public assistance programs into a new Department of Health and Public Welfare, combine some duplicative food safety programs run by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and would seek to privatize the postal service and air traffic control services, according to the Libertarian magazine Reason.
Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Mick Mulvaney has called this plan, “the biggest reorganization of the federal government since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.” Mulvaney inferenced that today’s structure of the federal government is antiquated and has failed to keep up with modern times and needs of the American people.
“Today’s Executive Branch is still aligned to the stove-piped organizational constructs of the 20th Century, which in many cases have grown inefficient and out-of-date,” the Trump Administration’s 132-page proposal states. “Consequently, the public and our workforce are frustrated with Government’s ability to deliver its mission in an effective, efficient, and secure way.”
According to the Washington Post, Trump administration officials said they intend to shake up what many in both the public and private sector call a “nonsensical” bureaucracy that requires multiple agencies, like the FDA and the USDA being necessary to regulate the production and distribution of an Arby’s roast beef sandwich. This is similar to what President Obama referred to during his tenure with a cheese pizza and a pepperoni pizza being regulated by different government agencies, and nearly everyone questioning the the merits of such practice.
“We’re dealing with a government that’s so byzantine you don’t know where to start,” Mulvaney said as he unveiled the results of a 14-month effort, which he called one of the, “biggest pieces so far of our plan to drain the swamp.”
For example, the OMB director said that 45 job-training programs scattered across the breadth of the government would be consolidated into just 16.
In a true means of “draining the swamp,” the White House deliberately did not consult with members of Congress for the restructuring plan. They solicited ideas from agency leaders and heard from over 100,000 ordinary Americans who sent in suggestions. Quite an interesting concept, considering if you’re going to cut government agencies, they worst people to ask are those whom can’t hardly even pass a budget.
Though, is this a brand new, monumental plan that will amount to sending the wrecking ball down Pennsylvania Avenue and federal department-lined streets in downtown Washington D.C., laying waste to taxpayer money-sucking programs?
Some of these proposals have been tried before and were derailed by intense political opposition, of course – no surprise there. In 2012, President Barack Obama proposed shifting the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to the Interior Department, an effort that was shot down. Unfortunately, the people that will be utilized in the shifting and restructuring are those who will be shifted and restructured themselves.
As well, much of the inefficiency and frustration with government services results from them being exactly that – government services.
This plan should not be seen as a save-all for saving taxpayer dollars and paying off the nearly $20 trillion federal budget. Though, moving programs from one department to another might help streamline the federal organizational chart.
“Eliminating a department while transferring its programs in essentially unchanged form to other departments or agencies would probably result in little or no budgetary savings,” the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded in a review of departmental merger proposals in 2013, “because most of the costs incurred by departments are the costs of the programs themselves.”
Many of the proposals and name changes are more or less, what Reason calls, “conservative-friendly rebranding.” For example, the idea of renaming the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the Department of Health and Public Welfare. Though, the Trump Administration is looking at bringing non-HHS public assistance programs, like food stamps, into the newly renamed department.
Other proposals are aimed at getting rid of some peculiar contradictions with government departments. In Politico, Mulvaney said that one of his “favorite” examples of weird regulatory practice within the government is the fact that a salmon swimming in the ocean is regulated by the Department of Commerce, while a salmon swimming up an American river is regulated by the Department of the Interior.
The real question for many here is that why must government regulate pizza, roast beef sandwiches, and salmon at all?
Iain Murray, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, believes the restructuring program was a missed opportunity. “It is disappointing that the opportunity was not taken to propose a wholesale reduction in the size of government,” he said.
Hopefully, this entire program won’t end up on the top shelf collecting dust along with strikingly similar proposals from the Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama administrations, considering parts of the Trump plan, like merging the Department of Labor with Education, seem to have been lifted from previous, unsuccessful efforts.
A White House official said the Education-Labor merger would, “allow the federal government to address the educational and skill needs of American students and workers in a coordinated way, eliminating duplication of effort between the two agencies and maximizing the effectiveness of skill-building efforts.” But, this is a bit of another contradiction. As long as the federal government is taking a central role in American education and labor, there will always be one-size-fits-all regulations that limit innovation and effectiveness.
While the plan itself may bring innovation to bureaucracy, if the restructuring was truly revolutionary, it would go to lengths to emphasize the goal of eliminating one-size-fits-all government, seriously considering which functions could be abolished or privatized.
