Returning to the ‘trimming federal government’ project. You can call me the Department of Government Efficiency. Oh wait, somebody’s already using that title.
First: Every agency, bureau, and office dealing with Native American affairs should be pulled out of its existing departmental flow chart; redundancies identified and minimized; gaps identified and rectified; and the scope and policy for a new resulting Department of First Nations Administration circulated to all tribes for comment and revision.
Note, I have no desire to spend less on the interests of Native Americans. I want to make our tax dollars work harder and achieve more, preferably in the hands of the actual tribes and not in the bottom drawer of some desk in Washington, D.C.
Second: Every agency, bureau, and office dealing with recruiting, training, performance review, retention, and discipline should be pulled out of its existing place and merged into the Office of Personnel Management (current budget $330 billion), which should then be pruned back as hard as possible.
Third: certain federal functions formerly under the purview of, for example, the Department of Transportation are actually essential national interests. We should be funding and administering chunks of that at the federal level. However, most of these functions are essential to national security – from the FAA to the interstate highway system to commercial access to coastal waterways – so along with the TSA (Transportation Security Administration, which I’d move from the DHS to the DOD) I’d create a new Transportation Infrastructure Administration within the DOD. And I’d fund it with some of the money currently allocated to last century’s military infrastructure, i.e. money already in our vastly bloated defense budget.
To the extent that government employees design, build, and maintain interstate transportation infrastructure, those employees could be Civilian Conservation Corps workers, who I’d define as citizens recruited from the 18-28 age group (including nonviolent parolees) who can thus earn vocational or education credits along with a fair wage, and/or Army Corps of Engineers workers.
Then:
To be merged and restructured:
Institute of Museum and Library Services: $315 million
National Endowment for the Arts: $237 million
National Endowment for the Humanities: $251 million
Commission of Fine Arts: $9 million
Total above: $812 million
Target budget for combined arts funding, including grants for cultural and educational audio and video programming: not to exceed $750 million ($15 million per state, as block grants)
To be merged and restructured:
Election Assistance Commission: $148 million
Federal Election Commission: $87 million
Total above: $235 million
Target budget for combined election oversight fund: not to exceed $150 million ($3 million per state, as block grants)
To be merged and restructured:
National Labor Relations Board: $310 million
Federal Labor Relations Authority: $31 million
Total above: $341 million
Target budget for combined labor relations fund: $250 million ($5 million per state, as block grants)
To be merged and restructured:
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: $1 billion
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board: $50 million
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board: $5 million
Total above: $1,055,000,000
Target budget for combined nuclear regulatory, safety, and technical oversight: TBD, but $1 billion doesn’t seem excessive. I suspect that an actual bureau or agency would be a better structure than a board or commission, in the sense of operating with greater transparency and accountability.
Also in need of restructuring, reform, auditing, and editing:
Department of Justice: $67 billion
General Services Administration: $61 billion
Railroad Retirement Board: $17 billion (and all the other separate retirement & health benefits systems within the federal government. We have Social Security and Medicare. Everybody should use them. More on that later).
And finally,
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ($653 million) should be converted into a Citizens Fairness in Finance Fund providing block grants to the states, based on the number of private financial institutions operating in each state; total funding not to exceed $500 million. The states could use the grants to fund investigations and prosecution of financial malfeasance.
As I’ve said before, all of this blatheration is prompted by my belief that while federal-level laws and regulations are absolutely necessary in order for our federal republic to function, a federal-level administration of every piece of government is not. We need to spend fewer tax dollars on Washington bureaucracy, and get more of those dollars into state and local governments.
The far right says the same thing, but they have yet to present any kind of actionable plans for a) reducing the size of the federal government; b) trimming the federal budget; c) addressing the national debt; or, more importantly, d) actually improving the lives of citizens.
Instead, the far right continues to shit-stir about drag queens, trans kids, the evils of diversity, and the desirability of having small bands of Christians dictate what books your public libraries can contain.
Meanwhile, the incoming shit-stirrer in chief is doing his usual thing: running a high-profile sideshow, this time about Greenland and Panama, taking the focus off his new tame legislature. We should be on high alert to see what new bills are being presented - like the one banning trans kids from participation in high school sports, or the one that’s proposed to prevent trans public servants from using the restroom of their choice.
We are talking here about lawmakers coming in with legislation that is explicitly about denying equal rights. We should be loudly and continuously outraged.
The far right is not about improving lives. It’s about controlling lives, within a framework historically opposed to equal rights for all.