RESCUING THE UNITED STATES FROM CONGRESSIONAL PROFLIGACY:
A PROPOSAL TO AMEND THE U. S. CONSTITUTION

By Barry D. Friedman, Ph.D.
North Georgia College
Dahlonega

Presented at the 1996 National Conference of the American Society for Public Administration
Atlanta, Georgia, July 1, 1996
(Original Title:  "The 'Efficiency Dividend':  How Many Services Can Be Squeezed Out of a Diminished Budget?")
Copyright © 1996

ABSTRACT

     This paper is a study to determine whether the impact of federal-government service cutbacks can be blunted by using efficiency measures to "squeeze" more services out of diminished budgets forced by the accumulated debt. The author finds that inefficiencies do not arise merely because they slip by unnoticed, but rather because of systemic factors, most of which are political or structural, that undermine efforts at reform. Because the causal factors are inherent in the politics and structure, they can be overcome only by changing the rules and the structure. Thus, the author calls for the state legislatures to save the country from Congress and to save Congress from itself by initiating a proposal for a series of constitutional amendments that would (1) require a balanced budget unless the economic cycle or a declared war justifies an exception, (2) establish that the president is the chief budget maker and that Congress's role is to allocate funds for outcomes, not for processes (thus possibly ending the practice of "pork"), (3) transfer from Congress to the president the power to create and terminate agencies and to reorganize the executive branch, (4) make federal employees responsible only to the president and not to congressional committees (such that subpoenas could be issued only upon a resolution approved by both houses of Congress), and (5) limit the number of terms to which members of Congress may be elected.

Introduction

     Bill Clinton had just assumed the presidency, and an editorial cartoonist depicted him in conference with an aide, who was briefing the president on the government's financial status. The president wanted to know: What had we been obtaining from deficit-spending? "Something for nothing," the aide responded. The president further inquired: And what will we obtain from paying off the deficit? "Nothing for something," intoned the aide.

     Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration endeavored to combat the Great Depression with a federal government that was collecting about 7.7 percent of the Gross National Product.1 Beginning in the 1960s, government spending has exploded. James Dale Davidson, head of the National Taxpayer's Union, observed:

     Since 1960, federal spending has increased by three hundred percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. But average earnings, which peaked in 1973, have now slipped back to 1961 levels. That means the average guy is making what his father did, but he's paying for three times as much government.2

     The imbalance of federal government revenues and federal government expenditures would seem to confront government officials with having to live with, as the cartoonist's representation of a Clinton aide would say, "nothing for something." A family coping with burdensome credit-card bills that have accumulated over a long period of time will find that the use of a large part of income to pay off debt translates into a substantial deterioration of standard of living. The U. S. government's accumulation of massive debt means, similarly, that the use of a large part of revenue to pay off debt will involve implications for government operations and the health of the national economy.

     Like the debt-ridden family, that can choose whether to try to pay off its debt or to file for bankruptcy, the federal government can choose whether to balance the budget (combined with making payments toward the debt) or to allow itself to become insolvent. It is this author's opinion that numerous members of Congress have found the former option to so threaten their immediate re-election opportunities that the latter option has become more attractive. Should the government be allowed to collapse financially, then presumably a new government will be designed from scratch, in the hope that some of the glory of the government that operated under the Constitution since 1789 can be recaptured.

     This paper assumes hopefully that the former option--balancing the budget and making payments toward the debt--will be effectuated. This is the "nothing-for-something" prescription. Concurrently, if sound government management practices can be adopted, then it is possible that the deleterious effect on the economy and on Americans' quality of life resulting from reduced government spending can be blunted through more efficient and effective uses of resources. Just as some analysts discussed savings that might result from the end of the Cold War as a "peace dividend," this paper explores the possibility that savings might result from more efficient government operation--hence, the "efficiency dividend."

 

Causes of Deficit Spending

     "Our federal government," Lambro writes, "has become a bloated, extravagant, paternalistic, remote, cluttered, disorganized, inefficient, frivolous, duplicative, archaic wasteland."3

     The literature of political science and public administration has described, in painstaking detail, the causes of deficit spending. However, the conditions so described are not always identified explicitly as "causes of deficit spending." This section of this paper catalogues the various problems of public administration that have contributed to budget imbalances that have resulted in the accumulation of debt.


REDUNDANCY, OVERLAP, AND DUPLICATION

     The Constitution established a system that has built-in redundancy, overlap, and duplication. The "layer-cake" model of dual federalism notwithstanding, the creation of a national government that would co-exist with 13 state governments--all of which carrying out legislative, executive, and judicial functions-- orchestrated the practice of duplicate governmental activities. Cooperative federalism merely elevated the duplication to a revered ritual. Another source of redundancy is the operation of a bicameral legislature, where the "Three Readings" process must occur twice if a bill is to be enacted. This redundancy causes Congress to maintain two sets of legislative leaders, two sets of support staff, and two sets of committees. While the principal reason for bicameralism was to effectuate the Connecticut Compromise, which conceded an advantage in the House of Representatives to the large states and an advantage in the Senate to the small states, another motivation for bicameralism was to restrain the legislature by allowing each house to check the other, thus "slowing it down." Moreover, the system of interbranch checks and balances, which violate the principle of separation of powers, causes each branch to carry out some of the powers associated with the others. For example, Congress has far more influence over the structure of the executive branch than the president does and oversees how the executive branch administers laws. Also, the president can--by using his veto power--force yet another round of consideration of a bill by one or both houses of Congress.

     Overzealous use of congressional oversight as a check on the executive branch has been given the pejorative label, "micromanagement." This duplication of management control has been blamed for numerous distortions and inefficiencies. Chaired by the late industrialist J. Peter Grace, the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (popularly known as the "Grace Commission") complained in 1984:

     . . . Congressional involvement in day-to-day management decisions has frequently delayed or prevented achievement of efficiencies proposed by program managers, thus costing the taxpayers billions of dollars in unnecessary expense.4

     Commenting on the Grace Commission's report, Fitzgerald and Lipson--two commission staff members--noted that the commission found over 100 examples of congressional involvement in executive functions that interfered with efficient management. For example:

     Congress refuses to allow the executive branch to even review the pricing structure of the Federal Power Marketing Administrations, which received over $250 million in taxpayer subsidies in FY 1984. . . . The Veterans Administration, with over 200,000 employees, must obtain congressional approval for any reorganization affecting as few as three employees. . . . A Senate committee chairman directs the appropriation of $7.1 million to paper over financial irregularities in American Samoa. . . . A House committee chairman obtains special legislation that delays the Department of Health and Human Services from recouping $354,000 that had been criminally misspent. . . . Civilian workers at an Air National Guard base are exempted from a governmentwide pay raise ceiling in order to receive a 27 percent pay increase through special-interest legislation. . . . A high-ranking senator exempts his state from the governmentwide competitive rate structure for moving the household goods of military families, an action that cost taxpayers at least $78 million from its inception in FY 1979 through FY 1983. . . . A Senate committee chairman prevents the sale of $2 billion worth of excess silver from the National Defense Stockpile and in the process benefits parochial interests. . . . A Senate committee, in a dispute with the House, refuses to approve requests for needed repairs on federal buildings that the General Services Administration must submit to Congress, adding a projected cost to taxpayers of over $150 million since FY 1979.5

     Within the executive branch, agencies and programs often duplicate and overlap each other. Landau has written a tribute to redundancy and overlap, saying:

     . . . [R]edundancy serves many vital functions in the conduct of public administration. It provides safety factors, permits flexible responses to anomalous situations and provides a creative potential for those who are able to see it. If there is no duplication, if there is no overlap, if there is no ambiguity, an organization will be able to neither suppress error nor generate alternate routes of action. In short, it will be most unreliable and least flexible, sluggish, as we now say.

     "Streamlining an agency," "consolidating similar functions," "eliminating duplication," and "commonality" are powerful slogans which possess an obvious appeal. But it is just possible that their achievement would deprive an agency of the properties it needs most--those which allow rules to be broken and units to operate defectively without doing critical injury to the agency as a whole.6

     A compelling argument can be presented that--even if redundancy and overlap are desirable luxuries, as Landau contends--a debt-ridden government can no longer afford such an extravagance. Furthermore, the argument can be made that federal administrators are not responsible for these management failures; rather, the failures result principally from the White House and Congress which, the Grace Commission report stated, "are the joint architects of the Federal Government's management systems, policies, and practices."7


POLITICAL FACTORS

     Most government overspending can be traced to political factors that permeate the government.

     Congressional re-election-oriented activities. Mayhew states that members of Congress orchestrate their repeated re-election through a number of strategies designed to appeal to the parochial interests of their respective districts. The strategies are advertising, credit-claiming (pork-barreling and constituent service), and position-taking.8 To these may be added a strategy that is not parochial but is designed to appeal to broad segments of the electorate--the creation and expansion of entitlements.

     The Citizens Against Government Waste organization operationally defines pork as follows: Pork (1) is requested by only one chamber of Congress, (2) is not specifically authorized, (3) is not competitively awarded, (4) is not required by the president, (5) greatly exceeds the president's budget request or the previous year's funding, (6) is not the subject of congressional hearings, or (7) serves only a local or special interest.9 Pork tends to encompass two categories: (1) the attraction of a government installation that would be built anyway into the district of an influential legislator and (2) the development of a facility that might have been paid for by some other benefactor or might not have been created at all. The former would not tend to generate marginal costs, except to the extent that the location of the installation is inefficient. For example, the construction of the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base on coastal Georgia necessitated dredging work to deepen the waterway to accommodate the submarines that would be serviced there. The extra work might not have been necessary at another location, but in order to please the president--Georgia native Jimmy Carter--and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) the Kings Bay site became attractive. NASA's Houston Space Center was built a long distance from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to please the constituents of a House aeronautics committee chairman from Houston. The potential benefit of pork to a state or district is exemplified by former Senate president pro tempore and Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.), who campaigned for re-election by telling his constituents: "I want to be West Virginia's $1-billion-a-year industry."

     Recently, Martino produced an account of how subsidies for science projects--once selected on a case-by-case basis for peer review--was "discovered" by Congress as another opportunity for pork-barreling.

     The practice goes back to 1983, when a Washington lobbying firm, Cassidy and Associates, succeeded in getting direct appropriations for laboratories at Columbia University and at Catholic University. Congress simply directed the Department of Energy to spend the money. Neither [DOE] nor the scientific community [was] asked whether the laboratories were high-priority projects, or even if they had any merit. For that matter, there were no congressional hearings on the laboratories. Other porkbarrel items in the same year included $20.4 million for the Oregon Health Sciences University and $15 million to the University of New Hampshire for a space and marine science building. . . .

     If 1983 was the first leak in the dike, by 1984 the leak had become a flood. Representative Sidney Yates, chairman of a House appropriations subcommittee, slipped a provision into an appropriations bill that provided $26 million for a laboratory at Northwestern University, in his district. Other universities hired lobbyists to get similar goodies for them. The lobbyists delivered. . . .

     In 1983 and 1984 together, Congress appropriated $100 million for laboratories and research projects solely on the basis of lobbying by the recipients. There were neither requests by the government agencies directed to spend the money nor congressional hearings on any of these appropriations.

     From there, Martino reports, "things got even worse."10

     The nonparochial version of disseminating resources to a grateful (or, at least, an expectant) public is entitlements. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that a democratic government survives until the people realize they can vote themselves largess from the treasury, at which point economic disaster ensues.11 Recognizing this threat, President Roosevelt ended cash relief and required that recipients work for benefits in 1935, explaining: "To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic."12 What was once seen as loathsome dependence on the government has been elevated to a wholesome sharing of promotional resources (except when the lower class receives such subsidies, at which time the payments continue to be regarded as disgraceful). Thus, while a poor 20-year-old mother is seen as a pariah for receiving a welfare check and food stamps, the acceptance of a Social Security check by an affluent 65-year-old retiree is regarded as a transfer that is owed to the beneficiary. Columnist Jack Anderson described the disingenuity:

     To stave off a national crisis, those of us who have adequate means must agree to give up our Social Security pensions.

     The first time [my wife] heard me say this, Olivia . . . literally screamed her objections: "We've contributed to that fund all our lives! It's our money! It's not the government's money! They can't take it away from us!"

     Unhappily, she was only partly right. While Americans of my generation have paid into Social Security through payroll deductions for most of our working lives, the money we are taking back is not our own. It comes from the workers of today, not yesterday, and that is the main reason we're in trouble. . . .

     The problem is, we usually get back from Social Security far more money than we put in. It always has been that way. The first-ever recipient of a Social Security check--Ida Mae Fuller of Ludlow, Vt.--paid a grand total of $22 into the system. By the time she died, at 99, she had received more than $20,000 in Social Security benefits. In just six years, most retirees recover every cent--plus interest--they paid into Social Security.13

     Any effort to curtail this transfer of wealth from indigent children and young workers to the affluent elderly is frustrated by the vocal expectations of senior citizens, who scrutinize candidates' actions and statements to detect any hint of belligerence against the continued growth of Social Security payments. A candidate who appears to threaten the growth of such payments can expect to lose virtually the entirety of the large elderly electorate. In 1964, the Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry M. Goldwater (R-Ariz.), questioned the propriety of the federal government's involvement in Social Security, thus antagonizing the population of older citizens. Based on such experiences, former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill (D-Mass.) called Social Security "the third rail of politics--touch it, and you die."14

     Similarly, so-called "corporate welfare"--a cornucopia of subsidies for American business--tends to escape the derision that payments to unfortunate individuals and families attract. The virtual invulnerability of these programs prove James Q. Wilson's contention that "a benefit once bestowed cannot easily be withdrawn."15

     Presidential initiatives. Although any incumbent president would be the most likely source of central management motivated to balance the budget, there are two reasons why presidents sometimes become spenders rather than budget balancers. First of all, they may be influenced by (or may tire of resisting) the heads of clientele-oriented departments. As Charles G. Dawes explained: "Cabinet members are vice presidents in charge of spending, and as such they are `natural enemies' of the President."16 Second, in competing with Congress to appeal to the public, presidents invent their own spending programs.

     After criticizing Republican President Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election for his failure to balance the budget,17 Roosevelt discovered Keynesian economics. A cartoon of the day depicted his aides dancing in a circle around an obviously self-satisfied Roosevelt, while they sang, "We owe it to ourselves!" Keynesian economics provided the rationale for the federal government to spend the country out of a downturn in the economic cycle so that the cycle could be attenuated. Deficit spending would also be available in times of military emergencies, such as World War II. But John Maynard Keynes clearly expected that the government would pay off debt and/or build up a reserve during times of economic prosperity. And, by forgoing the opportunity to demobilize after World War II, President Harry S. Truman launched the Cold War and inaugurated a costly state of perpetual military readiness.

     Beginning in the 1960s, presidents and Congress forgot about the part of Keynes' formula that prescribes paying off the debt in times of economic prosperity. While President Lyndon B. Johnson presided over an unprecedented level of prosperity, with virtually unlimited employment opportunities and negligible inflation, he pursued a "guns and butter" course "from which [the United States] has yet to recover."18

     To make good on his promise to shore up the country's military capabilities, the conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan perversely lowered taxes, opting to finance the military buildup by using the nation's charge account. From 1981 to 1986, the accumulated debt more than doubled from $994 billion to $2.1 trillion.19 Some conservative Republicans remarked on the ingenuity of Reagan in undermining the remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society by making it impossible for the Democrats to find the funds to develop those programs any further. The debt thus haunts President Clinton and congressional Democrats, and may have been an insurmountable obstacle that doomed Clinton's proposal for socialized medicine. "The biggest differences aren't over money issues, but how to restructure social programs we've had for 30 to 60 years," said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal-leaning Center for Budget Policy and Priorities.20 Ironically, however, the return of Republican control of Congress in January 1995 has forced Republicans to cope with the enormity of the Reagan-Bush debt. Their inability to get a handle on the problem threatens to make their current control of Congress a mere interlude.

     The concept of "uncontrollables." Public budgeting textbooks talk of "uncontrollables"--the huge proportion of the budget that is purportedly beyond the reach of budget makers. The concept seems to arise by assessing the frame of reference of the president --i.e., from his perspective, nothing can be done about entitlement programs, interest on the debt, etc., because they are fixed by law. The Grace Commission's proposed savings identified "implementation authority" as follows.21


Three-Year Savings/Revenue by Implementation Authority

Authority Amount ($ billions) % of Total
Congress $395.1 72.5%
Department/Agency 106.7 19.6%
President 43.2 7.9%
Total $545.0 100.0%


"In testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, Roy Ash, [then-director of the Office of Management and Budget,] argued that out of the entire 1975 budget about $92.2 billion could be labeled discretionary as opposed to $225 billion that he termed `mandatory spending.'"22 The concept confounds some discussions about these issues, because most government expenditures are imagined to be non-negotiable. Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review (NPR, the working group given the task of "Reinventing Government") described the resulting strangulation of presidential initiative this way:

     Incoming presidents and senior political appointees are traditionally warned to resist the temptation to manage the executive branch and are instead encouraged to accomplish a few significant political changes that define the incumbent administration. One conventional point of view is that, as the chief political officer, the President's principal task is to lead the federal government, not to manage it.23

     However, all government expenditures must be approved through congressional appropriation, currently an annual process. An NPR report observed critically that there is a "relatively small share of federal spending that must, by law, come up for executive and congressional review each year. . . . [O]nly a third of the budget--about $540 billion--is subject to annual decisions."24 What is "uncontrollable" for the president (save for the use of the veto power) is firmly within Congress's control. ". . . [W]hat Congress has granted, Congress can take away or whittle down," Lambro wrote.25

     Short-term focus. A private-sector corporation and the markets necessarily have a long-term focus. It is a principal of private-sector financial management that the price of a share of stock is determined by the present value of the expected flow of future dividends. Government officials rarely exhibit this long-term focus. The president's time horizon tends to be his four-year term of office. Even this may be an extravagant estimate. In truth, the president enters into office with a "honeymoon" period that may last for about half a year. By the time the administration obtains some experience in managing the executive branch, the honeymoon is over and the president rarely has success in getting legislation through Congress.26 Besides, high-ranking political appointees maintain their positions for an average of 18 months; they then take their experience, such as it is, elsewhere. Senators plan for re-election after a six-year term. Representatives are never more than two years away from the next election; thus, they spend virtually every day of their terms of office in a state of red alert. The short-term focus of government in our presidential-congressional system of office is a dominating force that undermines any motivation to plan for the long-term well-being of the country.


MANAGEMENT PECULIARITIES IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

     In addition to the "short-term focus" discussed above, there are a number of managerial distortions that are peculiar to the public sector.

     No "bottom line." Because government officials lack a clear criterion for performance--a role occupied in the corporate sector by the "bottom line"--wasteful practices survive in government virtually undetected. For example, an OMB official admitted, "We've never done a study of overhead." Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex.) has pressured OMB to study overhead; OMB, in turn, has threatened to throw his staff out of the OMB library. Smith's chief of staff, John Lampmann, reports that government overhead in 1995 amounted to $234 billion, or $115,000 per federal employee. When this overhead cost is combined with employee salary and benefits, the cost of maintaining each federal employee comes to $200,000--between two and three times as much as the cost of maintaining a private-sector employee. The items that are included in overhead are travel ($6.4 billion), moving of things ($5.3 billion), communications ($6.9 billion), consultants ($4.2 billion), furniture and decorations ($1.3 billion), computers, rent, printing, and purchase of supplies and services.27

     Another example of waste caused by the lack of a "bottom line" is the deficient procedures used by the government for cash management and inventory control. The simple rule of cash management that private concerns use is that bills should be paid as late as possible and receipts should be deposited as soon as possible.28 An NPR report recommended the use of electronic funds transfer (EFT).29 The Grace Commission recommended that the Department of Defense employ the Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) method for determining the optimum quantities of materials to be ordered and the most favorable frequency of placing orders to replenish inventory.30

     Suboptimal methods of budgeting and financial reporting. The government's arcane, line-item-oriented method of budgeting obscures operating statuses more than it illuminates, under-informing the president, Congress, and other officials. The line-item format also has the effect of micromanaging what government managers do, so that they lack discretion to improve management and obtain better results. The budget process bears little relationship to any sort of performance criteria. Moreover, the systems for monitoring financial-oriented operations are separate and uncoordinated. An NPR report complained:

     Today, to put it simply, the federal books are a mess. Any business with separate, uncoordinated systems for budgeting, accounting, and product sales would soon be bankrupt. But the federal government has such [uncoordinated] systems. Indeed, our government requires companies, states, and localities to meet professional financial standards that it does not come close to meeting itself.

     Consider, for example, what [OMB] found in its 1992 survey of 878 agency financial systems. Over half don't meet agency financial processing requirements, nearly half don't meet their own internal automated data processing requirements; a third don't meet functional requirements for reporting to OMB and the Treasury Department; over 30 percent are more than 10 years old; and, perhaps most shocking, the age of nearly 20 percent couldn't be firmly established. . . .

     Currently, 60 percent of major federal agencies have one or more programs on OMB's high-risk list of programs particularly vulnerable to fraud or waste.31

     Hamm has a related analysis about expenditures that are separated from the budget:

     . . . [One] key contributor to waste is the "scorecard" that is used to keep track of costs--the budget document. . . . [M]any . . . important categories of "government spending" usually are not given adequate scrutiny because they do not show up on traditional "scorecards" of government spending. If increasing or decreasing the amount provided for a given program is not going to raise or lower the size of the budget as it is reported in the press, an elected official's incentive to scrutinize program expenditures is greatly weakened, thus reducing the checks on waste.32

     Another NPR report noted:

     Congressional testimony in support of the Government Performance and Results Act [P.L. 103-62] (which President Clinton signed August 3, 1993) stressed the need for a fundamental shift in the federal government's accountability system from one oriented to accountability for processes and who gets "inputs" (in this case, fiscal resources) to one focusing accountability on performance and results. . . .

     The [Clinton] administration has already begun to transform these processes. The focus of the budget is moving away from seeking more, more, more. The process must be transformed to focus on what managers produce and citizens get for their money--results, performance, value, quality, and customer service.33

     Territorialism, monopolization, and "slack." Classical capitalist economic theory celebrates competition as the invisible hand that brings vendors and customers together to make transactions at reasonable prices. Competition requires businesses to minimize production costs, lest they be unable to compete with more efficient firms. Because government can, in most practical contexts, be understood to have no competition, the forces that otherwise drive down costs are absent. Under these circumstances, certain government establishments--notably the Department of Defense--will be lethargic in procurement, giving rise to the extravagantly priced toilet seats, screwdrivers, etc., that are often described in exposés. Often, the Pentagon will specify unique designs that require contractors to re-tool, so that 3-cent screws may cost $91 each.34 In contrast to monopoly, government is essentially a "monopsony" (the only customer) for defense contractors; if the government would use standard devices, it could approach the market to buy cheap equipment at Sears or Home Depot, as all the rest of us do, at substantial savings.

     Certain government suppliers, such as the General Services Administration, act as monopolists in supplying the needs of other government agencies. GSA is involved in or actually controls about $45 billion per year in purchases by government agencies.35 Its monopoly status allows it to charge costs that are higher than are common in the competitive marketplace.

     The government's insulation from competition provides government officials with the opportunity to enjoy "slack"--i.e., perquisites whose costs a truly competitive enterprise could not survive. "The government [is] spending $250 million a year on furniture, . . . while a government warehouse in Franconia, Virginia, [holds] a giant cache of perfectly good furniture," Gross reported. It is estimated that the federal government spends $1.35 to $2 billion per year on new furniture and decorating-- "[t]hat's more than the entire budget of the state of North Dakota," Gross noted.36 The government's fleet of vehicles equipped with chauffeurs is another indication of "slack." ". . . [T]here is almost one government car for every ten federal civilian employees--at least ten times the ratio of private corporations," Gross observed.37 The government's insulation from competition also reduces the necessity to scrutinize operations to eliminate fraud and abuse.38

     Distortions caused by personnel administration. The burdensome requirements caused by the government's system of personnel administration bury supervisors in paperwork and discourage them from rewarding competence and punishing sloth for fear of additional paperwork. "The classification and pay systems are inflexible. The performance management system is not adequately linked to the organization's mission and goals."39 Therefore, the personnel administration lumbers along entirely separated from any activity that might enhance the efficiency of governmental operations.


BUREAUCRATISM AND BUREAUPATHOLOGIES

     James P. Pinkerton, deputy assistant to President George Bush for policy planning, wrote that the political paradigm of American government, including American public administration, has been the paradigm of "bureaucratism." All political initiatives worthy of any note have been designed to achieve outcomes using the bureaucracy as the medium (or, to use a contemporary computer term, the "operating system").40 Given the fact that public administration scholars have scrutinized the bureaucracy model throughout the 20th century and have found it to be riddled with contradictions, it would not be surprising to find analyses that attempt to drive a stake into the heart of the model of bureaucracy as an appropriate vehicle for policy execution. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the challenges to the bureaucratism paradigm have been selective and limited, and that so few have gone down the same road as Pinkerton to discard the old paradigm and develop an alternative.

     The bureaucracy model has given rise to the following distortions, inefficiencies, and other disadvantages.

     Growth and self-promotion. The assumption of bureaucratism has been "grow or die." Downs commented on the near-immortality of government institutions, comparing their survival record to that of churches and universities, and observed that an agency that survives its infancy is an agency that will not be uprooted.41 The resistance of the Board of Tea Experts to efforts by President Nixon and others to abolish it is legendary.42 An NPR report stated that "the federal government has created a managerial culture that is reactive and oriented toward maintaining the status quo."43 In order to insure their positions, agencies seek strategies of inexorable growth. In an analysis reminiscent of C. Northcote Parkinson's development of Parkinson's Law,44 Gross traces the growth of the Department of Agriculture despite a decline in the number of farmers.

 

Year Number of Farmers Number of USDA Farm Employees Ratio of USDA Farm Employees to 1000 Farmers
c. 1900 5 million 3,000 0.60
1935 6.3 million 20,000 3.17
1992 2.1 million 60,000 28.57 (!)

     Gross extrapolates the data to reach this conclusion:

     By the year 2040, the number of full-time American farmers will be down to 150,000, while the number of [USDA] workers will have reached the same level. Surely, we Americans will have achieved the ultimate victory of bureaucracy--one federal employee figuratively kibitzing each farmer as he plows his rows.45

     To further cement their position, government agencies engage in extensive and expensive public-relations campaigns designed to keep their popular activities visible and to develop positive images in the arena of public opinion. For example: ". . . Uncle Sam is undisputably the world's biggest magazine publisher." The federal government also spends $500 million making films.46

     Hence, Gross has referred to the federal government itself as the most powerful special-interest group of all. Similarly, its constituents--i.e., both government employees and their clients-- are organized into smaller subsets that seek benefits for themselves and their domains. Mosher described the activity of professions in the public sector, which attempt to achieve self-government by freezing out generalists and others who might interfere with that objective.47 The federal government's "staff" members (as opposed to "line" officials) are stereotypical, in that they have attempted to impose their objectives on line managers, interfering with the line managers' efforts to operate their agencies.48

     Sowell has offered an emphatic description of how practitioners of anti-poverty programs build in failure to their methods for fear that success may obviate their further employment.

     To be blunt, the poor are a gold mine. By the time they are studied, advised, experimented with, and administered, the poor have helped many a middle-class liberal to achieve affluence with government money.49

     Lambro adds: "The total amount of money the government spends on its many antipoverty efforts is three times what would be required to lift every man, woman and child in American above the official poverty line, by simply sending money to the poor."50

     Red tape. In order to suppress corruption, governments develop red-tape methods by which every transaction can be traced. While the red tape discourages some forms of corruption, the processes are made far more intricate, time-consuming, and costly. An NPR report said:

     Traditionally the executive and legislative branches have "corrected" poor leadership and mismanagement by extending and tightening oversight, regulation, compliance, clearance, and review mechanisms of agencies and managers. These processes foster staff-directed management through rules and regulations. These tools and levers have created a culture of tight control. However, they also create gridlock in programs and organizations. They are not mechanisms for action, accomplishment, or empowerment. These staff-driven rules wrap managers in layers of control, oversight, and red tape; obscure responsibility and accountability; and shift management's focus to compliance with rules--and away from achieving results and satisfying customers. Based on the public's opinion of government, this approach has not worked. But it stubbornly persists throughout the federal government.51

     Corruption. "Bureaucratic corruption," says Caiden, "is a particularly virulent form of bureaupathology." Bureaucratic corruption, he says, can be and often is "institutionalized." When the corruption is "regularized" (i.e., accepted as customary), bureaucratic mechanisms proceed to react to wrongdoing with leniency and even to penalize propriety and integrity. The bureaucracy thus takes pains to make the corruption obscure to those who might have the capacity and inclination to expose and terminate the wrongdoing.52 It can be said that bureaucracy provides a home for corruption and protects and nurtures it, a shortcoming that suggests that the bureaucratic model needs to be subjected to doubt and scrutiny.

 

Reform Attempts

     The enumeration in the preceding section of reasons why government expenditures have increased relentlessly may make it apparent that efforts to reform the system are precarious. What follows is a brief discussion of how and why such reform efforts have failed and the reaction of reformers to these failures.
 

INERTIA

     The National Performance Review recognized the inertia that shakes off efforts to cut the budget. An NPR report said:

     Were it easy to greatly reduce the deficit, past Presidents and Congresses would have done so. Needs greatly outweigh resources, so demand far exceeds supply. Everyone wants more, feels justified in seeking more, organizes to get more. Changes in the budget process won't alter that reality.53

     Years of experience with congressional behavior, bureaucratic behavior, and interest-group behavior--as expressed in such models as the subgovernment model of the "iron triangle"54--indicate that resistance to change will not suddenly melt. Schick reported that only three major nondefense programs had been eliminated during the Reagan-Bush era, a period when presidents were committed to program cuts.55


EFFORTS BY OMB, THE GAO AND THE GRACE COMMISSION

     OMB. Although the Bureau of the Budget was renamed the Office of Management and Budget in 1970 to designate the bureau as a center of study for better government management, the "M" side of OMB has long been virtually dormant.56

     GAO. Congress's watchdog institution, the General Accounting Office, routinely audits executive agencies for mismanagement and inefficiency. However, according to Lambro, there are some 14,000 audit reports "gathering dust on government shelves, even though they document the loss of $4.3 billion annually in unauthorized use of federal funds by contractors and grant recipients."57

     Grace Commission. The Grace Commission chronicled the failures in federal government systems that waste resources. The commission foresightedly pinpointed the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Pentagon's procurement system, and regulation of the savings-and-loan industry--potential problems that ballooned into notorious scandals. Kelly tells the "rest of the story":

     When the report was first released, some of the recommendations were actually followed--saving, by Grace's count, $200 billion. But most have sat on a shelf, fueling his frustration with Washington in general and Congress in particular. Three quarters of the reforms required congressional action, and Congress, it is apparent to Grace, was not about to reform the government when it came to cutting spending, wasteful or not.58

     In 1984, Grace and the Grace Commission spawned a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization called Citizens Against Government Waste. The organization continues to identify wasteful government spending and to organize voters to challenge government officials who perpetuate deficit-spending.


FRUSTRATION OF REFORMERS

     Reformers in Congress trying to alert their colleagues to government overspending that will eventually make the government insolvent have discovered that their colleagues are aware of the problem, and that their inaction and indifference are due to their fear of imperiling their prospects to win re-election. When members of the Grace Commission appeared before the House Budget Committee, Rep. Delbert L. Latta (R-Ohio) confessed:

     I don't think there is any question that the members of Congress, as a body, know what the problems are. The question in my mind after 25 years down here is whether or not they have the fortitude to vote to do something for "good old Joe" or for this faction or that faction, and get re-elected, than it is to do something for the country.59

     Members of Congress who have been willing to oppose the system of waste, pork, and entitlements have, sooner or later, departed from Congress with feelings of exasperation, disappointment, and failure. Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wisc.), the man who bestowed the famous "Golden Fleece" award for boondoggles, said upon leaving Congress: "I have spent my career trying to get Congressmen to spend the people's money as if it were their own. But I have failed."60 On the Senate floor, Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N. H.) said:

     The fact is we are unable institutionally to do what has to be done. We are literally not watching the fiddler fiddle when Rome burns--we are watching the entire orchestra. How is it that in the early spring or late winter of 1992, with a federal budget deficit reaching $400 billion, with the country in economic disarray, how can we--any of us--responsibly stand on this floor and talk about doing anything that has even the slightest chance of adding not a dime but a penny to our budget deficit?

     I think I have the answer. I think I have finally figured it out after 11 years, and that is that people are afraid to level with the American people because they have been lied to for so long.61

Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) expressed a similar sentiment on the Senate floor shortly thereafter:

     Deep down in our hearts we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. We have been so intent on getting ourselves elected that year after year we have put off the hard issues, and year after year we have told people that they can get their choice between more benefits and lower taxes. . . .

     We know that entitlement programs are the lion's share of the federal budget and that we have no mechanism for reining in their growth. But no sooner is that suggestion put forward than people say, "Wait a second. Not now. No. Wait until next year. Let us not talk about controlling the entitlement programs, because this is an election year and we do not want to offend anybody by talking about the entitlements." . . . An election is never more than two years away in Congress. . . .

     We have told Americans that we can give them something for nothing. We have told them we can reduce taxes, and we can increase benefits. And the numbers do not add up. . . . We pretend that if only corrupt people were not around, this problem would go away. If only incompetent people were not around, that problem would go away. If only we did not pay members of Congress so much, that would free up the money and we could have everything. If only we did not have foreign aid, then we could spend the money. If only we could reduce defense spending, then we could spend the money. If only we did one thing after another, we would be able to spend more on us and pay less taxes.

     It is a fraud. We have defrauded the country to get ourselves elected.62

     For some time now, I have predicted that members of Congress would continue to practice deficit-spending in order to get re-elected repeatedly but that, once the ship of state began to sink, they would retire from their jobs and leave it to others to officiate over the crumbling of the system. Indeed, substantial numbers of legislators are bailing out as economic disaster approaches.63 Unfortunately, not enough of these selfish individuals are departing. Arguably, the least greedy of them are the ones who are leaving now. But the departure of larger numbers of incumbents may afford more opportunity to make fundamental changes in the way that the federal government carries out its business.

 

Remedies:  Reducing Expenditures

     A number of committees, commissions, researchers, and journalists have identified programs that they think should be cut and the amounts of money that would be saved by doing so. A representative listing follows, based on available literature. Some of the figures may be somewhat out-of-date. The purpose of this list is solely to obtain a portrait of the orders of magnitude of programs that may be suitable for cutbacks or termination.64


AGENCY CUTS

Agriculture:  up to $56 billion
Close 1200 offices representing the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the Rural Economic and Community Development divisions; eliminate USDA Extension Service; cut county extension funding; eliminate USDA costs of inspecting, classifying, and grading cotton and tobacco

Commerce:  $3 billion
Privatize the Census; eliminate Economic Research Service

Defense:  $1.3 billion
Close military bases that the military wants to close; eliminate Defense Civil Preparedness Program; close Pentagon's "Top Brass" Dining Room; cut military recreational facilities; close certain military commissaries and exchanges; cut Inter-American Defense Board; eliminate Coast Guard Selected Reserve Program; eliminate Selective Service

Education:  $20 billion
Eliminate Department of Education; eliminate Ethnic Heritage Studies

Housing and Urban Development:  $675 million
Eliminate HUD's Office of International Affairs; eliminate HUD's Office of Interstate Land Sales Registration; eliminate HUD Urban Development Action Grants

Transportation:  $20.5 million
Eliminate Highway Beautification Program

Federal Information Center:  $4 million

NASA:  $8.7 billion

Amtrak:  $899 million

SBA:  $1 billion

American Battle Monuments Commission:  $7.5 million

Community Services Administration:  $668 million

Consumer Information Center:  $1.2 million

Office of Consumer Affairs:  $1.8 million

Council on Environmental Quality and Office of Environmental Quality:  $3 million

Council on Legal Education Opportunity:  $1 million

Economic Development Administration:  $2.4 billion

U. S. Employment Service:  $738 million

FDR Memorial Commission and Commission on Fine Arts:  $288,000

Foreign Claims Settlement Commission:  $958,000

Federal Election Commission:  $8.5 million

President's Council on Physical Fitness:  $818,000

Institute of Museum Services:  $7.8 million

International Development Association:  $1 billion

Interstate Commerce Commission:  $80 million

Law Enforcement Assistance Administration; National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice; and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency:  $486 million

Legal Services Corporation:  $300 million

Japan-U. S. Friendship Commission:  $2.4 million

Maritime Administration:  $491 million

Minority Business Development Agency:  $53 million

National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice:  $704,000

National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities:  $300 million

National Institute of Building Sciences:  $750,000

National Institute of Education:  $86.5 million

Parole Commission:  $5.4 million

Smithsonian Special Foreign Currency Program:  $4.3 million

U. S. Travel Service:  $8 million

Regional Commissions:  $67.7 million

Office of Smallpox Eradication:  $1.2 million

VISTA:  $30.8 million

Women's Bureau:  $2.5 million

Youth Conservation Corps:  $70 million

814 federal advisory boards, committees, commissions, and councils:  $74 million

Congress (annual budget: $3 billion):  $500 million
Examples: Reduce size of staff; discharge Automatic Elevator Operators; close House and Senate Gymnasium; eliminate Congress's Florist Service; cut Capitol Police


FUNCTIONAL AND CONTRACTING CUTS

Three Year Savings/Revenue by Major Management Function
(according to the Grace Commission)

Function Amount ($ billions) % of Total
Human resources mgmt. $125.9 23.1%
Subsidy programs mgmt. 99.0 18.2%
Fiscal management 53.8 9.9%
Weapons acquisition mgmt. 49.9 9.2%
Procurement mgmt. (non-ADP) 44.7 8.2%
Subtotal $373.3 68.6%
Next 5 largest 119.7 21.9%
Subtotal $493.0 90.5%
All Others 52.0 9.5%
Total $545.0 100.0%

 

Promotional:  $1 billion
Cut PR ranks in half; cut government advertising; discharge government lobbyists; cut government film-making

Contracting
$200 billion in outside contracts per year wastes at least 30 percent of the federal budget--enough to pay for one-third of the annual federal deficit.

Consultants:  $1 billion

Procurement:  $4.5 billion
Reinvent federal procurement


PORK, SUBSIDY, AND ENTITLEMENT CUTS

Pork:  $8 billion

Corporate welfare:  $25 billion

Education:  $12 billion
Cut "overhead" reimbursement attached to research grants to universities in half; reform student financial aid; end Impact Aid to Education, "B" Category; eliminate Bilingual Education Program; eliminate Educational and Cultural Exchange Grants

Medicaid:  $50 billion
Reform and revamp Medicaid

Agriculture:  $30 billion
Phase out farm subsidies; eliminate Beekeeper Indemnity payments

Transportation:  $46 million
Eliminate "Essential Air Service" program; privatize Alaska Railroad

Revenue Sharing:  $6.8 billion
Eliminate Revenue Sharing

Science:  $100 million
Eliminate National Science Foundation Low Priority Research


CUTS IN PERSONNEL AND OVERHEAD COSTS

Overhead:  $78 billion
Cut overhead of $234 billion by 33%--examples: eliminate chauffeured limousines; cut agency travel budgets from $7 to $4 billion; eliminate VIP Lodges and Retreats; discharge personal chefs for Cabinet secretaries; discharge military servants; cut use of DOT planes

Personnel (salary and benefits):  $54 billion
Cut the payroll of the government by one-third--examples: eliminate 20% of middle managers; cut back on overly generous benefits to federal employees; cut federal-employee pension benefits

Double dipping:  $1 billion
End practice of double dipping


COSTS OF POOR CASH MANAGEMENT, UNCOLLECTED REVENUES, DEBT, ETC.

     The Grace Commission projected the following levels of debt and interest if the President's Private Sector Survey (PPSS) recommendations were not adopted and if they were.
 

  Federal Debt ($ trillions) Annual Interest on Federal Debt ($ billions)
  Without PPSS With PPSS Without PPSS With PPSS
1990 $ 3.2 $ 2.0 $  252.3 $ 89.2
1995 6.2 2.2 540.9 62.3
2000 13.0 2.5 1,520.7 75.1


     The Grace Commission reported:

     One-third of all [federal] taxes is consumed by waste and inefficiency in the Federal Government. . . . Another one-third of all their taxes escapes collection from others as the underground economy blossoms in direct proportion to tax increases and places even more pressure on law abiding taxpayers, promoting still more underground economy--a vicious cycle that must be broken.

     With two-thirds of everyone's personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government.65

     Using electronic payments instead of paper checks, and using electronic collections, could improve the government's cash flow by more than $70 million per year within five years. Strengthening debt collection could bring in an additional $1 billion per year.66

The following table shows that of $424.4 billion of cost-saving opportunities identified by the Grace Commission, 73.6 percent of that amount could be saved by resolving waste and system failures.

 

PPSS Savings Recommendations
(according to the Grace Commission)

  $ Billion % of Total
Program Waste $160.9 37.9%
System Failures 151.3 35.7%
Personnel Mismanagement 90.0 21.4%
Structural Deficiencies 12.7 3.0%
Other Opportunities 8.6 2.0%
  $424.4 100.0%


     The federal government also needs to be more receptive to opportunities to collect user fees. For example, in 1994, the Federal Communications Commission collected $8.9 billion selling broadcasting licenses. "The money went straight to the Treasury to reduce the deficit."67

     See the appendix for summaries of projected savings from the recommendations of the Grace Commission and the National Performance Review.

 

Remedies:  Changing the Institutional Structure and Process

     The experience has been repeated several times that lists can be made of potential program cuts, and more efficient methods of management and operation may be proposed, but the president and Congress implement a token few of the reforms. While it is a service of some note to make such lists, in the final analysis an overhaul of the institutional structure and processes of the federal government must be undertaken if the benefits of these studies can ever be realized. Accordingly, I recommend the following changes. Some of these can be done by statute. However, some will required that the Constitution be amended. Explaining some of his more aggressive strategies for waging the Civil War that violated the Constitution, President Abraham Lincoln intoned that only by violating the Constitution could he save it. In this case, I contend that only by amending the Constitution will it remain the law of the land. Should the government finally become insolvent, the Constitution will be of more historical interest than practical importance.


BALANCED-BUDGET AMENDMENT

     The state legislatures should initiate action to propose a balanced-budget amendment. The amendment should allow the president and Congress to take into account the economic cycle and the national emergency of a declared war. However, the permanent state of deficit spending should be outlawed in such a way that Congress can not finesse the requirement. Social security funds should be separated from the Treasury in assessing the balance. Hiding funds and collections of user fees off-budget and using pension funds to appear to balance the budget should be proscribed by the amendment.


TERMINATE MICROMANAGEMENT

     Congress must discontinue its practice of micromanaging the executive branch. The president must be the chief executive in fact, not just in theory. Public administrators must be empowered to execute the laws efficiently and effectively. The Grace Commission praised the Reagan administration's use of a Cabinet Council on Management and Administration to spearhead the development of sound principles of management. It also recommended the establishment of an Office of Federal Management in the Executive Office of the President. The office would be "responsible for policies and programs throughout the Government to improve financial management information systems, to coordinate reporting policies and procedures, to assure effective management of human resources and for planning and budgeting."68

     The National Performance Review staff pleaded for Congress to respect the separation of powers.

     A broad array of experts says Congress has become overly involved in executive branch functions and responsibilities, such as with too much detailed program direction and program oversight. Congress, however, responds that the executive branch appears unable to guarantee sound internal management. Regardless of who is right, the government and the country would benefit from a more collaborative relationship between the executive and legislative branches--without compromising the fundamental value of separation of powers. The President can work to enhance informal communications with lawmakers and staff to reach agreement on ways to deal with management problems.69

     The staff also called on Congress to give the president authority to reorganize the executive branch. Congress's control of the structure of the executive branch is a relic of the revolutionary period. An NPR report recommended to Congress:

     Reestablish the President's authority to reorganize agencies. Presidents have had this power periodically since the 1930s. The last authority was granted for one year in 1984 and has not been renewed.70

     Clearly, Congress has no intention of ceding reorganizational power to the president. When President Nixon proposed that four superdepartments be established in 1971, Rep. Chet Holifield of the House Committee on Government Operations responded:

     If by this organization you affect in a major way the powers of the various committees in the Congress, you may as well forget it. The only way I know to get one or more of these departments through is to allow the committees that now have the programs within their jurisdiction to follow their programs, just as they are followed now, and authorize these programs wherever they are distributed.71

     Accordingly, the state legislatures should initiate a proposal to amend the Constitution to allow the president to determine the organization of the executive branch. The amendment could prohibit Congress from specifying the location of facilities in appropriations legislation, thus ending the practice of pork. Presumably, giving control of executive-branch structure to the president would help him to reduce or virtually eliminate redundancy, duplication, and overlap, thus saving--by Gross's estimate--$10 billion per year.72

     Congress's micromanagement of the executive branch constitutes meddling that kills creativity and any incentive that may exist to operate an efficient administration that recognizes quality as the focus of efficiency.73 The use of substantive legislation, appropriations legislation, and oversight hearings must be curtailed. The state legislatures should initiate a proposal to amend the Constitution to make public administrators responsible to the president, and not to the committees of Congress. A subpoena to the executive branch should be issued only upon a resolution receiving an extraordinary majority of votes in both houses.


PERFORMANCE BUDGETING IN PLACE OF PROJECT AND LINE-ITEM BUDGETING

     The budget must be an integral part of a management process that provides benchmarks for efficiency and better management, but that does not specify how results are achieved. Congress should allocate funds by establishing desired outcomes, but not by prescribing processes by which the work is accomplished.

     An NPR report called for "mission-driven, results-oriented" budgeting which would involve these protocols:

     Strengthen accountability for results, with potential leadership defining political priorities first, then reaching agreements with managers on what they are expected to accomplish and how their accomplishments will be measured. . . .

     Once decisions have been reached, empower managers to achieve expected results by providing the necessary resources, unburdened by excessively detailed restrictions. . . .

     Streamline and improve the budget development process to give managers more time to manage their programs, to provide them with more timely information on policy priorities and funding levels in order to more effectively use resources, and to provide links between budgetary resources, missions, goals, and results.74

     If management decisions were vested in federal managers, there would be an opportunity to improve program design. An NPR report stated:

     In designing programs, officials all too often fail to anticipate the unintended consequences. . . . [W]e need broadly applicable techniques for designing effective, cost-efficient programs, especially in an era of fiscal austerity. We also should apply program design technology to existing programs as part of program review, evaluation, and redesign processes. In time, the objective criteria that we develop may help us better determine what services the federal government should provide, and what we should discontinue.75

     Making the budget mission-directed would provide fewer places where fraud and abuse can go undetected.76

     The NPR called for the budget process to be converted into a biennial, rather than an annual, process. It also suggested:

     The administration should develop an internal mechanism for communicating total fiscal limits, allocating resources within those limits, and enunciating multi-year spending targets. This mechanism, analogous to the Congressional Budget Resolution, should allocate funding by the broad missions of government cross-tabulated by agency, thus avoiding months of effort spent developing unrealistic budget requests. Policy discussions should involve all affected agencies.77

     The state legislatures should initiate action to propose an amendment to establish that the president is the chief budget maker and that Congress's role is to allocate funds for outcomes, not for processes.


BETTER USE OF INFORMATION

     The Grace Commission established that information about the common management functions of the departments and agencies are not integrated in common data bases. There is no central authority for developing and coordinating financial management policies and monitoring financial performance. Departments have separate information systems and procedures in the areas of payroll, personnel, accounting, and asset management. Concerning asset management, the commission complained:

     The information gap in the Federal Government is so serious that nobody knows, for example:

     • what cash balances are, where they are located, and what total Federal funds have been committed to individual states or localities;

     • where real and personal property is located and what it is being used for; and

     • how much money is owed to the Government by any one individual or corporation and how long it has been outstanding. . . .

     Information gaps of this magnitude are not tolerated in the private sector; any company which did not solve the problem quickly would be out of business in short order.

     The Grace Commission projected three-year savings opportunities of $78.598 billion if the information were collected and utilized.78


TERM-LIMITS AMENDMENT

     More than the expected proportion of freshman Republican representatives in the 104th Congress seemed to be motivated toward balancing the budget even at the expense of re-election.79 More representatives who are not obsessed with the necessity of being re-elected are needed if the difficult decisions that can bring about electoral defeat are to be made. Action by the state legislatures to propose an amendment for congressional term limits is already past due. The president is limited to two terms by the 22d Amendment; a similar policy should extend to legislators.


 

APPENDIX

 

     The Grace Commission projected $1.9 trillion in savings per year by the year 2000.80

* * *

Clinton/Gore NPR Savings
(FY 1995-1999, $ in billions)81

Agencies $ 36.4
Streamlining the Bureaucracy through Reengineering 40.4
Procurement (5% annual savings in total procurement spending) 22.5
Information Technology (savings due to consolidation and modernization of the information infrastructure) 5.4
Intergovernmental (offer fee-for-service option in lieu of existing administrative costs) 3.3
     TOTAL $108.0

 

 

ENDNOTES

     1 The Government Racket:  Washington Waste from A to Z (New York:  Bantam Books, 1992), p. 6.

     2 Quoted in Brian Kelly, Adventures in Porkland:  How Washington Wastes Your Money and Why They Won't Stop (New York:  Villard Books, 1992), p. 53.

     3 Donald Lambro, Fat City:  How Washington Wastes Your Taxes (South Bend, Ind.:  Regnery/Gateway, Inc., 1980), p. xv.

     4 President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste (New York:  Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984), p. 19.

     5 Randall Fitzgerald and Gerald Lipson, Porkbarrel:  The Unexpurgated Grace Commission Story of Congressional Profligacy (Washington, D. C.:  Cato Institute, 1984), p. xxvii.

     6 Martin Landau, "Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap," in Bureaucratic Power in National Policy Making, 4th ed., ed. Francis E. Rourke (Boston:  Little, Brown and Company, 1986), p. 483.

     7 President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, p. 19.

     8 David R. Mayhew, Congress:  The Electoral Connection (New Haven, Conn.:  Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 49‑75.  See also Morris P. Fiorina, Congress:  Keystone of the Washington Establishment (New Haven, Conn.:  Yale University Press, 1979), Ch. 5.

     9 Citizens Against Government Waste, 1996 Congressional Pig Book Summary (Washington, D. C.:  By the organization, 1996), p. 2.  The list of criteria is directly quoted from the booklet; however, punctuation has been adjusted to fit into the text.

     10 Joseph P. Martino, Science Funding:  Politics and Porkbarrel (New Brunswick, N. J.:  Transaction Publishers, 1992), pp. 1‑2.

     11 "When a people begins to reflect upon its situation, it discovers a multitude of wants to which it had not before been subject, and to satisfy these exigencies recourse must be had to the coffers of the State."  Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New Rochelle, N. Y.:  Arlington House, 1965), I:204.

     12 Quoted in "GOP reform plan would end welfare as we know it" [editorial], The Atlanta Journal, December 22, 1994, p. A18.

     13 Jack Anderson, "`Why Should I Pay For People Who Don't Need It?'" Parade Magazine, February 21, 1993, pp. 4‑5.

     14 Ibid., p. 4.

     15 James Q. Wilson, "The Rise of the Bureaucratic State," in Bureaucratic Power in National Policy Making, p. 136.

     16 Kermit Gordon, Reflections on Spending (Washington, D. C.:  The Brookings Institution, 1967), p. 15.

     17 Everett Carll Ladd, American Political Parties:  Social Change and Political Response (New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 1970), pp. 187, 208‑209.

     18 Hobart Rowen, "Our Own Worst Enemy:  How America drove its economy into the ditch," The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, Sept. 26‑Oct. 2, 1994, p. 10.

     19  Thomas B. Edsall, "The Real Legacy, in Reagan Red:  The deficit has reached out from the past to color Clinton's future," The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, Aug. 2‑8, 1993, p. 25.

     20  Andrew Mollison, "Benefits are at core of budget dispute:  Social programs' future uncertain," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 1, 1996, p. A6.

     21  President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, p. 316.

     22  Lambro,The Federal Rathole (New Rochelle, N. Y.:  Arlington House, 1975), p. 17.

     23 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Creating Quality Leadership and Management, September 1993, p. 7.

     24 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Mission-Driven, Results-Oriented Budgeting, September 1993, p. 109.

     25 Lambro, The Federal Rathole, p. 17.

     26 James W. Fesler, "Policymaking at the Top of Bureaucracy," in Bureaucratic Power in National Policy Making, p. 331.  See also Paul C. Light, The President's Agenda:  Domestic Policy Choice from Kennedy to Carter (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 42, 44‑45.

     27 Gross, The Tax Racket:  Government Extortion from A to Z (New York:  Ballantine Books, 1995), pp. 293‑294.

     28  See, e.g., President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, p. 57.

     29 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Improving Financial Management, September 1993, pp. 1, 4.

     30  President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, p. 106.

     31 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Improving Financial Management, pp. 1‑2.

     32 William Hamm, "What Do We Mean by Waste in Government?" in Fraud, Waste and Abuse in Government:  Causes, Consequences and Cures, ed. Jerome B. McKinney and Michael Johnston (Philadelphia:  Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Inc., 1986), pp. 10‑11.

     33 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Mission-Driven, Results-Oriented Budgeting, pp. 2‑3.

     34 See, e.g., William Proxmire, Report from Wasteland:  America's Military-Industrial Complex (New York:  Praeger Publishers, 1970), and James Fallows, National Defense (New York:  Vintage Books, 1981), pp. 35‑106.

     35 U. S., Office of the Vice President, General Services Administration, September 1993, p. 1.

     36 Gross, The Government Racket, pp. 52, 54‑55.

     37 Ibid., p. 24.

     38 See U. S., Office of the Vice President, Reinventing Support Services, September 1993, p. 1.

     39 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Reinventing Human Resource Management, September 1993, p. 2.

     40 James P. Pinkerton, What Comes Next:  The End of Big Government‑‑and the New Paradigm Ahead (New York:  Hyperion, 1995), pp. 5‑6.

     41 Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston:  Little, Brown and Company, 1967), pp. 22‑23.

     42 See, e.g., U. S., Office of the Vice President, Common Sense Government:  Works Better and Costs Less (New York:  Random House, Inc., 1995), p. 119.

     43 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Streamlining Management Control, September 1993, p. 3.

     44 C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), p. 12.

     45 Gross, The Government Racket, pp. 9‑10.

     46 Lambro, Fat City, pp. 48, 184.

     47 Frederick C. Mosher, Democracy and the Public Service, 2d ed. (New York:  Oxford University Press, Inc., 1982).

     48 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Streamlining Management Control, pp. 3‑4.

     49 Quoted in Lambro, Fat City, p. 71.

     50 Lambro, Fat City, p. 71.  Said Matthew Glavine, president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation:  "In 1965, 70 percent of each dollar spent to fight poverty went directly to poor people.  Today, 70 cents of each dollar goes not to the poor, but to those who serve the poor."  Quoted in "Study probes use of anti-poverty aid:  Administrators get more than poor," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 5, 1992, p. G7.

     51 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Creating Quality Leadership and Management, p. 7.

     52 Gerald E. Caiden, "Public Maladministration and Bureaucratic Corruption," in Fraud, Waste and Abuse in Government, pp. 34, 38, 41.

     53 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Mission-Drive, Results-Oriented Budgeting, p. 2.

     54 See J. Leiper Freeman, The Political Process:  Executive Bureau-Legislative Committee Relations (New York:  Doubleday, 1955), and Douglass Cater, Power in Washington (New York:  Random House, 1964).

     55 Allen Schick, cited in U. S., Office of the Vice President, Common Sense Government:  Works Better and Costs Less, p. 112.

     56 Ronald C. Moe, "Traditional Organizational Principles and the Managerial Presidency:  From Phoenix to Ashes," Public Administration Review 50 (March/April 1990):  129‑130, 133‑134.

     57 Lambro, Fat City, p. 2.

     58 Kelly, Adventures in Porkland, p. 48.

     59  Quoted in Fitzgerald and Lipson, Porkbarrel, pp. xxvii‑xxviii.

     60  Quoted in Gross, The Government Racket, p. 182.

     61  Reprinted in Warren Rudman, "Leveling With the American People," The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, March 23‑29, 1992, p. 29.

     62  Reprinted in John C. Danforth, "`We bankrupted America,'" The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 5, 1992, p. V5.

     63 See, e.g., "The 13 Senators Who Say It's Time to Leave," The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, Jan. 22‑28, 1996, p. 16.  The senators are Bill Bradley (D‑N. J.), Hank Brown (R‑Colo.), William S. Cohen (R‑Me.), J. James Exon (D‑Neb.), Mark O. Hatfield (R‑Ore.), Howell T. Heflin (D‑Ala.), J. Bennett Johnston (D‑La.), Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R‑Kan.), Sam Nunn (D‑Ga.), Claiborne Pell (D‑R. I.), David Pryor (D‑Ark.), Paul Simon (D‑Ill.), and Alan K. Simpson (R‑Wyo.).

     64 Gross, The Government Racket, pp. 10, 29, 45, 51, 52, 60, 63, 71, 76, 163, 175, 194, 201, 207, 217, 230, and 234; Gross, The Tax Racket, pp. 292‑295, 297, and 300‑304; Lambro, Fat City, pp. 153‑404; President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, p. 9; U. S., Office of the Vice President, Common Sense Government:  Works Better and Costs Less, pp. xxi, 121.

     65 President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, pp. v, vii.

     66 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Improving Financial Management, p. 4.

     67 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Common Sense Government:  Works Better and Costs Less, p. 110.

     68  President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, pp. ix, 26.

     69 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Creating Quality Leadership and Management, p. 3.

      70  U. S., Office of the Vice President, Transforming Organizational Structure, September 1993, p. 3.

     71 U. S., Congress, House, Committee on Government Operations, Legislation and Military Operation Subcommittee, Hearing:  Reorganization of Executive Departments, Part I, June‑July 1971, p. 324.

     72 Gross, The Tax Racket, p. 304.

     73 See U. S., Office of the Vice President, Creating Quality Leadership and Management, p. 7, and U. S., Office of the Vice President, Improving Customer Service, September 1993, pp. 1‑2.

     74 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Mission-Driven, Results-Oriented Budgeting, pp. 3‑5.  Emphasis is deleted.

     75 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Rethinking Program Design, September 1993, p. 2.

     76 Hamm, "What Do We Mean by Waste in Government?" pp. 10‑11.

     77 U. S., Office of the Vice President, Mission-Driven, Results-Oriented Budgeting, pp. 3‑5.  Emphasis is deleted.

     78 President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, pp. 37, 40.

     79 Guy Gugliotta, "`They Flat Do Not Care':  For many of the GOP freshmen, a balanced budget outstrips the prospects of reelection," The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, Jan. 1‑7, 1996, p. 13.

     80 President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, War on Waste, p. v.

     81 U. S., Office of the President, Creating a Government that Works Better & Costs Less:  Report of the National Performance Review, Sept. 7, 1993, p. iii.

 

 

 

 

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