In my last post I put forth a proposal for what a new president might do to reduce regulations in the bloated “administrative state.”  I will now add more fuel to the fire by suggesting what actions the new president might take to eliminate whole agencies.  Yes, I did say entire Federal agencies.  I won’t name names yet.  But this post is much shorter than the last.

The process is pretty simple.  First use his new agency officials to gather information on the various agencies—what is their budget?  How are funds used?  How many employees?  What do they do at various levels of the hierarchy?  What mechanisms for oversight are in place?  How many employees are covered by Civil Service rules?  What are the outcome/output measures used to assess the efficiency, responsiveness and other criteria of the agency?  (This one is crucial)  How do the consumers of the agency services perceive the service they receive?  Are there other “clientele” besides consumers (for example, employee unions, lobbyists and the organizations they represent)?  What is the “philosophical”/economic/political justification for the agency’s existence—both what is ostensible and what lies beneath the surface?  What has been the trend in budget increases?  In employee increases?  What facilities have been built to house the agency (and are they worth the usually high cost)?  There are many other questions to be asked, but the reader gets the picture.

We gather all this information, send it to the new president and his specifically appointed advisors on such matters, and they, with the president, begin to look for agencies that have no justifiable reason for existence.  Which ones would really never be missed, except by their employees and their clientele?  In other words, which ones are so inefficient (high cost, little or no benefit), so unresponsive and so interfering with the lives of people, that they would justify elimination?

All that is relatively easy.  The next extremely difficult step is to “make a list” of all these agencies, with the respective justifications for axing them, and send all that to Congress, asking it to actually rescind the legislation that authorized them.  OK, that is about as bold (or funny) a move as anyone could suggest.  It could only be done by a president who is not worried about re-election.  I also admit this move is not very likely.

But in the spirit of our English forefathers, I make this “modest proposal” in the hopes that perhaps courage, one of the cardinal virtues, might prevail in the future.  A final comment:  This is an ‘editorial opinion,” not an analytical piece, so if you were about to pounce, then restrain yourself.  I am presupposing that we can agree that many Federal bureaucracies are so pathologically defective that they can only be excised, not surgically mended.  If you do not agree, then I can point you to many fine studies on the subject of bureaucratic or government failure (the opposite of market failure).  And after all, you may have your own suggested proposal to address the problems.

By the way a couple of my favorite targets for elimination are the Department of Education and big parts of the EPA.