Government Opens! The Shutdown Ends! - The Sluice Gates Of Irresponsible Public Spending Are Open Again

Government is the only enterprise that does not require results.  Congress passes one spending bill after another on good faith, promise, and hope.  No private business would ever be so lax, so indifferent to results, so unconcerned about profit as the government of the United States.  It is no wonder that in just a few months, Elon Musk and his wrecking crew found billions of dollars in waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy  'If it feels right, fund it' has always been the meme on the Washington street. 

USAID, the government department responsible for international development assistance was a sinkhole of failed promise, pie-in-the-sky idealism, hopelessly feelings-driven projects, and total ignorance of the venality, corruption, and blatant thievery among its  foreign 'beneficiaries'.  Project after project was designed to reduce poverty, improve the lot of women and children, to empower local communities, and to promote popular engagement; and project after project was bilked by canny foreign government officials who siphoned off most of the funds and used the remaining few in a desultory show of good will. 

No one at USAID or the State Department stopped to ask for justification, cost-benefit analysis, or proof of success.  The means were more important than the ends.  If a project engaged women, encouraged community participation, and engendered an appreciation for local development, it was a success even though the stated objectives - higher educational performance, job creation, reduction in poverty, etc. - were not met. 

USAID had a perverse system of 'verifiable indicators' and asked all prospective contractors to indicate projected positive changes.  How many teachers would be trained, grades raised, swales constructed, school meals delivered?  Contractors had a field day inventing numbers, rates of increase and final results.  It was a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a vaudevillian disappearing act with no substance whatsoever; but USAID took the numbers as fact, and doled out money accordingly. 

 

Musk exposed the worst of this nonsense - gay teacher training in rural Uganda, transgender mime show production in Zambia, bridges to nowhere in Tanzania - but layers and layers of ill-conceived, hopelessly naive, and futile investments were still ongoing or planned. There was nothing to do but to shut down the whole kit-and-kaboodle 

Free food has been doled out to Americans for decades with no accountability and justification, with few enrollment and longevity requirements, and with little or no restrictions on what food stamps could be used for.  Fat and flubber were no bar as Americans working the system filled market baskets with Twinkies and Krispy Kreme.  The Department of Agriculture, tied to principles of diversity, equity, and inclusivity, could not in good conscience tell people what they could and could not buy with their entitlement.  The poor were deserving of respect.

 

So who knows how many of the 46 million Americans on food stamps are obese, indolent, and happy to live off welfare but  should never be on it.? 'Don't ask', says the government, for that would be insulting.

Bill Clinton tried to reform welfare, suggesting that there should be strict entry criteria, time limits, and absolute cutoffs if eligibility requirements were not met.  His reforms were met with a chorus of progressive opposition. How could he, a man born in poverty, be so callous and indifferent? and so the sham and charade continued. 

Joe Biden had no shame when he authorized billions in infrastructure and social welfare projects - two areas of notorious corruption and misuse.  Every bridge, road, or port project is known for its cost overruns, unaccountable 'investments', and baldly self-serving subcontracts.  Infrastructure projects world over are known as cash cows for everybody up and down the line -except the taxpayer 

National social welfare projects, as flimsily designed and as hopelessly idealistic as those foisted on third world countries are just as remunerative for local governments, school boards, and city councils.  These feel-good, unaccountable, unmeasurable programs have always been one stunning waste of money. 

And so it is that the reopening of government is not exactly the panacea that many expect - the return of programs to help the poor and the disadvantaged, to extend protection to the vulnerable, to give a leg up to the promising, to build parks and promenades to that the poor can enjoy fresh air and sunlight.  In fact, it will be a return to the venal Congressional business as usual, the doling out of untold billions with no concern whatsoever how they are used. 

Of course it will be nice for airport lines to disappear and the Washington museums to reopen, but other than that, the sluice gates for irresponsible spending will reopen and a flood of unaccountable cash will once again flow.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency are in the rear view mirror.  Musk had just got his engine started and bulldozers working when he got into a food fight with the President, and the wrecking ball was suspended.  The work of upending the federal bureaucracy, eliminating most of it, and relying only on a lean, Constitutionally mandated (only Defense is specifically mentioned) government, has only begun but now is in hiatus. 

 

The President took advantage of the shutdown, moving to eliminate not only jobs but positions, thus acting on his promise to reduce the bureaucratic burden, but now that the government will be open for business again, it will once again grow, creep, and insinuate itself everywhere.  It takes great commitment, time, effort, and stick-to-it energy to actually reduce the size and influence of government. 

Shutdowns are good things, for they both expose the inanity of most government programs, the inefficacy of many others, and the ability of private citizens and businesses to get along just fine without them.

Most bureaucrats will go back go work and get paid after their two month vacation.  The paperwork, endless meetings, signoffs, approvals, and reiterations will begin again as though they never stopped; and one way or another, budget compromise not withstanding, new monies will be earmarked, approved, and spent to no useful ends whatsoever. 

Government! What a colossal scam.  What a perennial, perpetual, con perpetrated on the American people.  Ronald Reagan famously said, 'Government is not the solution.  Government is the problem' but even he could do little to stem the tide.  Conservative administrations have addressed the issue to little avail.  Bureaucracies are living organisms that change and morph like amoebas, squeeze them here and they reappear there.  Abolish one department and it shows up somewhere else unchanged but with a different name. 

 

Given all that, we are stuck with Big Government, Big Brother, and bigtime waste.  We, the voters, the taxpayers the citizens are complicit, for free things always win votes and the consequences come only later.