Mechanism needed to hold government accountable for failures
Having spent the past year in the Pennsylvania Legislature as a state representative, I am amazed by the lack of critical analyses in government. As an aside, I came out of the private sector and am a CPA who owned my own turnaround management practice. Our firm succeeded or failed based upon my decisions.
When government fails, citizens pay. Government is seldom accountable for its failures or lack of planning. I have seen politicians run on a platform of fixing the very problems they created.
The methodology used to develop governmental programs is suspect at best. Spending by the executive branch is seldom based upon results and is based upon hearsay and innuendo.
For example, Social Security, which is failing, is now called an entitlement when in fact all contributions came from taxpayers and employers. The smoke and mirrors surrounding Social Security have confused people about what they earned. Despite hoopla from government, the government is merely a trustee of the social security trust funds.
The marketing of government programs has also frequently clouded the landscape about what is real and what is not based solely upon the whim and fancy of those in office.
Common Core has been touted as the newest brainchild for improving education for all. Prior to Common Core, it was No Child Left Behind. Meanwhile, many employers and most students expressed concern about students entering the workforce who had little to no preparation for the real world. In other words, it became almost all children left behind. Smoke and mirrors!
The difficulty of both the education system and Social Security examples is that government lacks any meaningful measure of effectiveness about the effectiveness of its programs. “Feeling good” replaces actual results.
Government has no competition and no performance standards.
Businesses and individuals adapt, or they face obsolescence and potential bankruptcy.
Government perpetuates itself by developing a keenly honed inability to adopt a performance measure or performance measures which may indicate that they are failing. The lack of critical and analytical analyses in developing political solutions to societal problems have perpetuated greater pain and unintended consequences on our society at almost every turn.
Be it the opioid crisis, the student debt crisis, autism epidemic, exploding medical costs, national obesity, global warning or virtually every government program, the root causes and solutions are seldom well thought out.
The need for scientific review and analyses is now more important than ever. The critical risk factors facing the government of smoke and mirrors explodes in every facet of our economy.
To effectively combat the smoke and mirrors, every program in any government should be evaluated against the performance metric that has been analyzed and scrutinized to avoid unintended consequences. Those metrics should be incorporated into any major piece of legislation that is passed.
An Auditor General, Office of Inspector General or Office of Management and Budget at the federal level, should be the independent agency that reviews for the legislature and the executive branch the viability of the programs implemented.
Any agency or program which fails this performance metric system must be subject to review. This review and resulting recommendations for improvement would then be subject to legislative correction.
Our nation has severe problems. They can be solved. The smoke and mirrors used by government to justify its own existence threatens our existence.
Without meaningful systems of controls on the programs will likely lead to disaster and great harm to citizens due to the unintended consequences of a governmental program run amok.