‘Swamp’ likely to win vs. Trump
Presidents try to overhaul federal government — and largely fail
President-elect WASHINGTON Donald Trump frequently pledged during the campaign that he would slash the size of the federal government and rein in spending, once proclaiming “we will cut so much, your head will spin.”
But the bombastic business titan is about to come face to face with Washington, that “swamp” he wants to drain. And both non-partisan specialists and others who have tried before suggest the odds are not in his favor.
Most presidents in modern times have mounted an effort to streamline the federal bureaucracy, and all have largely failed. President Obama in 2012 proposed merging parts of six agencies and cutting more than 1,000 federal jobs. Congress wasn’t having it.
“It worse than died, it was assassinated on the Hill,” said Donald Kettl, University of Maryland professor and author of Escaping Jurassic Government: Restoring America’s Lost Commitment to Competence.
Likewise, President George W. Bush put forth a “Management Agenda” to overhaul the bureaucracy, and Bill Clinton pushed a “Reinventing Government” plan. “In each case, executive branch efforts to reform management were viewed with skepticism (by Congress),” John Kamensky, deputy director of Clinton’s initiative, and Jonathan Breul, a budget management adviser during both administrations, wrote in a paper about lessons learned. “As a consequence, few pieces of significant legislation were enacted.”
President Ronald Reagan in 1984 convened a commission of private-sector executives and experts who offered more than 2,000 recommendations to reduce waste, improve management and restructure the government. The so-called Grace Commission said the changes would save taxpayers $424 billion over three years.
“Absolutely nothing came of
“For all their talk about getting rid of this or that, the truth is that they don’t want to get rid of any of it.” Kenneth Baer, former associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget
it. Absolutely nothing,” said Paul Light, New York University professor and author of 25 books, including Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability.
Light said the last successful major overhaul of the federal government was in the 1950s. He said there are a mix of forces fighting to keep the status quo, not the least of which is Congress.
“All duplication and overlap flows downhill from Congress,” Light said. “Committees create these different programs, and they don’t want to do anything about it.”
Kenneth Baer, who was associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget when Obama made his push, said there’s no incentive for members of Congress to cut anything.
“For all their talk about getting rid of this or that, the truth is that they don’t want to get rid of any of it,” he said.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has been issuing annual reports since 2011 on wasteful spending, and has identified hundreds of fixes that could save taxpayers billions of dollars.
The GAO report this year said the IRS could be collecting $385 billion more in taxes annually, and millions could be saved by reducing overlapping programs. Food safety, for instance is overseen by 12 different agencies. Eight agencies administer more than 100 programs supporting individuals suffering from mental illness.
Of 544 fixes recommended by GAO in the past five years, 244 have been completed.
Orice Williams Brown, a GAO managing director who helped coordinate this year’s report, said that because eliminating programs is so difficult, Congress often just layers new ones on top.
“There really wasn’t an appetite to step back and say, ‘Let’s put aside what we currently have, and let’s think about what we would do if we were starting over today,’ ” Williams Brown said.
Some people are optimistic about Trump’s chances of improving the bureaucracy, particularly given his Cabinet picks so far, which include executives from the private sector and members of Congress. His pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, RS.C., is a deficit hawk.
“In my view, they are better positioned than the members of prior administrations, high-ranking members of prior administrations, to come in and start getting to work right away,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a group founded by the leaders of Reagan’s commission.