The BureaucRatchet

Going by the hysterics emerging from the entrenched political classes about the Department of Government Efficiency's pursuit of... are you sitting down?... government efficiency, anyone who is upset about amok spending and all its negative consequences should be wearing a giant grin.

Sadly, no. Many conservatives are freaking out that spending is being undone by executive order, arguing that the power of the purse belongs to Congress.

Yes, it does. But, and this is where the rubber hits the road - when Congress delegates that power to the executive branch, which is what it has been doing for many years via its giant, vague, and inscrutable spending bills, the executive branch isn't really going outside the existing rails if it takes spending in the other direction.

Many who have worked in Corporate America have witnessed end-of-year scrambles to spend off whatever remaining budget a group or department was given, rather than leave it unspent, for fear that next year's allocation might be less. No regard as to whether that extra spending might be unnecessary or wasteful - it's just about preserving the gravy train. In government, it's even worse. Corporate America has, somewhere in the hierarchy, people who care about the company's health and profits. Government? Not so much.

Which is why nobody knows how many government agencies there actually are. Which is why the Pentagon cannot successfully complete an audit of America's military spending. Which is why Medicare loses more money to waste, fraud, duplication, and improper payments than the entire private sector health insurance industry earns in profits.

Which is why Musk thinks he can find as much as $2 trillion to cut out of government spending.

One of the most nefarious bits of spending policy in the government space is called "baseline budgeting." Every year, government entities start out with the premise that they will spend as much as they did last year, no matter whether they needed to spend that much last year, no matter whether they overran for whatever reason. Then, those numbers are dialed up because of many whatevers (inflation included) by the seasoned teat-sucklers. If someone else comes along and cuts, say, 2% from the increases, the cuts are simultaneously called draconian and touted as actual spending cuts, rather than reductions to planned increases.

The only way such a system can persist is if no one gives a flying rat's patootie about the bottom line, about the taxpayers, or about the growing national debt. Since government is so big, the only pressure on spending is "who gets it," rather than "let's spend less." So, we get some crab antics, but spending keeps going up up up up up.

Our Best-and-Brightest are so used to this, they may actually believe it when Nancy Pelosi tells us "the cupboard is bare, there's nothing left to cut."

Such a statement is the grossest insult one can hurl at the taxpayers. Does our government really need to spend $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid binary-gendered language?

In the movie Law Abiding Citizen, Gerard Butler plays a former CIA engineer who specialized in finding ways to eliminate nearly impossible targets. One of his past missions was discussed, wherein he invented a fabric that could "ratchet," and made a necktie out of that fabric that was given to the target. Once tied, the tie eventually strangled the target.

This is how government spending works in America. It ratchets ever upward, with endless mechanisms ensuring that it never loosens, and if left to continue, will eventually strangle the country.

It has been quipped that the hardest creature to kill in all the world is an ongoing government program, and we are seeing this aphorism in full effect as Trump, Musk, & co try to pluck even such low hanging fruit as $1.5 million for a Serbia Workplace Diversity Program.

As is so common whenever spending is being discussed, defenders and apologists pull out equivalents of Washington Monument Syndrome, where they highlight "good" spending to argue away the cutting of bad spending. I expect this from the Left, but I'm disappointed in seeing this from the Right. Disappointed but not surprised - too many on the Right only talk a fiscal conservatism game. Usually, they have their own sacred cows, and in this case they purport to the aforementioned "principle," ignoring the cold reality that, at this juncture, Hulk-Smash appears to be the only way to actually cut any spending.

It would be lovely to see Congress do the cutting, but that house of spineless hogs-at-the-trough has not shown any interest in doing so. Unfortunately, what is done via EO can be undone via EO, so...

Rather than complaining about executive overreach in attempts to rein in spending, how about those people of principle - long-standing and new-found - devote their energies to demanding that Congress codify those cuts, so they cannot simply be reinstated by the same executive fiat that made them and cut them?

And, while we're at it, how about we implement zero budgeting, where every on-going program has to be individually renewed rather than simply reloaded with taxpayer cash?

Yea, I'm not holding my breath.

It has been observed that this may be the only opportunity to make the sorts of cuts that Trump and Musk and you and I envision - and that the nation desperately needs - because "normal politicians" are too beholden to the system that knows only one direction: up.

I laugh more and more with every new bit of hysteria, and with every “we are spending too much but this program is worthwhile” bit of self-interest. Besides, the judiciary still remains in play as the “check-and-balance” to excess.

The left-radicals, of the 60s and of recent vintage, who felt incrementalism was insufficient for their nefarious goals may have be onto something. Theirs is the wrong direction - but we now see that a radical, any-means-necesary tear-down may be the only way to rescue the nation from economic collapse.