Downsizing Blog
Upcoming Fiscal Deadlines
The federal government’s debt ceiling will return on Monday following a 14 month suspension. This is the first of many important fiscal deadlines that Congress must consider before the end of the calendar year. These deadlines represent opportunities for Congress to control spending growth and reform entitlement programs.
Wasting Billions on Improper Payments
Federal outlays in 2014 topped $3.5 trillion. Over the next ten years, federal outlays are expected to climb to $6.1 trillion. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) tries to keep tabs on some of the obvious waste in the vast federal budget. One of its efforts is an annual report highlighting areas of duplication, improper payments, and other types of inefficient spending.
Long Range Bomber’s Big Bill
Over the next several months the Pentagon will award the contract for the Long Range Strike Bomber. If the Department of Defense’s history repeats itself, cost overruns on the project seem likely.
Infrastructure: Privatization and Innovation
Tomorrow at CPAC, I will discuss some advantages of infrastructure privatization. Perhaps the largest advantage is innovation. Unlike government bureaucracies, private firms in a competitive environment are eager to maximize the net returns of projects, so they find new ways to reduce costs and improve quality.
Austerity, A New Weaselword
The financial press has become inundated with the word “austerity.” Since Greece’s left-wing Syriza proclaimed an “anti-austerity revolution,” strong adjectives, like “incredibly savage,” precede that overused word.
DHS Shutdown
Policymakers are battling over a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The disagreement over the bill involves the funding of President Obama’s recent immigration actions.
Failing to Clean Up the VA
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a long history of mismanagement. Last year, the public became aware of a wait-time scandal at the VA hospital in Phoenix. Veterans were forced to wait months for appointments, even as the hospital was reporting no delays in service and allowing its management to receive performance bonuses. Over 1,700 veterans were not placed on the official wait lists to hide the length of actual waits. The VA Inspector General suggested that the Phoenix VA was not the only center to modify its wait lists in this fashion.
Hayek vs. Government Health Care
In “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” economist F.A. Hayek described how markets take into account an array of local knowledge that governments do not possess. It is “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place,” which enters into everyday exchanges, but central authorities cannot access it. That’s because it “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” This sort of knowledge is tacit and subjective, so “by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form.”
The Congressional Pack Rats
The U.S. Congress hoards real estate like proud pack rats. For example, the Department of Defense has 562,000 facilities that cover 24.7 million acres—an area about the size of Virginia.
Governors Love Federal Funding
ObamaCare gives states the option to expand Medicaid to cover all individuals below 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which is approximately $33,500 a year for a family of four. To encourage states to expand, the federal government agreed to fund 100 percent of expenditures for the newly-eligible participants until 2016, and then slowly decrease the match to 90 percent in 2020 and into the future.