Smithsonian leaders have revealed that renovating the Air and Space museum in Washington, D.C. will cost almost $1 billion. That’s the equivalent of an army of 10,000 workers earning $100,000 each for a year to fix it up. Geez, government projects are expensive!

House Republicans have released a proposal for major tax reform.

The welfare state is so vast and complex that it often works against itself. Regulations and taxes kill jobs and work incentives, but EITC subsidies are supposed to boost incentives. The government tells women to breastfeed, but the federal WIC program subsidizes baby formula.

In this essay on government construction projects, I discuss how promoters use “strategic misrepresentation” to subdue taxpayer opposition and get dubious spending schemes approved. The low-balling of projected costs is a tried and true deception used by infrastructure promoters the world over.

The FBI has not been starved; its budget has grown rapidly. The chart,from DownsizingGovernment.org, shows that FBI spending in constant 2016 dollars has more than tripled since 1990, from $2.7 billion to $9.1 billion.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that virtually every one of the 1.2 million employees in their study received a rating at or above “fully successful,” compared to only 0.1 percent who were deemed “unacceptable,” which might be surprising given the scandals that have rocked multiple agencies in recent years and the fact that these employees are people, prone to making mistakes or every day struggles like everyone else.

WIC makes no sense. American pediatricians universally recommend breastfeeding, as do government health officials. Yet the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) runs a $6 billion subsidy program that induces mothers to use manufactured baby formula.

American businesses have become leaner in recent decades, with fewer layers of management. By contrast, New York University’s Paul Light has found that the number of management layers in federal government agencies has increased substantially.

The federal government has funded job training programs for decades, but they have never worked very well.

The government takes obesity so seriously that it funds a $78 billion program for people to buy any type of food they want at 250,000 retail stores nationwide. The program subsidizes 46 million people to buy items such as “soft drinks, candy, cookies, snack crackers, and ice cream