Trump vs. The Leviathan by Chris Buskirk

Author:Chris Buskirk [Buskirk, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781641770316
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 40860390
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2018-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

THE ACTUAL SIZE OF GOVERNMENT

Often overlooked in discussions of the size of government is the actual size of government. It’s huge. Private industry has used technology to be more efficient, that is to say, it can produce more with less labor. When it comes to the federal government, the opposite is true. Of course, the federal government should be doing fewer things. But those things which it must do, it should do better. That’s why President Trump started his tenure in office with a federal hiring freeze that began on January 23. It lasted for 73 days before the OMB Director Mick Mulvaney ended it and asked for each Department, Agency, Commission, Administration, and other federal fiefdom to submit a reorganization plan for Fiscal Year 2019 and beyond.

Mulvaney has been an unsung hero in the never-ending fight to shrink Leviathan. And when I say shrink, I adhere to the conventional definition, “to become or make smaller,” not the Washington definition: “grow ever so slightly more slowly than last year.” The budget guidance Mulvaney gave all federal agencies in April 2017 directed them to reduce their footprint. It was a one-day story; the political media quickly descended into tabloid melodrama about Russia. Remember, this was just weeks after President Trump claimed in a tweet that his campaign had been wiretapped. Thanks to Representative Devin Nunes, we now know that the President was correct. While political reporters were still hyperventilating over Trump’s claim, Mulvaney was pursuing a policy to reduce the size of government.

Final proposals were due to Mulvaney by September 30, but by the end of July 2017 the federal government had already shed 11,000 jobs, reversing a trend shared by Presidents Bush and Obama, who had both increased the federal workforce immediately upon assuming office. During this initial period of downsizing, it was reported that “some agencies [were] already using separation incentives to push employees out the door. Trump’s fiscal 2018 blueprint called for a net reduction of only 1,000 civil servants, as job losses at most agencies were set to be mostly offset by gains at the Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs departments.”

In the actual case, federal employment declined sharply between February 2017 and February 2018, going from 2.183 million to 2.172 million. This recalls to mind the old joke about what you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean: a good start.

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