by Robert M. Traxler
I received one of those chain emails, you know the ones with the please forward on the bottom. One of the points in the email was that the military is being cut in size, pay and benefits (health care co-pays have increased and funding for housing has decreased, basic pay has not been increased at the same rate as other government wages) but funding for illegal aliens (perhaps the politically correct title should be uninvited guests) and funding for government assistance programs have increased.
Social Security is always on the verge of running out of money but welfare and food stamps never are? We are cutting funds for veterans and our military
but we are not reducing benefits for illegal aliens and are increasing them for social welfare recipients?
The point is a good one, but the facts surrounding these issues are many and go to the complexity of our government funding and contracting laws. To investigate the government contracting process, the Army Criminal Investigation Command sends experienced, trained Special Agents to over a year of specialized training before they can even begin to understand the process the government uses to award contracts. The documents that control the process fill an average-sized living room and no one person has a firm grasp of them all. Indeed no one person can even keep up with the changes let alone the new regulations.
How the government operates and how the bureaucracy self-regulates is more complex than most good folks will ever know. Whatever happened to President Reagan’s program to reduce government and simplify the mammoth and complex governmental process? No current candidate for president in either party is actively calling for reducing government and simplifying the massive bureaucracy, at least no one has made it the center of their campaign.
A fact Mr. Donald Trump has brought to the forefront of the debate is the umbilical cord that connects politicians to the large donors. As Mr. Trump has said a number of times, when he gave large donations to politicians of both parties he owned them and expected them to dance to his tune. We do have a political class that is controlled by the donor class; both parties do this, but the new dynamic is that the Democrats (especially Mrs. Clinton) are raising more money than the Republicans. The result of the complexity of our government is that the folks with the funds to purchase politicians are able to get ahead, and the folks who do not own the political class are strangled by the complexity of the bureaucracy.
Former elected officials at the state and national level make a lucrative second career out of being lobbyists in Washington and Lansing, and also their extended families. Access is power; the higher the level of access, the greater the power and the more the lobbyist can demand in pay. The term lobbyist grew from people who would stand around the lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington DC during the Civil War to talk with members of congress who resided there, trying to sell them on their project or products.
A sad reality is that the political class needs the donor class to keep the donations flowing in, and the political class needs the bureaucrats to keep the process so complex and complicated that the donors are required to purchase influence. A donor “asks” a politician for help navigating the massive bureaucracy, the politician “asks” a government agency to speak with the donor and the agency assigns a bureaucrat to shepherd the donor through the process. It is not all about dollars, mostly about dollars, but not all; being able to muster volunteers to work for the political class has great value, as do people who can deliver a large block of votes.
Every American will benefit from a less complex and bureaucratic government. Why we are not demanding the political class of both parties pledge to streamline the government and simplify the process is beyond me. The bureaucracy continues to grow and the money, the mother’s milk of politics, will continue to flow.
A basic truth is found in the old saying the United States Army uses, the KISS principal, “keep it simple, stupid.” A simplified federal government will save money and reduce the influence of the donor class. The winners will be you and I and all Americans, the loser will be the donor class.
Let’s all join together and call for an open, simple, less bureaucratic government.
