Joe Boyles
Guest Columnist
When Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term six months ago, he promised to make the federal government more efficient by cutting waste. He hired Elon Musk to lead a group known as DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency. This tight group located hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud, waste and abuse. Now that Musk has returned to the private sector and DOGE has largely been dissolved, the departments are trying to accomplish the objective of making government leaner and more efficient.
We are told that the State Department is reorganizing to eliminate about 1300 positions. Given that State has more than 80 thousand personnel, eliminating two percent of the positions doesn’t seem too extreme, although the radical Democrat opposition to all-things-Trump makes it seem so. To be fair, the State Department is spread worldwide with many offices when you consider embassies and consulates.
First, there was one of those familiar federal injunctions stopping Secretary Rubio from taking this action, but the Supreme Court weighed in to unblock this low-level-judiciary legal maneuver. The easier way to eliminate two percent of the workforce is to follow normal retirements and simply eliminate the vacant position. I figure that normal retirements for the State Department are about 2500 annually, so in less than a year, these positions can be vacated, then axed. Of course, they won’t be in the places that reorganization require, so some shifting of positions will probably take place.
I did some checking, and it seems that State has grown about 40 percent over the past five years. I’m not surprised there is a lot of bureaucratic redundancy that needs to be pared down … probably more than two percent. When you eliminate redundancy, your goal should be to create a leaner, more efficient operation. Too much of Washington is about adding more jobs instead of measuring service output, in my opinion. Government often has trouble identifying what they produce.
The same thing is going on over at the Department of Education. Republicans have long dreamed of eliminating altogether the Education Department, and Trump is no exception. This cabinet level department was created during the Carter Administration nearly a half century ago. It isn’t a historical department like State, Defense, or Treasury. Why do we have this in the first place? Why can’t Congress simply block-grant funds to the individual states, where education of children actually takes place? Why does it pass through a Washington bureaucracy that siphons off their 30 percent carrying-charge?
For the longest time, education was deemed Democrat territory. I would remind you who created the department in the first place. We had public education for close to a century before Washington bureaucrats got involved. In my opinion, the Democrat obsession with education is all about teacher unions, namely NEA (National Education Association) and AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and political power. These two organizations donate hundreds of millions of dollars to political causes, almost entirely to the Democrats. Politicians know “where their bread is buttered.”
Speaking of cutting the budget and eliminating waste, here is a question for you: should illegal immigrants receive public assistance benefits such as Medicaid? There is a real debate behind the scenes on this matter. Since Medicaid (medical coverage for the poor) is administered by the individual states, some states like California, Illinois and New York spend hundreds of millions paying for the health care of illegal immigrants. Other states, like Florida, do not. Who is right?
If we extend public assistance benefits to non-citizens, doesn’t that provide them incentive to ditch their homeland and come to the US? It only makes sense they would move here, especially if they can simply walk over our southern border, which is what happened from 2021 to 24. Fully 23 percent (two million) of the population of Los Angeles is illegal; how many are receiving public assistance and what is that costing California taxpayers? Not coincidentally, the state budget this year is $30 billion in the red.
Trump is often credited with being the ‘common sense’ president and these are common sense issues. Why can’t we cut two percent of the positions in any bloated Washington bureaucracy? Why can’t we eliminate the Education Department and defer to the states where public education actually takes place? Why do we extend public benefits to non-citizens that are here illegally? These and more questions need to be asked and answered as we attempt to make our government more responsive to the American taxpayers they serve.