Last week President Trump proposed merging the departments of Education and Labor, and that’s got people thinking about reorganizing government. Any change would require the consent of Congress, which means it’s not about to happen tomorrow. But the proposal comes from the Office of Management and Budget led by Mick Mulvaney, and it’s got some great ideas.
As well as a few suspect ones.
Many government agencies grew like Topsy. They’re often duplicative and ill-suited for the department in which they’re housed. They’re not wired for the internet age, and they don’t deliver satisfactory services for their consumers — the American people.
Take pizza, for example. A cheese pizza must follow the FDA standards of the Department of Health and Human Services, while a pepperoni pizza must comply with the rules of the Food Safety and Inspection Services of the Agriculture Department. If you raise chickens, the FDA regulates their food while the FSIS inspects them at slaughter.
If you want to build something, you’ll often have to follow the rules of several different departments. It’s like going to a clerk’s office and being shuffled from one wicket to the other, at times with inconsistent messages. We can remedy some of this by merging departments that send people off in different directions.
The libertarian right wants drastic cuts in welfare entitlements. There’s none of that in the reorganization plan, but it sensibly proposes to create a Council on Public Assistance, comprised of all federal agencies in charge of public benefits, with authority to cut superfluous powers. We don’t mind looking after the needy; we just hate doing it wastefully.
The reorganization plan proposes to downsize government by privatizing some departments. For every kid who had a stamp collection, the one he’ll notice is the idea of restructuring the Postal Service or selling it off to a privately held corporation. On the other hand, before you get too sentimental about this, check out the new Scooby-Doo! Forever stamp.
Many think the housing market crash in 2006-07 was the proximate cause of the Great Recession of 2008. The Fed’s cheap money and cheap financing from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were to blame, and we told ourselves we wouldn’t do this again.
Except we did. The OMB plan proposes to do something about this, though we’re not entirely sure what. It would reduce the role of Fannie and Freddie in the housing market while at the same time continuing the support of the federal government for low- and moderate-income homebuyers.
That’s the problem with the report. It couples the promise to get something done with the promise that nobody is going to be too upset by any of this. And sometimes it just looks like more of the same, except maybe worse.
Consider the plan to rejigger American capitalism, by rethinking “how the Federal Government can drive economic growth in concert with private-sector investments in communities across the Nation by coordinating and consolidating Federal economic assistance resources into a Bureau of Economic Growth at Commerce, producing a higher return on taxpayer investment on projects that are transparent and accountable.”
I have a better idea. Take the Bureau of Economic Growth out back, put a gun to its head and pull the trigger.
What’s attracted most attention is the proposal to merge the departments of Education and Labor into a single cabinet agency, the Department of Education and the Workforce.
Not surprisingly, the teachers unions tell us it would be the end of civilization as we know it, but what’s behind the plan is the very reasonable idea that the goal of our educational system is to get people working — not to turn them into social-justice warriors.
Right now the two departments share the focus on jobs, so there’s a lot of duplication between them. But there would still be a serious refocus in the government’s educational mission, especially when it comes to higher ed and the idea of expanding access to short-term programs that provide students with a credential or license in a high-demand field.
That won’t eliminate philosophy departments, but it might do something to the degrees that leave students unfit for work, along with the proposal that prospective students be given information about whether its graduates can find jobs in their fields.
So a lot of good ideas, and some business as usual. I’ll give it an A-minus.
F.H. Buckley is the author of the forthcoming “The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed.”