As federal and state governments scramble to shore up the tanking economy by doing more of what got us to this point in the first place: meddling and spending, it will be interesting to see which government programs/expenditures, if any, get cut. No doubt budget conversations this year will be drastically different than last year’s, as expenditures and “services” deemed indispensable and essential last year suddenly don’t seem as necessary. Fortunately, folks around the libertysphere have already done the homework and found that there are quite a few programs and even entire agencies that could be cut back and even completely eliminated.
The good folks at the Cato Institute have put together an excellent video on why the Department of Agriculture, which has been bailing out inefficient US megafarms for decades, ought to be first against the wall:
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=VBZgyaA9Ryw
See more of Cato’s Ag policy prescriptions.
Baylen Linnekin, the proprietor of the excellent Crispy on the Outside, concurs on eliminating the Dept. of Agriculture and also criticizes calls to create a Food Czar:
If Kristof were really concerned with our health, and the billions it’s costing us to support an ineffective and arcane agency like the Department of Agriculture, he’d call for it to be abolished, not retooled.
Even famed law professor and frienemy Lawrence Lessig is calling for the FCC to be abolished. Of course, he wants to replace it with another agency that’s less prone to capture and more responsive to innovation. Adam Thierer, Tim Lee and Jim Harper point out that the nature of bureaucracy itself is what prevents building a “better” bureaucrat and is the fundamental flaw in Lessig’s proposal.
Matt Welch hints that closing the Department of Commerce might also yield some savings.
Other shutdown suggestions: FEMA, Department of Education (PDF) and many more (PDF).
Unfortunately, even though President-elect Obama promised to go through the federal budget line by line to eliminate waste, he looks set to hire 600,000 new federal employees. Here’s a good suggestion for Social Security Administrator.
What agencies/programs do you think the Obama Administration should shut down in these hard times?
[...] Fr33Agents.com, a blog devoted to following the liberty movement, embeds Cato’s new video, Downsizing the Federal Government. Tom Pearson writes: [...]