The Beginning of Deficit-Minded Government?

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Well everyone, hopefully I’ll be able to get back to a normal posting frequency next week.  It’s been a rough month, but I’ve just about finished running the gauntlet and things should be calming down to where I can actually write again.  Thank you everyone who kept reading random stories throughout this time; looking over the view totals for the last month, it warms my heart to not see very many zeros through this time.  Further, I’m going to make it up to you; this summer, I’m making several major changes to the blog.  Don’t worry, the same content you keep coming back for will stay the same, or improve over time.  However, I will be making several major behind-the-scenes changes, and quite probably a few visible ones.  But enough of all this talk of ending the hiatus; how about I go and actually end it by getting on with this post?

Anyway, the news story that led to today’s post is one that made me do a double-take because it was such a surprising one to read.  Would you believe it if I told you that the head of a Federal Government agency has acknowledged that the agency gets too much money from Congress?  Would you believe it if I said that agency was the Department of Defense, and the official was none other than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates?  Well, believe it or not, that is what happened on Saturday, as the Huffington Post reports.  Apparently, the Secretary of Defense is looking for about $10 billion somewhere in the Department of Defense because he acknowledges that “the [funding] gusher has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time”.  Now, don’t worry: cuts to the actual military are not in the picture; in fact, the search for savings is to preserve the current effectiveness of the military when Congress stops giving Defense the huge increases it has over the last decade.

Instead, according to the article, the Department of Defense is looking to at least partially tackle the infamous bloated bureaucracy typical of most government agencies.  While there have been several news stories about the procurement process, it is almost a given that problems with red tape exist throughout the Department.  The article also states that Secretary Gates talks about the Pentagon being ‘top-heavy’, or having more leaders than, well, are really necessary.  There should be no question as to why there is so much red tape when you have all these people with varying levels of authority over the same project sitting around having to approve this and consider that.  Of course, that is not the only issue with the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, therefore Secretary Gates’ attempts to restructure the whole thing and vowing to personally oversee it is a great initiative.  In fact, this is the kind of thing we should be seeing across the government.  In this time when all of us are tightening our belts due to the recession, we should see the government doing the same.  True, the deficit commission created via President Obama’s executive order is getting down to business with regards to government-wide belt-tightening, but unlike that, Secretary Gates’ attempt is concrete, specific, and as targeted as a Predator drone missile strike.

But will it work?

Any time jobs are on the line, or enough of the right people can be convinced that they are, there will be very fierce resistance.  In the speech, Secretary Gates explicitly targeted the bureaucracy, which manages to account for essentially 40% overhead in terms of DoD operating costs.  He can streamline as much as he wants to, but unfortunately he will have to cut some jobs to achieve a meaningful drop in that 40% figure.  Given the legendary job security of working for the Federal government, that will not come easy.  In fact, if there is one area that could doom his entire plan to find savings in the Department of Defense, it is the bureaucracy.  I don’t mean to trivialize an important issue, but forget jobs for a second.  Even streamlining procedures internally will provoke resistance thanks to bureaucratic inertia.  The workers there are so used to doing things one way that changing that will not happen overnight, or possibly even over one year.  It is possible to change the course of a massive bureaucracy, but it will take a lot of effort and sheer persistence.

Another large part of the defense budget is the protection of other jobs: those of the defense contractors.  Undoubtedly that industry plays an important role in the economies of the states their offices are located in, but the fact is we cannot afford every shiny toy that the services want; that is why there are such things as budgets and budget priorities.  On this front the Secretary of Defense has been quite successful; the article linked above mentions how he managed to convince Congress to kill off the expensive F-22 stealth fighter jet program.  While those would definitely have been a neat thing to have in our nation’s arsenal even from a civilian point of view, the program, like many defense contracts, became ridiculously expensive and unaffordable without more deficit spending.  Therefore, I applaud Secretary Gates for standing up to Congress on that one; the old culture of “oh, let’s just throw more money at the problem until it goes away” does not work when we are in a deep fiscal hole as a nation.  Changing the Department of Defense will not happen very quickly, but I get the sense from reading the news that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is the man for the job, if he stays longer than through the end of 2010, which, at least publicly, not even President Obama knows the answer to.

The The Beginning of Deficit-Minded Government? by The New Age of Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: bureaucracy, Congress, Defense Department, deficit, Military, Pentagon, Politics, reform, Robert Gates, United States, United States Army, United States Department of Defense, United States Secretary of Defense