(Be sure to check out The Scott 200 at the bottom!)
“The federal government can slim down in its operations and size by 5%, but a small agency will open up with the sole function of regulating you (the Kyle Blackburn Administration a.k.a. KBA). It’ll fall under a much larger department (Commerce maybe?), and will have a staff between 5-10 people. The KBA will provide regulation, oversight and guidance on you and your life. Do you take this deal?”
What kind of things does this department do? 5-10 people just regulating my life? Is their goal to restrict my personal freedoms well beyond other US citizens or is it just extreme policing? If they are creating new Kyle regulations to restrict my actions, how does my freedom compare to that of say a federal prison inmate?
“They’ll do analyses and studies to try and find ways for you to succeed. Their goal is for you to live your best life and that may require some regulation. It would probably restrict freedoms, but it’s not like someone will be following you around 24/7. Your freedom is much better than a federal prison inmate, but it could very well be reduced.”
This hypothetical is simultaneously easy to answer and borderline impossible to answer. What you seem to be weighing is the degree of my selflessness against my hatred for having my personal freedoms restricted, understanding somewhat my beliefs that our federal government is massive, wasteful, getting larger and more inefficient every year, and needs to be scaled back dramatically. You could have said 1% instead of 5% and I would have agreed to this deal. You could have said one tenth of one percent and I would have agreed to it.
The federal government employs 2.7 million people by their own estimation and that doesn’t include members of any of the branches of our military nor does it include contractors whose sole clients are the federal government. I’m also not factoring in state and local governments because you specified federal, but if you’re considering how many public employees our nation really has, that would add to the number considerably. This is all in a population of some 300 million people. The spending the federal government deemed mandatory in 2015 was marked at 2.45 trillion dollars and there was an additional 1.1 trillion discretionary, unfathomable numbers. Keep in mind as well that 6% of that goes just to paying the interest on our national debt, several hundred billion dollars. If you divide this spending by the number of employees in the federal government, they would each get to choose how to spend about 1.3 million dollars. This is not a realistic figure determining anyone’s individual power, but it does give a good sense of how much in terms of power and resources this body is throwing around and it helps because, again, the numbers are difficult to wrap your mind around. However, our politicians in the last fifty years or more seem to have collectively decided that this is not nearly enough resources for their tastes and have left the nation 20 trillion dollars in debt, which is now larger than the nation’s entire GDP.
This is in a nation where congressional approval rating is maybe 15% at any given time, only 50% of people trust the judiciary, and the celebrity game show host Republican president defeated the career Democrat dynasty empress in the last presidential election when more than 50% of voters had unfavorable views towards both candidates. She’s gone on to have her fourth memoir in the last ten years ghostwritten, which includes a line about how she doesn’t feel comfortable talking about herself as well as a hilarious misinterpretation of the book 1984 and he’s gone on to troll the NFL for their anthem kneeling and recently mentioned in a Wall Street Journal interview that he “knows more about wedges than anyone in the world.” The three departments of our federal government that use the bulk of these resources are Social Security, HHS, and the military. I’ll not comment precisely on how and why the military could be scaled back, but I will add that their insistence on upgrading every facet of their armed force constantly has left a surplus of war supplies which get sold to local police and SWAT units and is largely responsible for the civil strife our citizens feel with regard to the men and women that are supposed to be domestic peacekeepers. Under the Obama Administration HHS’s scope increased catastrophically as they removed our people’s freedom to choose not to have health insurance, while simultaneously creating a cronyist marketplace, difficult to use, socially inefficient, that above all empowers companies like United Health Care, Aetna, and Humana to jack up their prices, knowing the choices of their consumers have been forcefully limited. Worst of all is the Social Security Administration, which is nothing more than a nation-wide pyramid scheme, failing to understand that the next generation of elderly is going to be larger than the one before it, so we can’t simply take money from one or two generations back and give it to our society’s current old population and expect long-term viability. I also have a personal grievance against the ethics of social security since it sacrifices the well-being of the young for the well-being of the old, and I believe, societally, we should be making sacrifices for our children not having them make sacrifices for us. Departments with lesser spending are often equally bad or worse. You are well aware of my belief that the US Department of Education and all of its programs should be shut down.
So would I take this deal, reducing the size of this - thing - by 5%. Yes. Yes, I’d probably walk up to the Washington Monument with a shotgun and smear my brains across the marble to accomplish such a task.
The reason your question is also borderline impossible to answer is because the Kyle Blackburn Administration is so confusing. 5-10 people, all requiring salaries of say $30,000 yearly, expectations of benefits, health care, pensions, increased at 2-3% clip annually, and that’s all before the department’s budgetary expenses to monitor my life, run studies to see where I’ve done well in the past and where I’ve failed, and implement policy changes that dictate my future actions. All for the societal good of believing they know what is better for me and for everyone around me than I could possibly know because they’re experts in Kyle Blackburn. My freedoms COULD be reduced? Are you kidding? They’re telling me what to do and what not to do. That’s the whole point of their existence. What tremendous fear must one have in the thoughts and actions of others to assume they don’t know what is best for their own lives and thus must be controlled to such a degree. And of course, even in the event that I accepted the creation of the KBA, how long before one of its members recognized the obviousness of the truth, which is that it would be far cheaper and easier to simply pay me to do nothing whatsoever. They can sit around, I can sit around, and collectively we can all pretend that our world, our society, doesn’t actually have needs and desires that I could potentially fulfill.
THE SCOTT 200
Questions I'd need answered first:
About the Office of Kyle Blackburn (OKB):
- Under what statutory authority does the Office of Kyle Blackburn operate?
- Is its head an official appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate? Are they a appointee operating an independent agency at the discretion of the President? Or are they appointed under the discretionary hiring authority of a different public official? If so, which one.
- Does the OKB have to comply with all parts of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), including but not limited to: Office of Management of Budget (OMB) Review of Proposed Rules, Prescribed Public Comment Periods, Specific Analyses requirements as prescribed in parts 3 and 7 of APA, and Statements of Financial Impact?
- In particular, Does the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs have central review authority over proposed regulations emerging from OKB?
- Is the OKB subject to FOIA?
- How does Congress fund the OKB? Is its funding independent of Congressional Continuing Resolutions a la the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC)? Or is the office subject to the budgetary discretion of it's department's acting head, a la the National Cancer Institute (NCI) or Administration for Child and Families (ACF)? Or is it's funding squirreled away in some budgetary black hole a la the Presidio Trust or the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)?
About the 5 percent decrease in spending:
- Over what time frame will the decrease in spending occur?
- What is the baseline for these cuts? Is this spending based on current year budgetary responsibilities? Current year outlays? Baseline budget projections (as projected by the CBO)? Expected budget projections? Or based on the last enacted Congressional budget that met the Congressional responsibilities of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974?
- How do we measure the decrease? In raw dollar numbers? As a percent of GDP? In inflation-adjusted dollars? In an inflation adjusted basket of currencies, intent on reflecting world prices?
- Does operationally imposing these cuts also give me fiat power to control decision making by the Fed? How about tax policy? How about legal decisions resulting from lawsuits impacted by spending decrease decisions?
- Do I have fiat power to dictate the nature of cuts departmentally? Do I have to abide by the regulations of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and its underlying statutory authority? Do I have to comply with the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the 60 years of case law regarding its breadth? How about Title XII of the Civil Rights Act? How about the Equal Pay Act?
- Do I have to follow Congressional PayGo Budgeting Rules? Do I have to abide by previous sequestrations?
- Do I have to comply with previously signed treaty agreements between the U.S. and allied nations - most importantly the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)?
- To what extent can the decrease be diffused by limiting or delimiting states from certain spending areas? That is, if I, for example, descheduled marijuana, enacted rules forcing states to criminalize marijuana as a provision of receiving Medicaid funding (like we do with speed limits) and then eliminated funding for FBI drug prosecutions and federal courts, would that count as a spending decrease even though state expenses would necessarily rise to meet the new requirement, probably at a higher rate due to a lack of economies of scale?
A lot of the answers to these questions matter a ton in my final decision. I'd say the most likely outcome however is - yes, take the OKB and the 5 percent decrease.
On the one hand, the decrease will likely have almost no effect in practice because without fundamental reform to how the political system as a whole operates and a change in public expectation about what government's fundamental purpose is, you can't simply "cut government." All of the cuts will be done with accounting tricks, most likely sending outlays to budgetary years outside of whatever budget window you choose to look at.
On the other hand, the OKB will almost immediately be subject to regulatory capture by invested industries - because of its small scope far more quickly than larger bodies. And since the ultimate invested industry in the Office of Kyle Blackburn is Kyle Blackburn, it will be very easy to use the regulatory frameworks to create an organization that benefits you dramatically, probably at a relatively minor expense to the taxpayer. No matter who is in charge of the agency, they know their continued funding is necessitated by a single thing, making sure Kyle Blackburn doesn't become unhappy enough to alert congress to the organization's existence and force enough political pressure to shutter their agency and put them out of the job. That gives you incredible leverage to do what you want, and probably enables you to extract federal resources. Inevitably, the regulations that are "best" for Kyle will almost assuredly be things like, "give Kyle a $100,000 grant to self publish a novel" and "give Kyle equal opportunity by forcing publishers to read his manuscripts or making Borders and Amazon dedicate a shelf to his books."
After all, the best thing for Kyle cannot get better than "Kyle does whatever he wants, and a federal agency makes sure all of his decisions have no downside risk."
