Scalpel, meet ineffective federal programs
In the debate Friday night, Barack Obama responded to John McCain’s idea of freezing federal spending by arguing that “the problem with a spending freeze is you’re using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.” Then, on Face the Nation (pdf) on Sunday, he furthered his case: “The president has to make choices, and those choices mean that when you deal with a budget you don’t take an axe to it, you use a scalpel. There are programs in our government that do not work...”
Yes, there are. And for the better part of seven years, the Bush Administration has been tallying them and calling on Congress to eliminate them. Here’s the list of the Department of Education’s ineffective programs, for example.
|
Program (2008 BA in millions) |
|
|
|
|
|
$1.9 |
|
|
9.6 |
|
|
33.3 |
|
|
32.4 |
|
|
37.5 |
|
|
1.0 |
|
|
40.3 |
|
|
7.9 |
|
|
1,160.9 |
|
|
31.9 |
|
|
1.9 |
|
|
1.6 |
|
|
6.8 |
|
|
33.3 |
|
|
267.5 |
|
|
48.6 |
|
|
66.5 |
|
|
1.4 |
|
|
8.8 |
|
|
64.3 |
|
|
757.5 |
|
|
1.0 |
|
|
7.5 |
|
|
63.9 |
|
|
4.9 |
|
|
48.5 |
|
|
2.2 |
|
|
23.6 |
|
|
38.9 |
|
|
75.7 |
|
|
19.2 |
|
|
24.6 |
|
|
10.7 |
|
|
2.5 |
|
|
14.5 |
|
|
80.1 |
|
|
11.8 |
|
|
22.4 |
|
|
Strengthening Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian-Serving Institutions |
11.6 |
|
29.2 |
|
|
33.7 |
|
|
Teachers for a Competitive Tomorrow: Baccalaureate/Master’s STEM |
2.0 |
|
102.9 |
|
|
2.9 |
|
|
Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Career and Technical Institutions |
7.5 |
|
1.9 |
|
|
1.8 |
|
|
Total |
$3,260.4 |
$3.2 billion isn’t a lot of money in Washington, but it isn’t chump change either. And guess what, Senator Obama: Congress has been ignoring President Bush’s pleas to kill these programs for years. Even though he’s used his “scalpel” to go line by line through the federal budget and find programs that don’t work, all he really gets to do is wield a hatchet called a veto-for entire appropriations bills that come across his desk. (Only recently has he begun to do so.)
With all due respect, you don’t just need a scalpel (nor an axe nor a hatchet); you need a club to beat Congress over the head for authorizing and funding stupid programs. Oh, and you need some thick skin, because you’re going to be called all sorts of nasty names when you propose to eliminate fuzzy-sounding programs like “Even Start” and “Reading is Fundamental” and the “Underground Railroad Program,” not to mention Senator Kennedy’s “Exchanging with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners” (motto: “Whales: The other white meat”).
A “spending freeze” might be an empty political slogan, but so is this talk about wielding a “scalpel.” Until the president gets line-item veto authority (which would probably require a constitutional amendment), or until Congress gets serious about protecting taxpayer dollars, our federal budget is likely to be overloaded with all manner of wasteful excess. And there’s very little that the president—any president—can do about it.
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September 29th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Although there do appear to be a lot of questionable programs on this list, I can’t believe that the Ed. Dept. is calling for the elimination of pretty much the only Federal support for intellectually gifted students- the Javits program and the Byrd scholarships. It’s outrageous that for every dollar the U.S. spends on special education, we spend at MOST ten cents on educating those at the opposite end of the spectrum. More than 80% of gifted students in the U.S. receive NOTHING from their schools in terms of GATE. At a time when there is so much competition from India and China, we need to be investing in these young minds so that they can reach their maximum potential.
Financial support for GATE in the U.S. needs to be dramatically EXPANDED rather than cut.
October 3rd, 2008 at 1:45 am
I agree with the previous commentator that this list appears to be a mixture of good and bad programs. What criteria did the administration use to decide that a program was “ineffective”? Could some of the supposedly “ineffective” programs such as Javits, need more funding, not less, to make a major impact? The review is simply incorrect in commenting about Javits that “the program, by making a handful of grants each year, does little to increase the availability of gifted and talented programs in schools, increase the quality of those programs, or advance the field of gifted and talented education nationally.” Javits-funded research has been at the center of efforts to reform and improve gifted education and no state is funding similar projects. Several of the other programs are singled out because their activities could supposedly be carried out through other federal grants or programs—but if these other programs pick them up, there is no net cost reduction, just a transfer of staffing and funding from one place to another, possibly less knowledgeable, office. Folding everything into block grants can spell disaster for minority groups who lack a vocal constituency. I’d love to see some of the projects killed, but others are very important to those of us who live out in the boondocks.