Just like a 70-year-old car, our new 70-year-old president is off to a sputtery start. He has taken a large step toward repealing Obamacare and he has nominated non-traditional leaders to key Cabinet positions. But he has also sent his press secretary, Sean Spicer, into the lion’s den to argue a point that nobody with eyes believed (a record number of attendees at his inauguration).
He then followed it up by sending out his aide Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, who used what will certainly be one of the worst talking points of the year when she coined the term “alternative facts” to explain Spicer’s statements.
But, like a classic 1947 Chevy truck, I have confidence (or, dare I say, hope) that President Trump and his team will find their stride. Trump has a lot of work to do to correct the economic problems that eight years of President Obama’s poor leadership and worse economic policies inflicted on the country, like his ineffective stimulus package, Obamacare tax hikes, or the increased regulatory burden his administration foisted on businesses.
One area where I am hopeful is that Trump has pledged to cut 20 percent of staff from the federal workforce. Our federal workforce is needlessly huge at more than 2.5 million people in addition to the military. It’s hard to cut. When it’s cut even just by a small amount, politicians, at least on the right, often take victory laps.
For instance, Newt Gingrich would campaign with an ice bucket to symbolically represent that he had reduced the size of government. Before Newt, there used to be a staff of people to deliver ice to congressional offices, but Newt cut out that service. What Newt didn’t mention was that he couldn’t cut the service altogether — he was only able to cut the delivery end of the service, which amounted to only a few of jobs. In fact, when I started working in the Senate about a decade later there was still an “ice” room and a person sitting in the “ice” room with the sole job of making sure that people that entered to take ice signed their name.
Getting rid of federal jobs is hard. There are unions, there are friends, there are cronies, there are members of Congress who love cutting spending in your district, but don’t you dare touch theirs. And then there are people who don’t want to follow through on new requests and are hard to fire.
Change is hard, but a 20 percent cut would be a huge step toward reducing the size of government.
Trump is also looking at cutting federal spending by 10 percent. Cutting federal spending is almost impossible, but that is because most of the federal budget is already committed. In FY 2014, 60 percent of federal spending was mandated. That means that Trump is looking at cutting 25 percent of non-discretionary spending. He is optimistic.
One thing that should, and likely will, be cut is no-bid spending that agencies have full discretionary authority over. For instance, at NASA they have Space Act Agreements that they can hand out when what they want “cannot be accomplished through the use of a procurement contract, grant, or cooperative agreement.”
In other words, when they want a contract to go to friend, they can give that contract to a friend without bidding out the contract. The funding isn’t just at NASA though: No-bid, no-procurement policy contracts are in other parts of the government as well. Remember Halliburton? Or, remember the “emergency” award given to Accenture to work on healthcare.gov? From NASA to the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, no-bid, no-compete, no-oversight spending authority needs to be taken away.
Cuts to the federal workforce and budgets are needed to help return control of the government to the people, like Trump championed in his inaugural address. Returning the power to the people is a start, but I more closely align with a statement that Grover Norquist made in 2001: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The bigger the size of the government, the more money it takes from the economy, the more money that it distributes without regard to economic incentives, the more cronyism that can take place.
When you get in an old car, you can see the personality. When you start it up, you can hear its individual parts. When you start down the road, you can feel the car start coming to life. It might not be in the first week, it might not be in the second, but sometime before the end of his first 100 days in office, I hope Trump’s administration stops sputtering and starts cutting. Thankfully, Congress seems to already be at speed.
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributer to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor and for an academic think tank. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.