For generations, the IRS has held the distinction of being America’s most hated government agency. Its title is now in jeopardy.
Last week the Washington Post had a short metro item about the sad state of affairs of the Memorial Bridge and the National Park Service. Memorial Bridge spans the Potomac, connecting Arlington National Cemetery with the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. Built in 1932, it is a beautiful structure, with elaborate sculptures at the base. And if you care about quotidian matters such as utility, it is traversed by some 68,000 vehicles daily. It is also falling apart.
Because the Memorial Bridge is part of the National Register of Historic Places, it falls under the administration of the National Park Service, which has been agitating for funding to fix the bridge. Last spring, for instance, NPS chief administrator Jonathan B. Jarvis held a press conference on the bridge, warning that if taxpayers didn’t pony up, his agency might close the bridge to vehicle traffic entirely within six years.
You may recall Jarvis’s name. He’s the Obama appointee who, during the budget showdown of 2013, eagerly shut down every national park in America in order to further the Obama administration’s claims about Republican dereliction of duty. And Jarvis didn’t just shut down parks that the NPS spent manpower working on. He sent staffers to erect barriers around unstaffed sites—such as the World War II Memorial in Washington—so that citizens couldn’t visit them. He sent officers to Claude Moore Colonial Farm, a site privately funded and run, and ordered it to close down under pain of arrest. He sent members of the National Park Service to block off scenic overlooks near Mount Rushmore to prevent anyone driving by from being able to see the monument.
Jarvis showed amazing contempt for his fellow citizens. But however despicable his prissy authoritarianism was, one had to admire his diligence. Jarvis displayed the kind of zeal that would have made Inspector Javert or Dolores Umbridge proud.
But it turns out that when his duties turn from harassing taxpayers trying to honor their country to more mundane matters—such as fixing major pieces of transportation infrastructure—Jarvis is somewhat less diligent.
The cost of fixing the Memorial Bridge is estimated to be $250 million. The Park Service was supposed to apply for $150 million in funding from the federal FASTLANE, a hyper-competitive program that has $800 million to grant to important transportation programs.
As of April 14, the NPS still hadn’t submitted its application. (The deadline was that night.) Worse still, applications require cooperation from state and local partners, and the NPS did not reach out to D.C. and Virginia officials until just a few days before. The story in the Post was one of abject panic from local lawmakers—every last one of them a Democrat—who were amazed at the NPS’s incompetence.
What does not seem to have occurred to them is that the Memorial Bridge fiasco might be an example not of the National Park Service’s incompetence, but its priorities.
