If President Obama’s latests promises to kill wasteful and unneeded federal spending programs sound familiar, they should because the chief executive has trotted out that meme about every six months since the 2008 presidential campaign when he promised to go through the government’s budget “line-by-line.”
The president’s latest directive – that agencies study their budgets and find ways to cut five percent, beginning with duplicative programs – sounds like a concrete move forward, but actually it’s just a variation on a familiar Washington wink-wink:
“You say the taxpayers are getting restless about too much spending? Okay, let’s tell them we’re challenging the bureaucrats to do a comprehensive study and come back with a series of recommendations on how they will cut their budgets by five percent.”
Sounds decisive, right? Solid action. Five-percent cuts. In reality, as everybody in this town well knows, asking bureaucrats to study a problem and then make recommendations is nothing more than a way to buy time with the public until the current frustration passes.
If you doubt this, check out this post from the White House web site from April 2009 when the “process of going through the budget line-by-line” was supposedly “in full swing.”
Weekly Address: Efficiency and Innovation
Posted by Jesse Lee on April 18, 2009 at 05:30 AM EDT
With the process of going through the budget line by line in full swing, the President uses his Weekly Address to give some examples, big and small, of how the Administration is working to cut costs and eliminate waste. The President also announces two new key appointments, Jeffrey Zients as Chief Performance Officer and Aneesh Chopra as Chief Technology Officer, who will be invaluable in streamlining the way government functions through efficiency and innovation.
Did you catch this line towards the end of the president’s address?
“Finally, in the coming weeks, I will be announcing the elimination of dozens of government programs shown to be wasteful or ineffective. In this effort, there will be no sacred cows, and no pet projects. All across America, families are making hard choices, and it’s time their government did the same.”
Did we miss that announcement?
