Father may know best; however, our government seldom does! I could regale you all day with endless unmet promises by our government—trillions spent on anti-poverty programs that didn’t move the needle one inch. When the government screws up, you too rarely hear much about it. There’s just too much riding on whatever it is that’s not working, and there are too many snouts in the trough to confess the truth. If a billion dollars didn’t work, how about another two or three to fix it? In the world of government, insiders calling out that the emperor has no clothes makes you an outcast or worse.

Massive NASA Failure:

The government frequently has massive fails, like the NASA Space Launch System project that started in 2011, costing $26.4 billion to date, $8 billion over budget, and no next launch date on the horizon! SpaceX anyone? The Feds have put over $8 billion into the California High-Speed Rail project since 2008, with a projected cost of $106 billion for phase I, which is only 119 miles. The projected completion date is beyond 2032. Do you think they will make that date? Take a piece of legislation from the Covid era: over $80 billion of fraud in just the PPP program alone, another $100 billion in the balance of those programs. Over $6 billion went to non-citizens, including people living in Switzerland! The truth is that no one knows how much was stolen through fraudulent schemes. Now that’s government at its best, shoveling money out without controls. And, on the human side, how many people died or were made sick because our government withheld knowledge from its citizens time and time again that veered from the party line?

I have a proposition. Every law, spending bill, or regulation must also contain poison pills. I’ll explain this in a moment. But first, let’s look at the natural extension of all the worst government elements coming together to have still nearly a hundred billion dollars in unspent COVID money today! Drop in the bucket, you say? How about another $1.5 trillion in unspent money from the falsely named Inflation Reduction Act? School systems nationwide are holding on to hundreds of billions of dollars and trying to figure out how to spend it years after the Covid emergency is long gone.

One government functionary laid out the scam to me decades ago. Spend every dollar of your budget to receive more the following year. Reviewing dozens of government budgets through the years, I’ve noticed that spending ticks up rapidly as the fiscal year comes to a close. I once witnessed one agency purchase five years’ worth of computers and printers to ‘spend’ all that money they’d have to forfeit if not spent by the end of their year. This is emblematic of what’s wrong with our system and its lack of control.

Solutions to get Rid of Unintended Consequences:-

Let’s talk about a solution I alluded to a moment ago. Some bright lawyers and accountants could write a clause in every bill, law, rule, or direction in which the government is involved. In the briefest of words:

1. A written justification for every government action (laws, rules, directions) must include the action’s objective or spending and a timeline to accomplish the objective.
2. Potential harm justification for every rule, spending bill, or action must be contemplated in writing and made a part of everything the government does.
3. All laws, rules, and directions must have a sunset date for termination or renewal.Arcane commissions like “The Economic Development Administration (EDA) will no longer duplicate the activities of at least 62 other community development programs. The EDA will spend $350 million this year to spur local economic growth. Yet a recent (GAO) study found the EDA had no impact at all.  Five-year savings: $933 million.” There are many more agencies like this one!
4. All actions by the government must be audited by the GAO every three months to confirm compliance with the stated justification.
5. All unspent but obligated money is subject to recapture when the justification for the spending item no longer exists or circumstances have changed.

There’s more, but you get my drift. Perhaps you think all that this will do is create yet another, even larger Federal agency. You might also feel the task is too mammoth. You could be right. However, we need to normalize the concept of defending spending, rulemaking, and arbitrary or capricious government actions. It is where a non-partisan third party can and should make recommendations to Congress for either termination, recapture, or to point out where the government has gone off the rails.

Another thing: The public needs to see this in real-time on a dedicated internet site that spells out significant variations from the initially stated intent and how much money, lives, or time can be saved if the government terminates ill-advised activities. Today, there’s just no reliable feedback loop to counter the tendency of government workers to feather their nest. This, or something similar, could spotlight hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and corruption and help deliver essential services faster, more efficiently, and transparently. Hopefully, DOGE will enact this idea.

And, let’s not exclude all those agencies that operate in the dark, like the FBI, CIA, or the Justice Department and other dark agencies that fight to keep from releasing even a sliver of information that would illuminate what goes on, citing national security concerns. Like any other agency of the U.S. government, they are no better, no worse, stewards of our goodwill and tax money. By now, Most of us think that stewardship has been severely abused. This is how we get back to sanity.

Conclusion:-

Many conservatives feel that government at every level runs amuck. Good intentions today frequently turn into unintended consequences tomorrow. If that’s not bad enough, those unintended consequences tend to live on way past their sell-by date and drain us financially. We can no longer tolerate business as usual; after all, we’re bankrupt!

God bless America.

Allan J. Feifer—Patriot

Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com