budget

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Reduce the Size of the Federal Government


This may sound like a strange thing coming from someone who has voted for Democrats his entire life but it is something we really do need.  The most recent increase came with the establishment of Homeland Security as its own cabinet post.  I was particularly incensed at its formation, not because we did not need such focus, but because it disregarded an existing agency entirely.  That agency is the Department of Defense. I will explain.

By definition, homeland security has always been the domain of our armed forces.  But there have been certain restrictions with regard of how those forces could be used.  This restrictions are a part of our federal laws.  That meant we can use our armed forces as a police force only in times of martial law.  But the solution to that was not to create an entirely new agency, but to change the laws to make it possible.  There is not a single thing the DHS does today that our military could not have accomplished.  The most visible of all DHS is at our airports.  The idea of people in military uniforms was at the airports was undesirable.  The solution was to simply create a special uniform for those who were put into such situation so they did not look like other members of the military.  These people would specialize in just these sorts of duties.  But the duties would be easily transferable to the more traditional military duties.

That would have eliminated an entire agency as it exists today.  But I certainly would not stop there.  I think certain agencies can be folded into other existing agencies.  The Department of Energy can be fairly easily split between Commerce and Transportation.  The Department of Justice can absorb duties now assigned to the Treasury and Homeland Security.   Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services can be combined.  The Departments of the Interior and Agriculture can be combined.  And the list goes on.

I was a federal employee for 30 years, 11 active duty in the U.S. Army and 19 at the U.S. Department of Transportation.  I worked at one of the more lean portions of the government.  Even there, however, there was an overabundance of senior civil service employees which could have been easily reduced, even more than it had been.  Because of that, I certainly believe that this is true of every other agency.  That means there needs to be a definition of how many people at a minimum senior manager must have in order to retain their pay grade.  It would also give definition to how many of any particular pay grade can exist within the entire government.  It would not surprise me that people of the pay grades GS-15, SES-1 and higher have as few as 5 people working under them when a minimum of 25 or more should be observed SES grades and 10 or more for GS-15.  People in these grades typically jealously protect their fiefdoms.  They are wonderful at rationalizing the status quo but are poor when pragmatism is called for.  Additionally, minimum education requirements need to be observed for these pay grades, another thing that frequently does not exist today.  I knew of one SES person who had nothing more than a high school education.  He ruled over people holding master degrees and PhD.

I want to caution people about one thing.  A small  government is not a guarantee to a reduced level of funding.  At the federal level, payroll is a relatively small portion of the entire budget.  But to be sure, a smaller government will make it much more manageable.

 

 

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Reducing the Size of the Military a Big Mistake


I remember some years ago hearing that the 26th Infantry Division was going to be reduced to a single brigade.  The 26th, the Yankee Division, was the army component of the Massachusetts National Guard.  At the time I did not think too much about it.  I recognized the desire of many to reduce the size of the military.  The mistake in my thinking was that the reduction was coming at the expense of reserve units.

Let’s start with the active duty force.  There are about 522,000 men and women in the army today.  During the Vietnam era the army was more than a million men and women strong, to put this in perspective.  After Vietnam, as was true after every other war, the size of the entire military was reduced.  But what is different this time?  The difference is simple.  There was no military build-up during Iraq and Afghanistan.  To meet requirements the burden was shifted to Army Reserve and National Guard units.  And it was early in Iraq that it was realized how unprepared the National Guard units in particular were.  That has changed.  The point is, our active duty force was too small to handle the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Now our politicians have pressed the Pentagon to reduce an already lean active duty force.

I expect the Pentagon will push back by suggesting how to further reduce reserve and national guard forces.  This is a very dangerous tact.  The reason is very simple.  Regardless of how mechanized, how computerized, how modernized you make our armed forces, it still comes down to soldiers, not computers and machines, to win the wars.

I am certain that the Pentagon will push to keep our reserve forces better trained than they were prior to Iraq.  If there is one thing Iraq taught us, it is that our reserve forces were poorly prepared for extended active duty.  One has to remember, these forces train one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer.  That limits how much training you can do regardless of how hard  you try.  To think you can take these forces from their peacetime reserve status and throw them into a wartime stance as quickly as you can an active unit is absurd.  Short of doubling the training time allotted to the reserves, you are going to need a substantial ramp up period from peacetime to wartime stance for any reserve unit.

I think if anything our active ground forces need to be increased.  I think a 200,000 man increase, to about 750,000 troops is much more reasonable and gives us a much better defense force.  An additional investment into increasing the size of our reserve forces is also called for.

A standing army has always been an expensive item.  People are quick to look at the defense budget and think it is bloated.  I can assure you, nothing is further from the truth.  Another thing Iraq made painfully obvious was how woefully underfunded our reserves were.  They had too much obsolete equipment or equipment requirements that had not been filled due to budget constraints.  Having a well equipped army is not something that we can compromise on.

It is impossible to predict when and where the next conflict we will be involved in.  It is just as impossible to predict how much of a force we will need.  We cannot afford to be penny wise and pound foolish with our military.  We have to be fully prepared to meet the demands on our military in the future.  We can only have that with a reasonably sized military.