Burn it down and start from scratch?
It should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans do not know much about what their government does or why or who is in charge. Fewer than half can name all three branches of government. A quarter cannot name even one. Philip Bump wrote recently, “On any given Election Day, after all, some chunk of the electorate is misinformed about who and what is on the ballot.” But there is lots of governement waste, fraud, and abuse squirreled away somewhere that should be eliminated so we can lower taxes. They’re sure of that.
Like this genius Vivek Ramaswamy who wants to eliminate 75% of career federal employees. People we’ve trained to know their jobs. People who know important shit most Americans aren’t even aware is being done. Yeah, those people have got to go.
I sat down recently with a grade-school friend I had not seen since I was maybe 15. He was retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He’d captained vessels and flown planes as part of the agency’s data-gathering efforts. I asked if he’d read “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis. There’s a long section on what NOAA does as part of the Department of Commerce (for some reason). He had not. I told him he should.
“The Department of Commerce should really be called the Department of Information,” Lewis writes, because its real function is information-gathering and storage. The problem is its name isn’t particularly descriptive of what it does. Department of Information would not be much of an improvement. The department is also home to the National Weather Service (overseen by NOAA) which, if you are like me, you use several times a day. The National Climatic Data Center, here where I live, stores all that information. Weather.com and AccuWeather? They just repackage the data NWS and NOAA collect at public expense, then use it to sell ads at a profit. Trump apppointed AccuWeather CEO, Barry Myers, to run the NOAA. He argued that the government (his data supplier and competition) “should get out of the forecasting business.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promises to eliminate the Departments of Energy, Commerce and Education, plus the Internal Revenue Service. That’s one more than Texas Gov. Rick Perry famously wanted gone. Except he could not remember the name of the Department of Energy. He eventually ran it and didn’t know what it does. Its name isn’t particularly descriptive of what it does either.
Here’s what Lewis in 2017 said the D.O.E. does:
Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where.
Yup. That’s gotta go.
And all those other “woke” types who do things we don’t know anything about. Can their asses.