- The new Department of Homeland Security will merge 22
federal agencies and 170,000 federal employees into one monstrous bureaucracy.
It will not make America safer.
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- After all, the key agencies most directly involved in
fighting terrorism are excluded. They are the Central Intelligence Agency,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Department, not to
mention the National Security Agency. So, if the most important intelligence
agencies are left as separate agencies, what do they hope to accomplish
by consolidating less-important agencies?
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- It's bad enough they picked a name George Orwell might
have thought of, but they are overselling this to the American public.
It will take many months, probably even years, to actually put it together,
and it is a rule of thumb in government that the bigger the bureaucracy,
the harder it is to manage.
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- It's appropriate that it is being compared to the reorganization
after World War II. That, too, was an Orwellian screw-up. Instead of a
War Department ó a lean, mean machine that had successfully carried
us through two global wars and plenty of smaller ones ó we got a
Defense Department that soon ballooned into the elephantine bureaucracy
it is today. Instead of the president talking directly to the people involved,
we got the bureaucracy called the National Security Council. And, of course,
the Central Intelligence Agency that, as it turned out, was and is not
today a real central intelligence agency because there are more than two
dozen other agencies also engaged in intelligence.
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- If I had to sum up the essence of conservatism, I would
say that it is the belief, founded on centuries of experience, that government
is the least efficient way to do anything. The motto of government should
always be "Keep It Simple, Stupid." The more layers between a
decision at the top and execution at the bottom, the more expensive, inefficient
and fouled up the mission is likely to be.
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- I know it's hard to believe, but Franklin Roosevelt fought
World War II with a White House staff of about 15 people. And that was
a global, two-front war with 12 million Americans under arms. Today's peacetime
White House usually has a staff well over 3,000. At one point, there were
80,000 civilian bureaucrats in the Defense Department. I understand that's
been trimmed, but I don't know by how many.
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- Why are we playing bureaucratic games when we cannot
even find a 6-1/2-foot giant in a nation of short people? You can be sure
Osama bin Laden is not burdened with a gigantic bureaucracy. Think about
it. How would you manage 170,000 people? You know how government works.
There will be layers and layers of submanagers between the head, who won't
do much besides make speeches, and the people who actually do the work
way down at the street level. They will be lucky if their instructions
can filter down in three weeks.
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- Furthermore, you can count on the fact that in this long
process of consolidation, the individual agencies will have their work
disrupted. So under the most optimistic projections, the immediate effect
will be less efficiency and effectiveness, not more. I hasten to add, of
course, that only God knows how the Immigration and Naturalization Service
could possibly be more inefficient and inept than it already is.
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- So, OK, I'm like old Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
I can't think of anything good to say about this new monster bureaucracy.
The only cheerful thing I can think of is what a British aristocrat, who
hated us, said more than a century ago:
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- "God looks out for fools, drunks and the United
States of America." I sure hope that still holds.
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- © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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- http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20021125/index.php
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