Internal Improvements II
Down in the comments for Extreme Bureaucratic Trivia, my post on needing a designated director for internal improvements, helno51 says:
I think that Steve has stumbled on a flaw with his initial suggestion. That is that the position he wants created basically exists already. The fact that past Commerce secretaries have not made an impact doesn’t mean we should just create another government bureaucrat but rather we should demand that the existing bureaucrat do his job. Steves initial suggestion is how we end up with an enormous inefficient government that has multiple agencies doing the same job and most doing the job poorly.
Maybe. But it also depends on your priorities. The current cabinet departments weren’t set up by the Constitution. Some have been with us since the first Washington administration, like State, Treasury, and War/Defense, but others, like Interior (1849), Justice (1870), Agriculture (1889), and, oh, Homeland Security (2002) emerged later as the need for them was perceived. That doesn’t mean those administrative functions didn’t exist, but they were lower-priority operations shoehorned into other departments. Interior was dragged out from under State, and Agriculture was dragged out of Interior. When education seemed to need more of a focus than it was getting as part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, it got its own house.
In the case of Commerce, it was originally the Department of Commerce and Labor, but ten years in it was decided that Labor needed its own locus of attention. And so on. The current Commerce department has a lot of fish to fry, including international trade and the census, and including some random things like the National Weather Service and the Patent Office. Just one arm of it, the Economic Development Agency, is focused on internal economic development. Given that the whole of Commerce received $6.9 Billion in funding this year, almost 50 percent less than any other cabinet department, you figure the EDA isn’t exactly a priority. Indeed, this year the EDA received $274 million in funding, more than some Commerce components, but much less than others… And if you delve further into the EDA website, you will note that public works is just one of several things they spend money on.
No, POW will be a bureaucratic orphan until it gets its own home. As I will show in future posts, this is how it always should have been, but public works, not explicitly authorized by the Constitution, were controversial from day one of the federal government.
December 15th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Steve, Id like to respond since I was referenced in your post. I think you may have misunderstood my comment (or maybe I misunderstood your initial post). I am very familiar that cabinet posts were not created in the Constitution and have developed over time so if you are talking about carving something out of Commerce and making it its own specific department, thats a different story. While I may not agree that the specific task deserves its own special department, I can understand how someone might want a department to concentrate on a task that they see as vital. I was more concerned that the government, under your suggestion, would be setting up a new department while also leaving that function under Commerce as well. There are many, many examples of departments that are running programs that do the exact same thing (or nearly the exact same thing) as programs being run by other departments and that only increases the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of the government.
Now, as for elevating POW (or anything else) to is own department, I think it depends on the amount of money that is going to be spent. If Obama is really going to ramp it up to near Eisenhower levels than it probably should increase in promenance within the government for many reasons such as its monetary significane and for accountibility purposes.
My own thoughts on public works is that some are definitely necessary but Im not sure this is something that is going to be able to spur the economy which seems to be as big a reason for doing it as the improved infrastructure. My other concern is that it becomes a big slush fund that every local politician in the country hits up to fund their meaningless pet projects. That isnt going to accomplish anything. Also based on some of the quotes you included in your initial post, it sounds again like the government is working at cross purposes. On the one hand Obama is all gung ho about the environment and carbon and global warming, etc, etc but it sure sounds like this could involve a lot of road building and improving, which would seem to contradict his stated environmental views and would mean the government is throwing money at both sides of an issue ensuring that nothing will change and we will waste a ton of money in the process, while nothing changes.
December 15th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Looking forward to this. Give us a bibliography! This is a good chance for you to put a recommended books section up to the right, a la marginalrevolution.com