Monday, August 12, 2019

Here's one proposed law I think we can all support


Whether one's on the left or the right of US politics, some things are more important than political orientation.  I think this is one of them.

A coalition of six Republican and three Democratic senators wants officials to inventory the costs, goals, and performance of all federal programs, then post the resulting database on the internet.

. . .

The purpose of the proposal is to “provide taxpayers with an improved understanding of government programs through the disclosure of cost, performance, and areas of duplication among them, leverage existing data to achieve a functional Federal program inventory,” according to the bill’s text.

. . .

A previous version of the bill was approved unanimously by the House of Representatives in 2017, but didn’t pass the Senate ... If the proposal becomes law, it would represent the latest advance of an informal bipartisan movement that began early in the 2000s and first saw success with passage of the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA) [which] resulted in the creation of USASpending.gov, a federal database that puts about 70 percent of all federal expenditures within a few mouse clicks for anybody with access to the internet.

There's more at the link.

Forced disclosure of the true cost of every single Federal government program?  Oh, heck, yes!  The so-called "swamp" in Washington D.C. is populated far more with faceless bureaucrats spending taxpayer money than it is with partisan officials seeking to put their thumbs on the political scales.  I can't think of a more effective way to expose the swamp's shenanigans than to force it to report on, and if necessary justify, every single cent it spends.

I suggest we all contact our representatives and senators in Washington and tell them, "Yes, please!" on this one.

Peter

4 comments:

Old NFO said...

Hell yes! And kill those that don't do anything, or are obsolete, like the TVA, NEA, etc... Sigh...

Mad celt said...

Won't happen. Our rulers aren't giving up one of their sources of maintaining control.

Rev. Paul said...

Absolutely yes! And I'm a big fan of zero-based budgeting, too.

HMS Defiant said...

It quite literally cannot be done. Simply looking at the defense budget, the navy share of it, the part that went to SPAWAR and me, working on a little program with a very fixed budget listening to half a dozen young women in the cube behind me doing reclamas all day, every day and moving money around everywhere in order to stay ahead of mandated expiration rules. I may be wrong but OPN (other procurement navy) and OMN (operations and maintenance) were respectively 3 and 2 year money after which they supposedly 'expired' but no PM ever lets money expire, the put it on contract as an option they'll never exercise and then reclaim later. There are lots of other pots like that. SCN (ship construction) and you wouldn't believe the games played with fixed production contracts.

There is literally no way at all to follow the dollars to see what you got for it. Did you really believe we paid $600.00 for a hammer?

Of course it tried it would result in hiring thousands of bureaucrats and a sudden move to make all those fuzzy contracts black and take them out of the oversight world.

Ask me how I know.