Any serious proposal to streamline the operations of the bloated federal government deserves consideration. So a proposal by President Barack Obama to consolidate several federal economic agencies into one and to look at similar possibilities for other agencies merits a close examination by Congress.
But at least a bit of skepticism is in order as well, because previous efforts proposed by the president to reduce outrageous federal regulation of and interference in the economy have proved deeply disappointing.
About a year ago, the Obama administration announced that it was ordering federal agencies to get rid of unneeded or inefficient regulations.
That sounded like a good idea, of course.
But there was a big catch: The executive order to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy specifically exempted the most bureaucratic federal initiative of recent years: the ObamaCare socialized medicine law.
Thousands upon thousands of pages of rules are being written to implement ObamaCare, which Democrats in Congress passed in 2010. But the administration made it clear that those regulations would not be subject to the president’s order to cut back on excessive federal rules. ObamaCare’s regulations “will not be priorities for the look back,” an administration official told The Wall Street Journal.
So this latest suggestion of streamlining the federal government is obviously welcome. But it seems a little silly to focus on the inefficiencies in Washington without paying attention to the huge bureaucracy being created by ObamaCare.
That, as they say, is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.