Slash The Fat: 16 Agencies To Terminate
National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities
For instance, they are still spending about $420 million per year on the National Endowments for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Back in 1981, when the public debt was still under $1 trillion and 31% of GDP, we argued that the cultural institutions supported by the endowments should be funded by private philanthropy and public admission tickets to museums, operas, etc., not hard-pressed bus drivers in Milwaukee struggling to feed, clothe, and shelter their families; and most certainly not via borrowing from future taxpayers through endless deficit finance.
At the time, the net worth of the top 1% of households was about $3 trillion, indicating ample capacity among wealthy patrons to support America’s important cultural institutions and endeavors, along with the voluntary support of millions of other less prosperous but culturally engaged citizens.
Well, here we are 44 years later with a public debt of $36 trillion and heading skyward, while the net worth of the wealthiest 1% of US households has risen by 16X to $47 trillion. And that staggering wealth pile stands alongside an additional current net worth of $10 trillion for the next 9% of wealthiest households. Yet and yet: The clueless politicians on the Potomac are still borrowing money to fund cultural institutions when the top 10% of US households alone have $56 trillion of net worth available for support of the arts and humanities.
In this instance, we’d suggest that Elon Musk set the example by pledging $2 billion over the next five years to enable cultural institutions and artists time to locate alternative sources of funding, thereby permitting the national endowments to be zeroed out immediately. This would at least get the agency-elimination ball rolling with a bang!
To be sure, shutting down the two endowments would result in a reduction of only 200 Federal jobs and a compensation cost savings of just $32 million per year, but as we will detail below, it would also generate additional savings from grants and overhead of $390 million.
In any event, this is surely the place to start. After all, if the Trumpified Washington can’t even eliminate these two agencies, why then, truly, all is lost.
Legal Services Corporation
The same goes for the 800 staffers and $128 million of savings from eliminating the Legal Services Corporation. For crying out loud, this whole operation is a liberal hobby horse dating back to the early days of the War on Poverty in 1965.
If the dubious political litigation it mainly supports via direct staff and another $432 million of grants and contracts has not found non-Federal funding more than a half century later, it doesn’t deserve another dime from Uncle Sam. Period.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
In the case of the NHTSA, we have the very worst of the Nanny State. It has not only usurped the role of the private market and legal liability system in determining appropriate engineering standards for auto safety, but for decades has been knee-deep in setting idiotic average fuel economy standards (CAFE) for the entire fleet of each automaker.
This causes immense distortions in vehicle offerings, pricing, and production sourcing. That’s because to meet fleetwide fuel economy mandates each automaker must average together the lower fuel economy ratings of heavier, higher performance and profitable vehicles the public actually wants to buy with the artificially high fuel economy levels of small, stripped-down, under-powered cars that they must be deeply discounted to move the metal owing to limited marketplace appeal. In the process of compliance, automakers also tend to shift sourcing of the latter small, cheap “compliance” vehicles to Mexico and East Asia in order to relieve the strain on profitability resulting from these largely unprofitable NHTSA-mandated autos.
Accordingly, we would propose to abolish the NHTSA and in one fell swoop get rid of 600 bureaucrats and an overall waste of $1.2 billion per year, including about $500 million of safety grants to the states. With respect to the latter, if the genius socialist legislators in Sacramento and Albany want to steer their own unwashed driving masses to purportedly safer modes of happy motoring, let them do so on their own taxpayers’ dime.
Abolition of the NHTSA would also return consumer vehicle choice to the marketplace and likely bring a lot of current foreign-sourced auto production back home. That is to say, most of today’s auto companies–both the Big Three and foreign brands–make a decent profit manufacturing full-sized sedans, SUV’s, and pickups in the United States. Upon abolition of the CAFE program, therefore, Nanny State-mandated and foreign-sourced econo-boxes would lose their helping hand from Washington, paving the way for more US-built vehicles on dealer lots that consumers actually wish to buy.
And, yes, if consumers want six airbags per car as now mandated by the NHTSA (standard sedans are required to have two frontal airbags, two side airbags and two curtain airbags to protect occupants in the event of a side-impact crash), manufacturers will offer dealer-installed options at the appropriate (steepish) markup to base sticker prices. Indeed, the idea that consumers need a Federal Auto Nanny in order to choose a “safe” vehicle goes back to Ralph Nader’s original grab for regulatory power back in the 1970s and 1980s, which we fought in Washington when at least some Republicans still understood the statist scam of alleged “market imperfections.”
Federal Trade Commission
America imports $3.1 trillion of goods every year, which is testimony in itself that planet earth is crawling with potential competitors, fair and unfair. This actual and potential competition militates against the ability of any domestic manufacturer to monopolize anything.
In fact, students of sound market economics have understood since at least the 1960s the populist idea that private capitalism is an incubator of monopoly is just plain nonsense. With extremely rare exceptions, monopolies and rigged oligopolies only arise when they are enabled by the state via regulatory favoritism and capture, subsidies, and/or protectionist restraints of both domestic and international trade.
So what Washington needs is not anti-monopoly policemen, but the elimination of crony-capitalist policies that bestow unfair and coercive competitive advantage on politically privileged competitors. Most certainly, therefore, two anti-monopoly bureaucracies are way beyond the ken, meaning that the FTC should be abolished entirely. If need be, any minor residual meddling with business in this area can be handled by a low-cost rump operation in a drastically downsized antitrust division of the DOJ.
Again, savings of $180 million per year of FTC compensation expense is more than warranted, even as it would free American business from Nanny State meddling that results from 1,125 FTC staffers scurrying around in search of imaginary problems to justify their salaries. And, as we will amplify below, there would be a bonus savings here of $250 million, representing the non-payroll waste incurred by the FTC.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Even back in the world of 1981, there was no case for public funding of radio and TV, but by the year 2024 it has become a screaming instance of “Oh, puleeeze!”
The powerful presence of “X” (nee Twitter) is testimony itself that the dominant hometown newspaper and three broadcast networks no longer have even a remote monopoly on the news. That was the ostensible reason for the government-funded NPR back in the day, which, predictably, was bypassed by the flowering of tens of thousands of technologically and market-based alternative media and news/information/entertainment venues. And then, even as NPR became redundant and utterly unnecessary, it morphed into a state propaganda agency to boot.
Accordingly, the CPB’s 100 staffers should be told to send their resumes to the blooming, buzzing world of alternative media on Day 1, even as the expense of $16 million for compensation and $520 million for affiliate grants and contracts is eliminated. Cold turkey would be the obvious way to serve up the savings in this case.
OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration)
As it happens, there are approximately 90,000 units of state, county, city, village, and township government in the United States–the overwhelming share of which are involved in the business of grassroots public health and safety administration and enforcement in some form. So, if these manifold units of government can’t look after safety in the workplace–from farms to warehouses and factories–what’s even the point of the Founders’ genius? Namely, their acute understanding that healthy democracy requires a decentralized federalist form of the state, not a unitary power in a capital city distant from the daily life of the people and the marketplaces and communities in which they operate.
Beyond that, there is no absolute science of workplace safety. Always and everywhere, it involves a trade-off between levels of protection and costs, and also choices among an infinite array of engineering versus behavior approaches to safety–all of which have their pros and cons. That’s why a federalist approach is tailor-made for the very function and jurisdiction of OSHA.
That is to say, Justice Brandeis had the answer more than a century ago when he argued that the states were the proper laboratories of democracy and that many of the functions Washington has since usurped might be better experimented with and executed at the state and local level.
In the case of cowboy safety, for example, the California-style approach illustrated below might be appropriate for a state that lost its cowboys long ago, anyway. But Texas, which still has some, might well prefer a more practical and less burdensome approach.
In any event, 2,200 bureaucrats and inspectors on the OSHA payroll are absolutely unnecessary to insure safe workplaces in America. Not only would the elimination of OSHA save $350 million of staffing costs and $1.3 billion of annual Federal expense overall, but it would also relieve businesses and workplaces in America of literally billions of compliance costs and millions of hours of paperwork that represent the inherent overkill of a centralized bureaucracy that has become a captive of its own labor union constituencies.
Besides, we’d bet that Florida, the Carolinas, and Texas would be more than happy to accommodate the relocation of businesses that might be chased away by a mini-OSHA in Albany, Sacramento, or Springfield. That is, competition among the states for investment, jobs, and a favorable business climate is likely to be a far more powerful brake on regulatory agency excesses than the so-called Congressional oversight committees ever have been, or even the courts–neither of which have real skin in the game.
