Is the (Federal) Government a Useless Waste of Money?

by Tom Kando

 So now we have another government shut-down. It’s a stalemate between Trump and Congress about “the wall.”

I log onto my web portal/browser (Yahoo!) and I get the news story of the hour - This one about the government shutdown that started on December 22. The article of the hour is usually followed by many comments, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands.

I often scroll down a few dozen of these comments, because I am a sociologist and I am keenly interested in public opinion. I understand that these comments are obviously not representative. Many of them are probably written by trolls with an agenda to grind, many of their authors may not even be Americans. Yet, these ARE voices. And when I scroll down the list, peruse a few dozen of them randomly, and find an OVERWHELMING majority of them writing more or less the same stupid and WRONG thing, I worry.

Today, the vast majority of these trolls, while using different iterations of it, agreed with this familiar imbecile meme:
That the present (federal) government shutdown hasn’t made a damn bit of difference in anyone’s life; and that this is proof that the (federal) government is an utterly useless and wasteful institution, which employs millions of pencil-pushers who enjoy fat paychecks while doing nothing of value; that the permanent shutdown of this bureaucracy would make no difference in our lives, and that it would be a blessing.

Of course, we have been hearing this idiotic cliché for years from grandpa Jethro who still imagines himself to be an old-West ranchero. But this attitude is, in a more hidden and subtle form, present in the hearts of many Americans, maybe most Americans.
It ties in with the popular “Deep State” meme: Started by Mike Lofgren, this is the idea that the true political power in America is in the hands of thousands of unelected government bureaucrats,  who are largely liberal. This idea has been avidly co-opted by the far right, including people like Steve Bannon,  Breitbart News, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and many Republicans. Such people believe that the “liberal fascists” are out to deprive Americans of their individual rights, impose socialism upon us, etc.

Individualism and suspicion of big government and of collective solutions to social problems are deep-seated American values - more so than elsewhere in the world. So when the government shuts down and a few days later nothing terrible has happened, many people happily holler: See: the government does nothing of value.
It’s as if the captain of the Titanic turned off the ship’s engines, and because the ship did not stop immediately, passengers would argue that the engines have nothing to do with the ship’s propulsion. Stupid.

Any government shutdown of course affects us - a lot, and negatively. Not just the hundreds of thousands whose paychecks are delayed, but innumerable other services. Medical research, national parks, public safety, public assistance, and more. The total cost to the economy will be in the dozens of billions, even if the shutdown is as brief as the previous two were.

Contrary to the notion of the “Deep State” and the anarchist streak in the mentality of so many people, the public “bureaucrats” are the people who do all the essential work that underlies the actions and policies without which our vast and complex society could not function. They are the people who do the work that is the essential basis for political decisions made by Congress, the Courts and the Executive Branch.

Here are some of agencies that come to mind:

1. The CIA (Annual budget: about $15 billion)
2. The Department of Agriculture (About 100,000 employees)
3. The Department of Justice, including the FBI (About 35,000 employees)
4. The Department of Health and Human Services (About 80,000 employees), including the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta
5. The Department of Treasury, including the IRS (About 77,000 employees)
6. The Environmental Protection Agency (Annual budget: about $8 billion)
7. The Federal Reserve
8. The Federal Statistical System, including the Bureau of the Census (About 4,000 employees)
9. NASA (Annual budget: about $21 billion)
10. The National Endowment for the Humanities (Annual budget about $170 million)
11. The National Institutes of Health (Annual budget: about $37 billion)
12. The National Science Foundation (Annual budget: about $8 billion)
13. The Securities and Exchange Commission (About 4000 employees)
14. The US Postal Service (About 650,000 employees)
15. The armed forces, of course

All useless? Quite the opposite: Without the bureaucracies, you don’t have the data, the facts, the knowledge, the expertise or the manpower to carry out policies and services. Where do you think that the congressmen, the judges and the executives who pass, enact and enforce laws and policies obtain the facts upon which their decisions are based? The bureaucrats are the engine, the wheels, the mechanisms that make government and society possible.

© Tom Kando 2018;All Rights Reserved

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