As I researched the materials for my book, A Broken Sausage Grinder; Is Our Government Fundamentally Flawed?, one of the irrefutable observations that surfaced was that the staff is controlling the government. Another irrefutable observation was that our elected officials are not doing their jobs when it comes to control of the staff. It is not clear whether this lack of control by our elected officials is the result of incompetence or inability, but either way the result is unacceptable.
Another observation is that it really doesn’t matter whether we talk about Democrats or Republicans when it comes to controlling the staff. Neither political party seems to be able to get the job done. Administration after administration from both sides of the aisle continue to give us the same message when it comes to staff impropriety and that is something to the effect that “we are just learning about this and we will give it a full investigation before we decide what actions to take.” Next we hear “we will follow this where ever it leads.” Then, “I will see to it that the ones who did this are held accountable.” On and on it goes. Eventually, the whole thing dies down because it is overtaken by something new in the political arena and we almost never hear the outcome.
Now we learn that the Justice Department has lost two persons, with links to terrorism, from the witness protection program. This revelation comes on top of the discovery that the IRS was acting inappropriately with respect to oversight of some political non-profit organizations. That revelation came on top of the Justice Departments wide reaching use of subpoena power when tracking down the source of leaks of sensitive information from the Administration. And this revelation comes on the heels of the whole Benghazi affair which may not really be an affair at all. We have come to a sad state of affairs when we cannot depend on our government to act within the law. We have come to an even sadder state of affairs when we cannot depend on any of our elected officials to give us the truth without spinning it to their own advantage.
It is important to remember that the bad actors are only a minority of the staff. That said, the bad actors must be removed and disciplined in a harsh and public way so that we can start to regain the confidence in our government that we disserve. These bad actors should be fired rather than allowed to resign. And, not just the top dog either. Start at the top and fire everyone in the chain of command until we get to the staff person who actually committed the impropriety. Clean the place up!
There doesn’t seem to be an alternative to just thinning the ranks of the governmental staff until we arrive at a size that our elected officials are able to control. My suspicion is that the staff persons who actually deliver the service at the front counter are not the bad actors. Nope, I suspect the bad actors are filling up the ranks of middle and upper level management. These are the people who don’t know what their mission really is so they do what they think is expected of them. We need real professionalism in our government staff and we are not getting enough of it.
In my book I propose a performance audit of each of the departments within the federal bureaucracy to ascertain whether their activities are truly appropriate. My proposal comes after an examination of the various departmental websites where they have published the mission statement for the work they do. Some of the mission statement content seems like an encroachment into state responsibility and some of it just seems unnecessary. Again, we need to clean up the mess that is our federal bureaucracy so that we can regain the confidence we deserve from those who are supposed to be serving our needs.
The Sausage Grinder is Broken – will you help to fix it?
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