Today, President Obama said:
Without significant change to steer away from ever-expanding deficits and debt, we are on an unsustainable course.
Some will dispute (with merit) my credentials as a fiscal conservative. But let there be no question that I have been fiscally concerned of late about the massive deficits (and corresponding increase in total debt) projected by Obama’s administration during Obama’s administration.
I understand that the trendline for the current budget year is, by and large, a result of (a) the mess President Obama inherited, and (b) the malaise he and others are trying to mitigate. But it’s the trendline in the outlying years that worries me. Accordingly, when Obama said what he said today — coupling those words with the announcement that he had named a “chief performance officer,” Jeffrey Zients, whose job will be to “streamline processes, cut costs and find best practices throughout the government” — I was encouraged.
Granted, all the streamlining and best-practice-finding in the world will not be enough to balance the budget. At some point, major junks of embedded spending will need to be painfully abolished, if we are serious about restoring fiscal sanity. But Obama’s move is at least a start, and it seems a far more productive start, an exponentially more engaged step than the snide scoffing of the “Tea Party” protesters who ignored or dismissed Andrew Sullivan’s challenge to identify what they would cut, if the scalpel were in their hands.
While we’re on the topic, here are a few suggestions, from across-the-aisle (on numbered pages 15-16, PDF pages 22-23) for CPO Zients to consider “streamlining” …
69 separate programs, administered by 10 different agencies, provide education or care to children under the age of 5
Nine separate agencies administer 44 different programs for job training
23 separate programs, each with its own overhead, provide housing assistance to the elderly
I don’t question the need for the intervention required in these areas. In fact, unlike other so-called conservatives, I’m inclined by experience to believe government can (and often must) play a role in helping children under five, boosting job training, housing the elderly, and so on. However, while I generally support such efforts, I think it’s equally legitimate to wonder if one program administered by one agency in each of those three areas would not be more efficient and effective.
I’d greatly appreciate it, if the new CPO would at least make the effort to prove me wrong.