The Constant Gardener

Like gardening, it requires constant work to keep my back patio clean.

To be a successful gardener (and believe me, I am not a successful gardener),
you have to be constantly working to keep the flowers properly watered and
pruned. You also have to constantly work to fight off the weeds. If you don’t,
the weeds will eventually take over the garden, and the garden will be lost.

This isn’t a column about gardening. It is a column about government growth.

Like a garden, the government requires constant pruning. The weeds of
government (or wasteful Washington spending) can take over the whole government
if there isn’t a constant gardener who is working to prune and cut and pull out
the bad spending.

But there isn’t a constant gardener in the federal government, whose sole job
is to get rid of wasteful spending.

Sure, you have the Office of Management and Budget and you have the Government
Accountability Office and you have the Congressional Budget Office, and
theoretically, their jobs are supposed to be to look after the spending. But
the OMB and CBO are so politically compromised at this point that they have
very little credibility when it comes to spending.

They are not constant gardeners when it comes to the budget.

So I have a proposal. I say we are a constant gardener. Or better yet, we
create within the federal government a government commission charged with
identifying those parts of the government that need pruning or — better still —
need to be pulled out by their roots.

But this won’t be a regular commission. It will be a completely bipartisan
commission, like the Base Closing Commission, in that it has the ability to
bring its recommendations straight to the floor of Congress.

And here is the kicker. To give these commissioners an additional incentive to
actually identify waste, fraud and abuse within the government, I propose you
give them a small percentage of what they save back should the spending
proposals actually pass Congress. So if they save the Treasury a trillion
dollars in cuts, they actually get a billion dollars.

That’s a lot of money, which will give the commissioners some real incentives
to find that waste, and then a lot of incentives to actually compel Congress to
pass it.

I would add a further wrinkle. Allow the commission to hire lobbyists and PR
firms to pressure Congress to pass the spending cuts.

All too often, the lobbying profession is incentivized to lobby on behalf of more
spending. But it rarely, if ever, lobbies for spending cuts. And that may be
one small reason why Congress spends more and cuts less.

These lobbyist for the Constant Gardening Commission would only get paid if
their spending cuts were enacted into law. I bet you they would work extra hard
to get it done. I would even bet that some of them would give campaign
contributions to members of Congress to vote in favor of spending cuts.

That would be a real sea change for Congress. Just imagine if members of Congress
would get campaign contributions for actually voting to cut spending.

Everybody wins. The taxpayers save billions, if not trillions, of dollars that
won’t go to wasteful, useless spending. The commissioners win because if they
are successful, they can make some good money. The lobbyists who are hired by
the commissioners win, because they make some money by getting the spending
cuts enacted by Congress. And the representatives win, not only by doing the
right thing by cutting stupid Washington spending, but, if they play their
cards right, they can get support for their positions by K Street.

In any event, we need to have an independent Constant Gardening Commission to
keep pruning away at the weeds of government. The natural state of government
programs is to grow uncontrollably, just like it is the natural state of weeds
to grow as fast and as big as they can. The only way to stop it is to hire a
Constant Gardner.

Visit www.thefeeherytheory.com.