a large percentage of the population believes there are not enough government agencies and departments.
Any evidence to back that up? I doubt it. I'm confident that only a very small percentage feels that way. Just more RW nonsense.
Good point. They shouldn't be.
Public colleges and universities could survive without those programs, and the well-endowed private ones would of course stay in business as well. But many other private schools would shut down. Are you ready to accept that?
>>Block grants back to the States.
So you want programs that serve the interests of low-income and special needs students administered through fifty state gubmints, and you think that they would then operate more efficiently. Why not keep going and have county gubmints do the work, or even better, move it all down to a municipal level? Hell, let's have each individual school handle them. None of that awful "duplication" that right-wingers are always complaining about for you, right?
>>The same way they are now - by suit.
Do you think that's how all that oversight and enforcement is handled? Every time there's an issue related to a possible violation of civil rights law related to education, it ends up in court?
>>If only there was some kind of "Stanford Achievement Test Series" that we could use
There's a lot more data than standardized test scores collected.
Much of the waste that I see comes from any nexus with the private sector.
My sixteen years experience as a federal employee leads me to agree. My agency expends considerable resources in an effort to get some businesses and individuals (you can guess what their ideology is) to comply with legally mandated requirements to provide information.
>>they hire contract workers … it's wildly expensive. And the contract workers, with nothing to lose and no career to build, are less than worthless.
That's also a problem in the work we do. And there are always rumours that more of it is coming. I'm a fiercely dedicated public servant. I go more than the extra mile every freaking month to get complete my assignments and I
always underbill on hours worked.
I was a field operations supervisor in the 2000 Census. I was paid for a forty-hour week with zero benefits and no position open to me when the work was completed, and yet I often worked fifty hours a week or more. One day I worked from eight in the morning until four o'clock the
next morning, then slept for a few hours and started work at eight again. That's a twenty-hour day. I worked one afternoon at the local airport in a bad snowstorm offloading materials we needed for an operation that we were supposed to have already started.
I'd say I've been an excellent employee since I started working as a dishwasher when I was fifteen, but that level of dedication was not likely to come from me in the private sector. Only when I loved the boss as much as I love America, which was not typical.
why not ?? the more of them you fire the more of them have to get real jobs that contribute to our society rather than leech off our society.
Ya see, Govreducer, this is kind of worthless RW garbage that gets posted around this forum all the time. It's representative of the juvenile, ignorant, anti-American crap that pours out of the mouths of millions of teabugger morons. The good news is that there are sixty-five to seventy million voters that can and will toss this nonsense back into the sewer it leaks out of when the election is decided in November.
Nothing partisan or ideological out of
me.
Transfer payments and support structures take up the vast majority of public expenditures
And those "transfer payments" are mostly Social Security and Medicare, totalling $1.37 trillion, about 37% of federal spending in 2015. The rest is Medicaid ($350 billion), federal civilian and military retirement ($160 billion), disability insurance ($144 billion), veterans benefits ($92 billion), EITC, child care and other tax credits ($85 billion), SNAP ($76 billion), SSI ($55 billion), and the wonderful "other" category of around $100 billion. Altogether about two-thirds of federal spending.
It may or may not be a good idea to hack away at that pile, but you won't reduce it by lowering personnel costs.