But have congressional Republicans actually gotten rid of anything? I posed that question to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston last month and received an impressive four-page fax enumerating more than 200 program terminations since January 1995. The list of shutdowns includes such absurdities as the Women’s Educational Equity Act, the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corp., the U.S. Travel and Tourism Administration and the Department of Energy’s gas turbine modular helium reactor. And don’t forget Newt’s favorite: no more ice deliveries to the House Office Buildings. “While President Clinton fights to add to the bureaucracy,” crows Livingston, “we are cutting it.”
Here’s the bad news: all but a handful of the 200-odd oinkers on Mr. Livingston’s list have price tags of less than $1 million — not even a rounding error in our $1.7 trillion budget. The total annual savings from those closures amounts to $4 billion, or 0.2 percent of federal largesse. To the GOP’s credit, that is $4 billion more than the Democrats ever saved. Still, Medicare and Social Security spend more than that in a shortened work week. Worse, some of the terminated programs have simply been reincarnated under new aliases in different agencies.
Back in the headier days of early 1995, the House GOP slated more than 300 major federal programs and three cabinet agencies for the federal graveyard in their Contract with America. Every one of those programs deserved execution. Some of them — such as the Legal Services Corporation, bilingual education funds, and Bill Clinton’s army of $7.27 per hour Americorps “volunteers” –are merely political slush funds. Others — like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration –are so antiquated that Barry Goldwater pledged to shut them down when he ran for president more than 30 years ago. The price tags and the cobwebs, of course, are much bigger now. Most of the other programs — including the Economic Development Administration, Amtrak, federal transit grants, the Appalachian Regional Commission and maritime subsidies — are simply hopelessly ineffectual.
The closure of the Commerce, Education and Energy Departments would have saved nearly $20 billion a year, and the catalog of individual program exterminations another $14 billion. In short, getting rid of even a fraction of the unproductive programs in Washington would save real money and almost instantly bring the budget into balance.