Cutting Cost in the Federal Budget

To whom it may concern,

One of the many campaign promises from the Obama Administration was to eliminate ineffective government programs as a means to balance the federal budget. Over the course of American history new laws, procedures, agencies, and bureaucracies have been created and reformed at what seems like an exponential rate. These laws set mandates, cancel previous mandates, and in general result in more government, more complexity, and unfortunately, more waste. This tangled web of government implementation is so intricate at this point in time that some small yet effective programs are wrapped into ineffective agencies, others are consolidated in different Departments, and more still never fulfill their original intent and purpose. A comprehensive review of the entire system is needed to finally understand and then correct these structural failures of the whole. These reorganizations have historically been conducted with a sub context of ideological shifts in politics. If this federal review recommends a reorganization of Departments, programs, and staff, confusion and further redundancies are imminent. While it may be no different this time around, how will this administration determine what government programs are effective or not? Is the focus to reduce cost, to make government more effective, or to retool a bureaucracy to implement the political and ideological goals of this administration?

GUNNAR HAND, AICP