Another Government Agency - Oh Goodie

There was talk today about the possibility of a new government agency as the result of the banking crisis and credit card issues. What would this agency do that no other agency is already responsible for? Who knows. Probably nothing.

Being told that we need yet another government bureaucracy made me wonder just how many we already have. I couldn't find an actual count, but I found a listing of the agencies here, http://www.lib.lsu.edu/gov/index.html. When I went through and counted them up, aside from blood shooting from my eyes, I found that we have 1,278 governmental agencies. These range from NASA to the office of the first lady. Then I started wondering how many people work for the federal government. More blood shot from my eyes. According to the Bureau of Labor And Statistics, the US government is the largest employer in the nation. Doesn't that give you a warm tingly feeling inside. The US government, not counting the postal service, employs 1.8 MILLION people. This is larger than the population of Philadelphia. And these are only the CIVILIAN employees. Don't fool yourself into thinking that the number is that big because of our fighting men and women because that's not the case. These are non-military personnel. If we add the postal service into the mix, then we exceed the entire population of Dallas. Reassuring isn't it.

So although we already have nearly 1,300 agencies and over 2 million employees, nobody can take on the additional burden of looking over credit cards. Hmmmm. How about we get some Industrial Engineers or Six Sigma specialists in there to see what it would take to get the existing staff to be able to take on these additional responsibilities. Unlike the private sector, the government just takes it's money so has not incentive to improve efficiency, and the bureaucracy just keeps getting bigger.

Is this the small federal government that our founding fathers envisioned? Somehow I just don't think so. And what is Obama's plan for creating jobs? Well, the federal government is hiring.

Looking at these numbers it's obvious that what this country really needs is one more government bureaucracy.