Spiraling Debt Demands Bipartisan Mobilization To Terminate Federal Departments And Agencies

In a federal government seemingly incapable of sticking to the necessary and proper, 2024 interest payments on debt topping $34 trillion are set to surpass defense spending as well as Medicare outlays.

That ought to be a wake-up call as Biden prepares to send his fiscal year 2025 spending request to Congress on March 11, and as Congress continues battling over not just aid to Ukraine and Israel but still-unresolved 2024 domestic spending.

Not everything can or should be done in Washington, whose economic interventionism and cradle-to-grave custodial attitudes toward able-bodied citizens have created the debt crisis. Mere “waste, fraud and abuse” or “improper payments” are the least of it. Rather, Congress’s disregard of enumerated powers and its creation of swarms of officers wielding the carrots and sticks of subsidies, procurement contracts, societal transfer payments and more to the tune of trillions brought us here.

Biden routinely touts spending programs on infrastructure, for example, but particularly notable last year was Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator Mitch Landrieu’s boasting of “over $220 billion in funding for over 32,000 projects, reaching over 4,500 communities in every state in the nation, all of the territories, and D.C.”

That mass of projects is bipartisan. One rarely sees downscaling or subtraction at a pace matching such unmanageable additions. The Food and Drug Administration’s long-awaited elimination of the Board of Tea Experts was a pitiful, almost laughable, exception. Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-Missouri) “Abolish Government DEI Act,” seeking to eliminate more than 40 “Offices of Diversity” (or similar labels) erected mostly since the pandemic, is one notable attempt to offset the zeal for expanding programs meant to become inextricable and self-serving of bureaucracy.

Read the full article on Forbes.