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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Monday, September 12, 2005
Sunset Over New Orleans
A subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee is holding a hearing Sep. 21 on the House version of a White House proposal to give itself fast-track, take-it-or-leave-it authority to reorganize government and to force programs to plead for their lives every 10 years. Read more about that proposal here.
With New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in mind, imagine how that would play out:
FEMA could be forced to stop every 10 years and divert scarce resources into explaining to the Sunset Commission why it must be allowed to continue to exist.
The White House proposal calls for automatic death of programs, regardless of the Sunset Commission's decision, if Congress fails to act in time to save the program. A provision in the White House proposal would exempt programs "related to enforcing" health, safety, civil rights, or environmental regulations from the automatic expiration provision. Assuming that all of FEMA's programs are "related to enforcing" safety regulations (which is not immediately obvious) -- FEMA would still be forced to divert resources into justifying its continued existence before the Sunset Commission, which would also be empowered to demand the production of information for that review and potentially drown the agency in paperwork.
Meanwhile, no exemption exists from the work of the Results Commission -- the White House's name for the vehicle that would grant it almost unchecked power to reorganize government. The Results Commission pieces of the proposal could empower the White House to shatter apart all the different programs in FEMA and send them to many separate agencies, or bury FEMA -- once an independent agency, now a sub-unit of the Department of Homeland Security -- so deep into the bowels of government that it would be rendered even more ineffective than some recent news reports suggest FEMA has been.
Posted by Robert Shull
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