Cato looks at the herculean task of downsizing government

Cato has set up a web site that explores ways to downsize the federal government, department by department. This is a worthy cause. The government is now so big that it will require thousands of sets of eyes to get a handle on the sheer size, replication, waste and stupidity it embraces.

Click on the headline of this post to go to the web site.

Here's a small sample:

The Department of Agriculture administers large farm subsidy programs and runs the food stamp and school lunch programs.

The department will spend about $142 billion in 2010, or about $1,200 for every U.S. household. It employs 96,000 workers and operates more than 230 subsidy programs.

Issa blasts government's performance in Gulf oil spill

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has issued a report resulting from the committee’s fact-finding exercise to the Louisiana Gulf Coast to personally assess the impact of the oil spill and the effectiveness of the federal government response.

(snip)

• While the White House has tried to use the delay in finding a visible leak to explain its early silence on the oil spill, Transocean officials and Coast Guard documents from the scene of the oil spill reveal clear and early indications of a substantial oil leak days earlier than White House accounts;

• The failure of Administration officials to quickly waive laws preventing necessary foreign assets from reaching the Gulf and other regulations are hampering efforts to clean-up and limit damage from the oil spill. Local officials feel the federal government is making the perfect the enemy of the good in cleanup efforts;

• Local officials strongly dispute President Obama’s insistence that the federal government -- and not BP -- has been in control since day one. One Coast Guard Admiral told congressional investigators that decisions on the ground are made through a “consensus-based” process with BP. In practice, the Federal Government is not in charge of oil spill response efforts through a command-and-control approach;

• Local officials strongly believe the President’s call for a drilling moratorium will significantly compound the economic damage caused by the oil spill and will actually increase risk associated with future offshore drilling projects.

The furore isn't about immigration; it's about the "systematic failure" of the feds

The Congress of the United States -- an institution that spent a chunk of the past year cajoling passage of the most contentious legislation devised in decades -- may not have the "appetite" to take on another "controversial issue," namely immigration reform, this year, according to President Barack Obama. Bummer.

Health care reform, cap and trade -- at the heart of these questions resides an irreconcilable conflict of philosophy, be it economic doctrine or the proper role of government, and as we learned, no amount of negotiation will bridge these ideological splits.

Very few Americans, on the other hand, are inherently opposed to immigration. For the most part, the controversy we face isn't about immigration at all. It's about the systematic failure of federal government to enforce the law or offer rational policy. There's a difference.

Want a raise? Quit private industry, work for feds

Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.

Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.