19 July 2010

Saving Federal Dollars?

For years I've wondered about this.
I'd like to see the size of our Federal government reduced. If that can be done in a way that won't stop it from doing its job, that's good, right?


Consider this...
At the Federal level we have lots of folks involved in Law Enforcement:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The U.S. Marshal Service.
The Secret Service.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
The Drug Enforcement Agency.
And I'm sure there are some I'm overlooking here.

There has to be a TON of overlap between those agencies. I'm sure all those folks are stepping all over one another's toes during certain investigations.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to combine them to the degree possible? Seems to me combining them under one supervisor would greatly increase the chance the right hand would know what the left hand was doing. And there have to be redundancies...
How many high-dollar jobs could be eliminated at the Federal level?
How much money could we save?

2 comments:

Rain Trueax said...

There was just an article about that regarding all the groups formed to stop future terrorist attacks and immediately it was argued whether true or not but it seems a lot of what you said in terms of overlap and not that certain how much good they are doing since a lot of terrorist attacks seem to be stopped by alert citizens or good police work.

CJ said...

Let's not forget those hard working guys on the border - both Border Patrol and ICE - where would we be without them?

Actually, I think you might be surprised by how little their functions overlap. I could be wrong but each agency has its own little niche it is responsible for that no one else does. Example:

FBI - investigates terrorism, counterintelligence, cyber crimes, public corruption, civil rights violations, organized crimes, white-collar crime, and major theft/violent crimes

US Marshall - safe-guarding federal property such as courts and federal buildings, prisoner escort and security, witness protection, and paper service.

Not a lot of overlap there and if you create one huge agency, you run the risk of it becoming too big and losing sight of what's important.

cjh