Here is a place to start. I use to work for a company that was very serious about cost reduction, so they decided to ask for help from the people who really knew where the waste and inefficiencies lie, the employees. So they implemented a cost reduction program which included a committee that would evaluate cost reductions. Employee recommendations that actually resulted in savings got 10% of all savings realized.Before asking the question, is government too big, we need to agree on what we mean by big government. To many its not the number of employees and agencies but the cost. To other, its the regulation that effect how we do business and lead our personal lives. When some people complaint about big government, they arent complaining about what government does, but rather the inefficient way it does it. If reducing the size of big government means fixing all of the above problems then there is only one possible solution and that is revolution. That raises an interesting question. Can someone be a conservative and advocate the overthrow of their government?That's the big debate. Here's some food for thought.
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Rarely has the news of the day run so counter to the spin on the news of the day. It's hard to argue that the difficulties we confront were caused by an excessively powerful "big" government. Rather, most of them arose from the government's failure to do its job in the first place.
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The more important and dynamic force behind the current disillusionment with government comes instead from those who actually believe it can and should be effective. They do not think that the market is automatically rational or that the government has to be dumb. They are fed up with government not because their ideology or philosophy tells them to be but because they don't think government has been doing a proper job of promoting prosperity, equity and fair-dealing.
washingtonpost.com
The inefficiencies and waste MUST be addressed, but the problem is no one seems to know where to start. The DoD is such a mess that it is unauditable, according to the GAO, which may be the reason Secretary Gates (a Republican in case the fringers forgot) has called for even further deep cuts in the Pentagon's budget. Good for him. If every agency did the same, independently of what the president (no matter who he is) says, that may be the only way to reduce costs significantly across the board.
I don't see any reason why such a plan would not be successful in government. I worked for both the feds and state government for several years and I can tell you the employees knew how to reduce cost and increase efficiency. The problem was that management didn't really give a damn.