GovernmentExecutive.com

The closer the election gets, the more I've been thinking about Barack Obama's promise to "review the federal budget line by line and eliminate programs that don’t work or are unnecessary."

In their commentary on the election in GovExec today, Paul Posner and Steven Katz make the following point:

Another version of bad politics happens when the president and Congress pledge to solve problems while providing only a symbolic glimmer of the resources required to achieve results. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is a case in point: Years of budget reductions and regulatory constraints left this thinly staffed agency a parody of what a real consumer protection agency should do.

So by Obama's calculation, consumer product safety would seem to fall into the category of federal programs that "don't work." So does that mean he'll shut down the CPSC? Highly unlikely. In fact, I bet he'd do the opposite if elected -- propose to beef up the agency to address the issues Posner and Katz raise.

I discussed this issue in a 2004 column:

Lofty rhetoric aside, there's simply no direct line that can be drawn between a program's performance and its budget. Some poor-performing programs deserve to be killed. Others aren't doing well because they need more money. Still others just need a different approach to management, with more or less the same amount of cash.

The point here is that virtually all presidents declare that they're going to root out poor performing programs and cut or eliminate them, and virtually none have any success in actually doing so. The Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool is just the latest case in point.

That's not to suggest gathering data on federal programs isn't important. But such information should be used for the purpose of improving the management of the programs. Decisions on whether to eliminate them or slash their funding are and always will be ideological, and thus will be handled in the political realm.