Unplug the DOE!
George Washington had only
four Cabinet departments. Since his time, 13 new departments have been created
and only two eliminated (the Navy Department was absorbed into the Department
of Defense in 1949, and the Post Office was spun off as a federal corporation
in 1971). Ronald Reagan promised to close down two (Energy and Education).
Instead, he added one (Veterans Affairs). George Bush proposed adding another
(Environment), but didn't get to do so. The Republican "revolutionaries" who
took over Congress in 1994 pledged to abolish three departments (Energy,
Education, Commerce), but quickly retreated.
If
President Clinton is looking for an easy symbolic way to cement his reputation
as a "small government" Democrat--and, if we know Clinton, he surely is--the
answer is clear: Be one-up on the Republicans, and actually abolish a Cabinet
department.
But which one? The corporate-welfare-dispensing Department
of Commerce is an obvious candidate, since it mostly serves a big-business
constituency with an array of subsidies and favors. By punting Commerce,
Clinton could portray himself as a more principled defender of the free market
than Republicans, who tolerate the corporations that are chronically dependent
on the federal government.
What's the
downside? Taking on corporate welfare might backfire, casting Clinton in the
discredited role of Democratic scourge of business. Also, using Commerce to
promote U.S. business abroad has shielded Clinton against critics on the left
who say he's helplessly infatuated with free trade.
Another option is Education, created by Jimmy
Carter--mostly as a favor to the National Education Association, which gave him
its first presidential endorsement. Federal spending on elementary and
secondary education remains small in aggregate, amounting to just 7 percent of
total public spending on schools. Most of the department's popular programs,
like college student aid and Title I, which provides money for educating poor
children, existed before the department was born. Another sacrosanct federal
education effort, Head Start, is not even under the Ed Department's
jurisdiction. Education does finance science and math instruction, but so do
other agencies.
Junking
Education probably isn't politically feasible, though. For one thing, it would
anger the teachers' unions, a powerful constituency in the Democratic Party: A
full 525 of the 4,293 delegates at the party's Chicago convention belonged to
either the NEA or the American Federation of Teachers. And, having already
vilified the Republicans as enemies of learning for their proposed cuts in
federal education outlays, Clinton and the Democrats would appear hypocritical
if they abolished the Department of Education. Can't have that.
That leaves Energy, which is perfectly suited to abolition
on practical as well as political grounds. Aside from the environmentalists,
who are fixated on renewable fuels, few Democrats care much about the
Department of Energy anymore. The chief motive for creating the department in
1977 was to regulate oil prices, which only exacerbated the "energy crisis."
Reagan's decontrol of energy has resulted in the steady decline of gasoline
prices (in absolute terms), and has removed the issue from the table. Even
during last spring's spike in prices, no Democrat advocated price controls or
punitive taxes on Big Oil.
For the
most part, the DOE is an anachronism whose main function under Clinton has been
to generate embarrassing news stories about Secretary Hazel O'Leary's expensive
globe-trotting. Two-thirds of the DOE's budget pays for programs unrelated to
energy: nuclear-weapons production, maintenance, and cleanup. Those tasks can't
be eliminated; but they can, logically, be transferred to the Pentagon. Many of
the DOE's functions, like owning oil (the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) and oil
fields (the Naval Petroleum Reserve), can be privatized. (Clinton has already
proposed selling off the petroleum reserve.) Subsidies for solar power and
energy conservation likewise deserve the ax (energy taxes would do the job far
more efficiently, if the job needs doing); or, they could migrate to Interior.
Funding for science research at 28 national laboratories may be more
defensible, but even a DOE task force recommended an end to government
ownership of the labs. Much of their research is in commercial applications,
which belongs in the private sector.
Skeptics will carp that it is not critical
whether the department survives, but whether its programs do. It's true that if
the programs aren't winnowed down, not much changes apart from the stationery.
But, even if Clinton were to parcel the existing programs out to other
departments without appreciably reducing their cost, it would still make
political sense to dump DOE. Nobody will bother to compare the before-and-after
budgetary authority, but few will fail to notice that a department has
vanished.
After shuttering the DOE,
Clinton could depict himself as a crusader against waste and bureaucracy who
succeeded where even Reagan failed. Like his agreement last year to a
seven-year plan to balance the budget, this step would change the terms of the
debate with Republicans. Before the balanced-budget accord, the GOP framed all
opposition to its budget cuts as fiscally irresponsible conduct by people
committed to everlasting deficits. Afterward, the Republicans were obliged to
defend the proposed cuts on their individual merits, an argument which the
Democrats generally carried.
Democrats have done
themselves a lot of harm by refusing to discriminate between those programs
that are vital and those that are not. For Clinton to abolish the DOE would be
a bracing lesson in how to do just that. The question is whether Clinton has
the nerve. Republicans have long demanded smaller government. They should pray
Clinton doesn't give it to them.
