Monuments to Bureaucracy

Calls for regulation almost always mean well. but Congress doesn’t tend to make minor tweaks and tiny fixes.  This AP piece in the Politico makes the point well:

If history is a guide, Congresses and presidents don’t just tackle problems. They turn them into programs, departments and new regulatory regimes. Huge buildings stand around the nation’s capital as monuments to past crisis-management efforts.

• The energy crisis of the 1970s after the Arab oil boycott resulted in the creation of the Department of Energy.

• The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks gave birth to the Department of Homeland Security.

• The Great Depression led to a slew of New Deal federal social programs. Many of their successors remain today.

• The Federal Reserve was a response to bank runs in the early 1990s, the Pentagon was a crash construction project to put services fighting World War II under one roof, the Department of Housing and Urban Development owes its 1960s origins to President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty and concern about increasing inner-city crime.

The thing to remember is that regulation doesn’t just make rules. It makes programs and bureaucracy and spending and red tape — the stuff that all of us in Washington are surrounded by every day.  There’s always a cost. As Ronald Reagan famously said: "Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!"