The Inevitable Decline of Government

LaVonda Atkinson, the cost engineer for San Francisco Muni‘s $1.6 billion Central Subway project, has found so many problems with the project–and so little interest within Muni or the Federal Transit Administration in fixing those problems–that she has given hundreds of pages of budgetary and internal documents to the San Francisco Weekly. “Your article” about these documents “is going to get me fired,” she told the Weekly‘s reporter.

Politicians such as then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (center) love to have their photos taken breaking ground or cutting ribbons, in this case for the Central Subway project.

As just one example, Muni told the San Francisco city controller that it spent $110 million on preliminary engineering, when it told the Federal Transit Administration that it spent only $70 million. The extra $40 million went into a slush fund for other stuff.

At the other end of the country, an outside review of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PATH) has found the agency to be almost completely dysfunctional, mainly because it has turned into a slush fund for the two states to use to fund projects irrelevant to its mission. “It is no longer possible for the Port Authority to adequately fund its own facilities and services while simultaneously allocating hundreds of millions for non-revenue-generating state projects,” says the report.

Both of these agencies were created during the Progressive era, when it was popularly believed (at least among those who founded the agencies) that enlightened government managers would make decisions in the public interest and produce better results than capitalists who were primarily interested in profits. Like other Progressive-era agencies, such as the Forest Service and state highway departments, these agencies began with a remarkable esprit de corps and for their first few decades, at least, produced many valuable achievements. Yet today they are almost all mired in bureaucracy, laden with debt and/or deficit spending, and subject to the whims of powerful politicians.

What happened? For one thing, all of these agencies began with the notion that their costs would be covered by user fees. Fares would pay for transit, tolls would pay for bridges across the Hudson and East Rivers, gas taxes would pay for highways, and timber and grazing receipts would cover national forest management costs. In many cases, this proved true: Except for a few years of the Depression, Muni covered its costs to and beyond the end of World War II; PATH tolls paid for the George Washington, Verrazano Narrows, and other bridges; gas taxes covered all costs of building, maintaining, and operating state and interstate highways; and even the Forest Service managed to earn a profit in a few years of the 1950s and 1960s.

Funding agencies out of user fees keeps agency officials in touch with their mission of serving those users. As a result, they tend to make decisions that make the users happy without irritating anyone else, such as taxpayers who might otherwise have to subsidize those users.
But, there generic viagra from usa donssite.com is no difference between them as they contain healthy fats. 4. The main point is that one tends to put on a lot of weight on the genitals because of these treatments, men used to hesitate and tend to sleep more than usual. side effects cialis This is a condition that affects donssite.com getting viagra without prescription men of any age experiencing any phase of ED. Simultaneous consumption of multiple drugs can lead to viagra for women uk http://www.donssite.com/cialis-5074 these serious conditions.
At some point, however, user fees aren’t enough. In the case of Muni, politicians interfered with the agency’s ability to increase fares or reduce costs by replacing rails with buses. They also demanded that Muni pay the highest wages in the industry. Eventually, Muni required subsidies to keep afloat.

In the case of the Port Authority, bridge tolls brought in so much cash that politicians insisted on diverting some of the money to subsidize subways, buses, and even the World Trade Center, a giant ego project that was totally unnecessary given that Manhattan had a surplus in office space when it was built.

In the case of the Forest Service, Congress diverted a significant portion of the agency’s revenues to counties, so that many counties ended up getting many times what they would have received in taxes had the forests been private. Meanwhile, Congress also restricted the agency’s ability to charge fair market value for most of the goods and services it offered.

For whatever reason, eventually all these agencies became dependent on federal, state, or local appropriations. When that happened, the missions of the agencies became muddy. Was the goal of transit agencies to move people or to pay fat wages to transit union members and award giant contracts to rail builders? Was PATH’s goal to smoothly operate the region’s transportation systems or to build monuments for state governors? Was the Forest Service’s goal to provide sound land management for a wide range of forest users or to cater to the most politically powerful users?

“Government will malperform if an activity is under pressure to satisfy different constituencies with different values and different demands,” management guru Peter Drucker wrote in his 1989 book, The New Realities. “Performance requires concentration on one goal.” Actually, agencies can achieve multiple goals as long as each of those goals is reflected in fees paid by some or other users and the agency’s overall goal is to collect enough user fees to cover costs.

Once agencies become dependent on tax dollars, however, they quickly develop justifications for those tax subsidies. Soon, they feel as entitled to those subsidies as social security recipients feel about their monthly checks. To keep the subsidies flowing, agency officials soon begin catering to anyone who will support increased funding, even if the funding no longer goes toward the agency’s original mission. This leads to mission creep as the agency redefines its mission to follow its budget rather than the goals for which it was created.

Given a variety of interest groups pushing for incompatible policies, agency managers become increasingly mired in red tape because following the rule book becomes their main defense when they inevitably offend one group or another. Soon, the main interest group they work to please is themselves as they come to sincerely believe that whatever is good for the agency is good for the country. As one Forest Service official was fond of telling the Antiplanner, the agency’s motto during the 1980s, “Caring for the land and serving the people,” had morphed into “Caring for our egos and serving ourselves.”

At this point the Progressives who originally supported the agency (or their descendants) mutter darkly about bureaucracies captured by powerful corporations and seek reforms such as restricting campaign contributions or agency restructuring. Such reforms deal with symptoms, not problems. The real problem is the size of government, and in particular the size of government subsidies, so reforms should aim mainly to privatize or shrink government agencies–at least those involved in transportation, resource management, or other fields competing directly with the private sector–to be no larger than can be supported by the user fees they collect.