{"id":8068,"date":"2015-02-26T23:24:05","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T04:24:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=8068"},"modified":"2015-02-26T23:24:05","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T04:24:05","slug":"wash-times-obamas-bogus-boondoggle-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/26\/wash-times-obamas-bogus-boondoggle-cure\/","title":{"rendered":"Wash. Times: Obama’s Bogus Boondoggle Cure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jpb<\/a>Washington Times, February 27, 2015<\/h3>\n

Obama\u2019s bogus cure for boondoggles<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

In the 1930s, peasants who were starving due to the Soviet regime\u2019s brutal farm collectivization policy lamented, \u201cIf only Stalin knew.\u201d Nowadays, American social scientists look at floundering federal programs and lament: \u201cIf only Congress knew.\u201d The solution, they say, is the \u201cevidence-based\u201d reform movement, which will magically beget a new era of good governance.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince its earliest days, the Obama administration has been pursuing the most important initiative in the history of federal attempts to use evidence to improve social programs,\u201d according to Brookings Institute analyst Ron Haskins. Mr. Haskins, the author of \u201cShow Me the Evidence: Obama\u2019s Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy,\u201d touts a 2012 Office of Management and Budget memo announcing that federal \u201cprograms that can prove their effectiveness with data will be more likely to get the funds they seek.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Times hailed that memo as \u201cthe dawn of the evidence-based budget,\u201d which could be vital to \u201crestoring public trust in government.\u201d Mr. Obama fed this boomlet with a 2011 pledge that \u201cprograms are going to be regularly evaluated against a set of clear, high standards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Haskins and groups such as the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy encourage Americans to believe that because a few federal programs are spending pocket change to evaluate themselves, the government as a whole could soon be far more competent. However, history shows that smoking-gun evidence of boundless boondoggles rarely deters politicians from seizing more power over Americans\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

For instance, the folly of farm subsidies has been obvious for more than 80 years. In 1930, The New York Times, surveying the wreckage of agricultural markets after the federal government tried to drive up wheat prices, concluded, \u201cIt is perhaps fortunate for the country that its fingers were so badly burned at the very first trial of the scheme.\u201d But that did not deter President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress from making the secretary of agriculture a farm dictator.<\/p>\n

Despite an unbroken string of failures, the federal government has continued disrupting agriculture ever since. Politicians create convoluted programs that pay farmers more than their crops are worth, and then launch new interventions spurred by the disruptions caused by suppressing price signals. Most of the agriculture policy mistakes of the past are still being repeated \u2014 only the names of the secretaries of agriculture and of the farm-state congressmen have changed.<\/p>\n

Foreign aid is the largest laboratory for Mr. Obama\u2019s evidence-based reforms. The president promised in a 2010 United Nations speech to \u201cchange the way we do business\u201d with foreign aid, pledging to judge aid programs and budgets \u201cbased not on dollars spent, but on outcomes achieved.\u201d The following year, the Agency for International Development (AID) ballyhooed a new evaluation policy for a \u201ctransformation based on absolute demand for results.\u201d<\/p>\n

That \u201cabsolute demand\u201d could not compete, though, with the pressure generated by Mr. Obama\u2019s 2008 campaign pledge to double foreign aid. Boosting spending became far more important than preventing debacles. More than 400 negative findings were deleted from a sample of 12 inspector general audit reports, The Washington Post reported. Acting Inspector General Michael Carroll buried the embarrassing audit findings because he \u201cdid not want to create controversy as he awaited Senate confirmation to become the permanent inspector general,\u201d according to some AID auditors.<\/p>\n

Mr. Obama\u2019s rhetoric bounced off Agency for International Development\u2019s bureaucratic Teflon. A 2013 Congressional Research Service report quoted one AID bureaucrat: \u201cIf you don\u2019t ask [about results], you don\u2019t fail, and your budget isn\u2019t cut.\u201d More than 30 years ago, the General Accounting Office captured AID\u2019s intransigence in a sardonic report title: \u201cExperience \u2014 A Potential Tool for Improving U.S. Assistance Abroad.\u201d At least AID\u2019s \u201cfail-and-repeat\u201d tactic provides bureaucratic job security.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvidence-based\u201d evaluations have probably been applied to less than 2 percent of federal programs. This is akin to Mr. Obama preening that he will do an honest, balanced analysis on whether the United States should intervene in the tiny African nation of Lesotho \u2014 at the same time he ramps up his war efforts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and continues covertly warring in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. The president has simply ignored overwhelming evidence when it did not support his ambition. When he began pushing his Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2009, there was already a proven history of federal intervention inflating medical costs and disrupting health care. Nevertheless, the president was far more concerned with creating a legacy than with learning from Medicare and Medicaid fiascoes.<\/p>\n

The \u201cevidence based\u201d reform campaign presumes that politics is essentially a noble business devoted to serving the public. But for politicians, federal programs are fiefdoms. How many kings have abdicated their thrones after becoming convinced that monarchy did not truly serve the downtrodden masses? Will politicians cede power after social scientists document how their favorite programs are a budgetary pestilence?<\/p>\n

H.L. Mencken noted that the main concern of elected politicians \u201cis to keep a place at the public trough.\u201d Politicians will always be far more interested in verdicts from voters than from the American Journal of Sociology. There is no reason to expect that fighting waste, fraud and abuse will suddenly become more popular on Capitol Hill than getting re-elected.<\/p>\n

\u2022 James Bovard is the author of \u201cAttention Deficit Democracy\u201d (Palgrave, 2006) and \u201cLost Rights\u201d (St. Martin\u2019s, 1994). This article is adapted from The Mises Institute “The Austrian”\u00a0newsletter.<\/p>\n

* Thanks to Linas Garsys for the excellent artwork.<\/p>\n

On Twitter @jimbovard<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Times, February 27, 2015 Obama\u2019s bogus cure for boondoggles by James Bovard In the 1930s, peasants who were starving due to the Soviet regime\u2019s brutal farm collectivization policy lamented, \u201cIf only Stalin knew.\u201d Nowadays, American social scientists look at floundering federal programs and lament: \u201cIf only Congress knew.\u201d The solution, they say, is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWash. 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