Radio Script #1309

Little Talks on Common Things
April 11, 1982

Two years ago we were heartened by the prediction of a balanced federal budget by 1984. Now we are shocked by the announcement that the 1983 budget will be close to and may even exceed 100 billion dollars, the largest deficit for anyone year in our entire American history. The year 1962 was only 20 years ago; yet in that year the entire cost of running the federal government was less than the deficit alone will be in 1983.

However much politicians may try to blame opposing parties for this calamitous condition, we can all agree on one obvious cause for the present situation. That cause is the enormous extravagance and waste in all departments of our federal government. Do you remember what people were saying as long ago as the 1920’s? “Our trouble isn’t the high cost of living; it is the high cost of loving.” If that was true 50 years ago, how much more it is true today.

Every American should support welfare programs to keep the needy from extreme privation. The Social Security program keeps many aged people from real suffering. Those programs are good and should be preserved. But in administering even those valuable programs there is fraud and waste.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare, just before Education was made a separate department, employed 127,000 persons. Now, without Education, employs 135,000. Not counting its several hundred offices allover the nation, the Department occupied 57 buildings in Hashington alone.

Not long ago, one of our largest news agencies tried to find out how many buildings are owned or rented by the U. S. Government all over the world. They never did get the total. They were, after repeated requests and long waits. able to learn that the U. S. fully owns more than 500,000 buildings, but they never did learn the number of rentals.

Government buildings are maintained and furnished by an agency of government called the General Services Administration. In its several hundred warehouses it stocks almost every conceivable item of supply. It publishes a catalogue of its holdings, which lists sixteen different kinds of chairs, 40 patterns of plates and dishes, 7 varieties of stepladders, 12 kinds of cord and string, and 6 kinds of mop handles. And so we might go on with several thousand items.

Besides the numerous employees not subject to Civil Service, those within the Civil Service are classified in 18 grades the largest of which is Grade V, with 171,000 persons calling for nearly two billion dollars a year in pay. The total in all grades exceeds $20 billion. Yet Civil Service accounts for only about half the government’s dollar payroll.

When there is added to the host of federal employees, all the people working for other units of government such as state, counties and municipalities, it is easy to understand why one worker in every our in the entire U. S. is employed, at taxpayers expense, by some area of government.

The mere variety of government official titles is breathtaking. Almost every department has several deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries, secretaries to deputy and assistant secretaries, numerous administrators and directors, all with their assistants and secretaries.

And that says nothing of the thousands of clerks, stenographers, typists and messengers. The personnel in each department is so large and confusing that it is no wonder Congressional committees have great difficulty even getting a partial understanding of what is going on.

It is not hard to believe stories told almost every day about people getting lost in the vast expanse of the Pentagon. Lately we have all read repeated reports that the number of people employed by the federal government is today fewer than it was two years ago. That is a grossly deceptive statement. The number directly paid by the government may indeed be fewer, but the number employed under contract with private firms, to do what government employees themselves would ordinarily do has greatly increased. The
Department of Defense alone employs several thousand persons who do nothing but attend to contracts with private companies.

Now take a quick look at the comparatively new Department of Transportation. It recently paid the private counseling firm of Peat, Marwick & Mitchell $160,000 to make a study of urban transportation that revealed nothing that was not already known. The Navy paid another firm $65,000 to revise the Navy personnel manuals, and that was exclusive of the cost of printing. The American Business Daily issued five time a week, publishes each day the new contracts in all government departments and agencies. On one single day in 1981 those new contracts totaled 583. In response to inquiry by an inquisitive Congressman, a single Washington counseling firm admitted it regularly has contracts with the government amounting to three million dollars a year.

But all the blame for waste and extravagance should be placed on the bureaucrats. Congress itself is guilty. A year ago, when the ski resorts were hard hit by lack of snow, a N. H. Congressman tried to get a government subsidy. A skeptical colleague, more economically minded, said: “The next thing will be a call from the bikini industry because Florida has too much rain.”

It seems as ,if everybody in Washington is constantly bursting into print. One cynic recently remarked, “Washington seems to be the only place in the world where there are more writers than readers.”

Every daily issue of the Congressional Record contains an average of half a million words. It takes 530 printing office personnel working around the clock, to get out each issue. The Congressional Record contains verbatim reports of every word said in every session of the Senate and the House of Representatives, even the most trivial remarks. Sometimes a whole page will be taken up by a parliamentary issue.

Recently there has been presented to Congress a proposal to allow TV cameras on the Senate floor, as is done in the House of Representatives. On February 3, 1982, 16 pages of the Record were filled, not with debate on the issue, but in extended discussion as to whether the Senate would consider the matter at all. Rules of the two houses have long provided that members may revise and extend remarks for the Record. That means the publication during a Congressional session of numerous pages of comment that was not even made orally on the floor. Add to that the thousands of insertions that members put into the Record, reprinted from newspapers and other periodicals, and the total wordage becomes enormous.

Then we may ask, who reads it?

Under such circumstances, of course, the U. S. Government is the largest single user of printing paper in the world. Investigation has revealed that there are stored in government warehouses more than two million cartons of records that could be eliminated. All of any importance were long ago placed on microfilm. I have personally had some small experience with this kind of situation as a member of the Board of the Maine State Archives. The law creating the Archives made the Board responsible for deciding whether to retain or destroy certain records, in accordance with recommendations from the several state departments. At every semi-monthly meeting of the Board, much time was taken in making those decisions. Especially when the plan was new, the Board took great care not to destroy anything that could possibly have historic value. But the hundreds of thousands of papers that were destroyed emptied numerous filing cabinets for other use.

Now the Board, under direction of its very competent archivist, Samuel Silsby, has worked out a schedule with each department, whereby certain records are held for a stated number of years, then destroyed. Large as is the annual amount of records destroyed in Maine, it is a mere dustpanful compared with federal records. How many truckloads of federal records would easily be disposed of every year? No one knows. The outcome is the retention of multiple copies of papers that might not have been needed in the first place.·

Government officials are not unaware of this situation. The Paper Management Office in Washington persistently tries to get government employees to cut down on paper work, and every agency is asked annually to nominate for awards employees who have made suggestions that contribute to that end.

Now note how the Paper Management Office calls for those nominations. Its printed announcement sent to every government agency in the nation demands that six copies of each nomination be sent to Washington. That hardly seems to be a way to save paper. The government annually prints and distributes several thousand different publications. The total cost exceeds a hundred million dollars. But after all, how different from the rest of us are the workers in government offices? We live in an age of extravagance and waste. Government is not run by evil people. It is run by people like you and me, and you very well know that, in this matter of waste, all of us need to be watched.

But to return to what we said at the beginning of today’s broadcast, extravagance and waste account for a large share of our enormous federal deficits predicted for the next five years.

Year: 1982