The astonishing recent lapse in White House security has some media sources arguing that budget cuts are the underlying cause of the Secret Service’s dysfunction. But as the WSJ points out, the Secret Service budget of $1.7 billion for 2014 has doubled in real terms since 1998.
This past May, Peggy Noonan opined in the WSJ on the on-going disgrace of the Veteran Administration scandal and its impact on how Americans view government under the leadership of Barack Obama.
Barack Obama is killing the reputation of government. He is killing the thing he loves through insufficient oversight. He doesn’t do the plodding, unshowy, unromantic work of making government work. In the old political formulation, he’s a show horse, not a workhorse.
The president’s inattention to management—his laxity, his failure to understand that government isn’t magic, that it must be forced into working, clubbed each day into achieving adequacy, and watched like a hawk—is undercutting what he stands for, the progressive project that says the federal government is the primary answer to the nation’s ills.
He is allowing the federal government to become what any large institution will become unless you stop it: a slobocracy.
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