Government incompetence

When Hurricane Kartrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the Federal government’s slow and bumbling response drove President Bush’s political ratings to the basement, though it truth the debacle was due far more to incompetence and delay at the local political level (the Louisiana governor and the mayor of New Orleans) than to Federal inadequacies. Democrats, smelling blood in the water, were quick to capitalize on this turn of events for political gain.

Well, turnabout is fair play, and now President Obama is faced daily with a disaster of similar, if not greater, proportions in the Gulf oil spill. Once again, the Federal response has been slow, muddled, and largely incompetent. To be sure, the Federal government has neither the equipment nor the expertise to cap the well itself – that is best left to the experts in BP and other oil companies, who in any case already have the maximum incentive to get the job done as quickly as possible.

But the clean-up is another matter entirely, and while President Obama makes grand speeches about how much the Federal government is doing, and gets himself photographed visiting the Gulf region every week, in truth observers in the Gulf report chaos in the organizing of cleanup efforts. Hundreds of boats that could be out sweeping up oil are sitting idle in the harbors because the government can’t get its act together.

And of course there is the question of why the interior department allowed deep drilling in the first place with a blowout preventer design with no backup of critical parts, like the shuttle valve that drives the emergency cutoff shears. Or why their inspections (if they even made any) didn’t detect the existing equipment failures on the Deepwater Horizon in the days before the accident.

So in truth, Federal government incompetence has nothing to do with politics. It appears equally under Republican and Democratic administrations, and so must simply be inherent in our form of government.

In fact, it is noticeable that in our government virtually all the regulatory agencies are staffed in key positions and in upper management with people thoroughly enmeshed in the businesses they are supposed to regulate. The forest service is staffed with people from the logging industry, the FDA is staffed with people from the food and drug industries, the agencies that are supposed to regulate Wall Street are staffed with people who come from Wall Street, etc, etc. One might argue that this is necessarily so, because where else would one find the required expertise in these fields, and that is a valid point. But the result, of course, is that the Federal regulators too often are reluctant to effectively regulate their former colleagues.

Nor is Congress exempt from this form of corruption. With effective political campaigns now costing an outrageous amount, members of Congress are quite naturally beholden to those local interests who fund their expensive campaigns. It is simple corruption, in which political power is simply bought by interests, usually local business interests, with deep pockets.

So in fact, Federal incompetence isn’t really surprising. It is the natural result of the incestuous relationships that power and money in our society produce in our political system, coupled with the sheer size of the government these days, and the overwhelming amount of money floating around Washington. And it has nothing to do with political parties. The Democrats seem to be just as affected by this as the Republicans. Despite the rhetorical differences in their political speeches, in truth the parties are more alike than they are different, and the Federal government appears to be equally incompetent, and equally corrupted by special interests, under either administration.