the OMB’s September 2012 report says that under sequestration the National Drug Intelligence Center would lose $2 million of its $20 million budget. While that’s slightly more than 8.2 percent (rounding error or scare tactic?), the bigger problem is that the National Drug Intelligence Center shuttered its doors on June 15, 2012–three months before the OMB issued its report to Congress.
Progressives think that the problem with government is partisanship and gridlock. Or that politicians are too busy. In fact, the problem is an institution that has taken on so many functions that it is necessarily unwieldy and dysfunctional.
I remembering reading about the rise (about fifty years ago) and fall of the popularity of conglomerates as a mode of business organization strategy. The buzzwords write themselves. There were supposed to be synergies, transaction-cost-elimination efficiencies, vertical-and-horizontal integration advantages, hedging of volatilities in different sectors, and so on. It sounded just like the language of coordinated national production and central planning enthusiasm of a century ago.
There were real advantages, if I remember correctly, in terms of financing LBO’s. There were also risks that problems in one subsidiary could sink the whole parent corporation.
And then many of these conglomerates discovered that their enterprises were unwieldy and unmanageable – too unfocused to permit competent management except in a few particularly compatible cases (which are frequently tempted to shed their low-synergy divisions.)
The government is a growing conglomerate beyond coordination and suffers from all the same diseases.