Drowning it in the bathtub very slowly
by digby
I'm all for "reform" and "streamlining" but in my personal experience in the corporate world that inevitably just meant making one person do the job of three. Or four. For the same money. They call this "enhanced productivity" and on paper it looks really great. But for anyone who's on the job, most often it's clear that morale tanks and the work suffers.
Naturally the spending jihad during these decades of conservative political dominance meant that government would go the same way:
The controversy that erupted in the past week, leading to the ousting of the acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an investigation by the FBI, and congressional hearings that kicked off Friday, comes against a backdrop of dysfunction brewing for years.
Moves launched in the 1990s were designed to streamline the tax agency and make it more efficient. But they had unintended consequences for the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division.
Checks and balances once in place were taken away. Guidance frequently published by the IRS and closely read by tax lawyers and nonprofits disappeared. Even as political activity by social welfare nonprofits exploded in recent election cycles, repeated requests for the IRS to clarify exactly what was permitted for the secretly funded groups were met, at least publicly, with silence.
All this combined to create an isolated office in Cincinnati, plagued by what an inspector general this week described as “insufficient oversight,” of fewer than 200 low-level employees responsible for reviewing more than 60,000 nonprofit applications a year.
This was all the rage among the New Democrat types during the 90s. They told us that even though "the era of Big Government" was over, there was no reason services would suffer. How'd that work out for us?
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