Obama to propose combining agencies to shrink federal government

Bush made government big by creating the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans and especially Tea Party Republicans want to make government smaller again. They'd be happiest with no government.

Obama is now to propose making it smaller.

I'm trying to decide if this is just yet one more example of Obama trying to be more like a Republican, or if it's something that's absolutely innevitable no matter what.

Combining agencies will have negative consequences, regardless.

Depends, if the same people are still doing the same work with the same resouces then it's purely an administrational change packaged to look like an improvement. We would need more details to judge.

A novel idea would be to try for good government, size by itself is meaningless!

Why should "trimming the fat" of the government which is heavily influenced by corporations / run by corporate muckity-mucks be so different than the running of corporations themselves?

How many Americans have lost jobs because someone at or near the top decided that two people could (should) do the job just as well as three? Why should government be run differently?

Combine agencies I say - many of the functions overlap anyhow! Maybe the result will be a shift of money which will help employ more people.

Greece is a beacon of admin efficiency compared to the US. This will never happen in our lifetime. On the other hand, reading that 5% of Americans cause 50% of the healthcare spend, I am encouraged. Should be easy to treat them less or for less and save zillions.

There is a neo-liberal scientific theorem that says that every government organisation has some slack that can be cut and also has some inherent incompetence.

It follows by recursive application of the above that every government organisation can be reduced to a single person, and that person will be an imbecile.

From this we learn that cuts eliminate the good people and leave the imbeciles.