Bawling Over Boo Boos

President Trump recently proposed substantial cuts to the EPA’s budget of $2 billion, or about 24% of its operating budget. This would reduce its workforce from 15,000 to 12,000 and, obviously, mean that a number of programs and initiatives will end. Cue the end-of-world caterwauling:

• “Trump’s Proposed EPA Cuts Threaten Health & Lives of Tens of Millions of Americans”
• “nearly wipe out a federal Great Lakes cleanup fund”
• “cut could cause EPA science office ‘to implode,'”
• “The red lights are flashing at the Environmental Protection Agency”
• “The severe, real-world casualties of Trump’s EPA budget cuts”
• “American Lung Association says Trump’s EPA cuts should be ‘rejected out of hand'”
• “‘Extreme’ proposal to gut Chesapeake Bay cleanup program raises alarm”

And my favorite:

• “Why EPA Cuts Represent Another Example of Environmental Racism”

A 24% budget cut is substantial, and certain to gore many sacred cows, but you and I both know that even a 2.4% budget cut proposal would spool up the air raid sirens and cue endless gnashing of teeth.

Why?

Because the hardest animal to kill in all of creation is an on-going federal program.

A couple months ago, a despondent presumed-liberal named Ashley posted on Twitter that “Everyone Trump has picked wants to dismantle the agency they will be running. That’s it. No punchline.” I took that as a cause for celebration, not a reason to despair. And, indeed, the lament does hold more than a grain of truth in at least a couple cases. Scott Pruitt of EPA and Rick Perry of Energy certainly fit, and Betsy DeVos at Education might be considered a “dismantler” in that she’s a school choice advocate – something that the teacher’s unions consider an existential threat. Good for all of them.

They, unfortunately, have uphill battles and roads fraught with obstacles and land mines to navigate. It is in the nature of politics that any budget cut is met with fierce opposition. The reason for this is human nature itself, where a concentrated threat draws far more attention than a broad and thus diluted benefit. Most of us would be happy to see a couple billion cut from the federal budget, but we have many other things to focus on. Not so those whose jobs are on the line, those whose hot-button issues are threatened, and those who see benefit in making political hay of a specific cut proposal.

To understand this better, consider two examples:

1 – I’ve written about the useless money pit that is Head Start on multiple occasions (here, here, here, and here, to name a few). The program, running for nearly half a century and consuming billions every year, has, by the government’s own analyses, no measurable effect on its students. Yet, rather than cut or end it, and either save or repurpose those funds, the Obama administration increased funding for it.

2 – Trump recently undid an Obama action that added the names of people who had delegated the handling of their Social Security affairs to others to the gun no-buy list. The bill and its reversal were widely misrepresented as Trump allowing severely mentally ill access to guns, when in fact the original bill denied people their gun rights based on no due process or psychiatric evaluation. The hysteria over this was short-lived (mainly, I suspect, because there is so much hysteria over so many other things), but no less shrill for its brevity.

At play here are shallow perceptions and book-cover-judging. Head Start is “for the children” and has a really cool name, and so it must be Good. Guns are Bad, and guns in the hands of the mentally ill are Double-Super-Bad, so Obama’s action was Good and Trump’s undoing of it was Double-Super-Bad.

So it goes with just about every effort to cut government. Programs are pitched and actualized with great titles and highfalutin descriptions, and most people have little time to drill down past those titles and sales pitches to see the nuts, bolts and, eventually, results of those programs. Programs are about money, both on the government side and in the private sector, and threatening that money inevitably gets those whose jobs and initiatives face the ax all atwitter.

Fortunately, we have great real-world examples of how to handle people who go non-linear over spending cuts and government draw-backs. They’re called toddlers. Toddlers figure out, very quickly, that they can draw attention by turning on the water works and air raid sirens when they don’t get their way. They learn to cry and scream as if throwing a switch (and can turn it off just as quickly when they conclude there is no audience at hand). Adults, and I mean real adults, not “shut them up” appeasers, figure out the difference between genuine distress and overacting for effect, and know that the latter should be ignored rather than coddled.

The EPA cuts are, from a libertarian perspective, both welcome and long overdue. The agency has a long history of excess, and the lives, liberties, and fortunes of millions of Americans have been harmed by this excess. Of course, since the EPA’s supposedly about the environment, many people don’t see it this way, and presume that any cut is going to result in poisoned water, toxic landscapes, burning rivers, and greedy corporate fat cats dumping raw sewage onto preschool playgrounds. A 24% cut isn’t trivial, but the real bulwarks against irresponsibility (reputation, public perception, and liability) will remain firmly in place. In other words, the EPA is not even remotely all that stands between polluters and the environment.

This sort of absolutist reductionism, gobbled up by the press and shallow thinkers (but I repeat myself), and cynically repeated by agenda-driven rent-seekers and feeders at the public trough, is what makes cutting government, even in the slightest fashion and even in obvious cases, so difficult. It’s far easier to appease the toddler’s bawling than to wait it out or ignore it, but the latter is the right thing to do.