There are plenty of examples of this conscious and unconscious sabotage of government. One came today in the form of a news story about the numbers of staffers in Congress:
A quick refresher: In 1995, after winning a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, one of the first things the new Republican House leadership did was gut Congress’s workforce. They cut the “professional staff” (the lawyers, economists, and investigators who work for committees rather than individual members) by a third. They reduced the “legislative support staff” (the auditors, analysts, and subject-matter experts at the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the Congressional Research Service [CRS], and so on) by a third, too, and killed off the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entirely. And they fundamentally dismantled the old committee structure, centralizing power in the House speaker’s office and discouraging members and their staff from performing their own policy research. (The Republicans who took over the Senate in 1995 were less draconian, cutting committee staff by about 16 percent and leaving the committee system largely in place.) Today, the GAO and the CRS, which serve both House and Senate, are each operating at about 80 percent of their 1979 capacity. While Senate committee staffs have rebounded somewhat under Democratic control, every single House standing committee had fewer staffers in 2009 than in 1994. Since 2011, with a Tea Party-radicalized GOP back in control of the House, Congress has cut its budget by a whopping 20 percent, a far higher ratio than any other federal agency, leading, predictably, to staff layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, and drooping morale.
Source: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaugust_2014/features/the_big_lobotomy050642.php?page=all
Again, this is penny wise and pound foolish. In the short run, the elimination of these staffers may indeed save taxpayer money. But what's the effect in the long run on Congress when it lacks the staff to properly research and draft legislation that could be beneficial to the country?
Tellingly, while professional staff in Congress has been slashed during Republican years, other areas have expanded:
Since Republicans took control of the U.S. House in January 2011, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has led a cost-cutting effort that has trimmed staff for House committees by nearly 20%, saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. But the number of committee staff responsible for press and communications work has increased by nearly 15% over the same period, according to House spending records.
In the first three months of 2010, with Democrats still in control of the chamber, the primary committees of the House reported employing 1,570 staff members, 74 of whom had "press" or "communications" or related terms in their job titles. Over the same period this year, the same committees reported 1,277 total employees, a 19% cut, 85 of whom had communications-related job titles.
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said the numbers are "completely unsurprising. We promised responsible oversight of the Obama administration, and effective oversight requires communicating with the American people."
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/07/01/house-staff-cuts-communications-press/11425389/
This says a lot about the current state of the GOP. Staffers involved in doing actual work, like research for pending legislation, are out the door. The big focus now is "messaging" - telling the American people what they want to hear without actually acting on it.
As a result, Congress will be hobbled as it tries to solve the many problems currently facing the country. That's OK though, right? All the better for Republicans looking to prove their point about government's wastefulness and uselessness.
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