Streamlining the government bureaucracy sounds like a good idea. In private enterprise, systems are in a continuous state of re-engineering and improvement. Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a discipline that was honed in the 1990s.
Applying BPR to the federal government was the hallmark of the Clinton Administration with Vice President, Al Gore, being in the lead to award best practices.
The Department of Defense institutionalized those disciplines as they advanced with the application of systems engineering and information technology. Also, the federal government's leadership in concert with private enterprise advanced the methods and tools needed to make initiatives successful.
One important lesson from this vast experience is not to attack problems and opportunities for which you have not the resources to see the job finished. Otherwise, you may make a bigger mess of performance than that which you initially discovered.
The Trump approach under the tutelage of Steve Bannon who is a most unqualified adviser on the subject is to strip away regulations. Regulations are the product of the legislative process. In a democracy, it is inappropriate to do this without close consultation, coordination, and support of Congress.
Now, Trump is deploying his son-in-law to embark upon streamlining the bureaucracy. He has no knowledge of the federal government. Maybe he learned some techniques in the MBA Program at Harvard.
"Despite the chaos and the growing credibility gap, Trump is systematically succeeding in his quest to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon puts it. He’s pursued the most aggressive regulatory rollback since Ronald Reagan, especially on environmental issues, with a series of bills and executive orders. He’s placed devoted ideologues into perches from which they can stop aggressively enforcing laws that conservatives don’t like. By not filling certain posts, he’s ensuring that certain government functions will simply not be performed. His budget proposal spotlighted his desire to make as much of the federal bureaucracy as possible wither on the vine.
-- Trump has been using executive orders to tie the hands of rule makers. He put in place a regulatory freeze during his first hours, mandated that two regulations be repealed for every new one that goes on the books and ordered a top-to-bottom review of the government with an eye toward shrinking it.
Any day now, Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at undoing Obama’s Clean Power Plan and end a moratorium on federal-land coal mining. This would ensure that the U.S. does not meet its commitments under the Paris climate agreement.
The administration is also preparing new executive orders to re-examine all 14 U.S. free trade agreements, including NAFTA, and the president could start to sign some of them this week."
The PowerPost email from The Washington Post
The Whoops President?
Here's what we knew about the Republican plan. The latest version that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had a chance to analyze would have, over the course of 10 years, cut taxes by $1 trillion, disproportionately benefiting the rich; cut Medicaid spending by $839 billion, exclusively harming the poor and sick; and cut the Affordable Care Act's health insurance subsidies by about $300 billion, mostly hurting older people of modest means. Add it all up, and the CBO estimated that 24 million people would have lost their health insurance as a result. Not only that, but premiums would have increased 15 percent to 20 percent more than they otherwise would have in the next four years before so many older people were priced out of the market that premiums would have started to come down, and deductibles, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, would have been an average of $1,550 higher. In short: The GOP would have made insurance more affordable for younger people by making it unaffordable for older people and worse for everyone.
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