14-Jan-2012 - Obama to propose combining agencies to shrink federal government

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But the move also comes at a politically opportune moment, as the president heads into his re-election campaign and aims to blunt Republican criticism that his policies have stunted business growth and bloated the federal budget at a time of ballooning debt. Obama will propose combining the functions and staff of six trade- and commerce-related agencies and offices: the Small Business Administration; the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; the Export-Import Bank; the Overseas Private Investment Corporation; and the Trade and Development Agency. The move would ease the regulatory burden on businesses and save money by eliminating duplicative functions such as human resources, the White House official said. Under the plan, Obama would first seek broad consolidation authority from Congress, which would also be able to vote on each specific proposed merger. Such authority was last held by former President Ronald Reagan in the NFL jersey supply 1980s, according to the Associated Press, which first reported Obama’s proposal.While symbolically important--especially because reform efforts by previous White House administrations have mostly failed--the consolidations would barley dent the number of workers and the amount of spending in the country’s vast federal bureaucracy. Obama will announce his proposal in a White House appearance scheduled for 11:20 a.m.In his 2011 State of the Union address, Obama vowed to tackle federal inefficiency, famously joking: “The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in salt water. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.”Aides said the quip came from White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley, who served as commerce secretary during the Clinton administration and had urged Obama to tackle concerns with the sprawling federal bureaucracy. NFL jerseys Despite the prominent discussion of the issue and Obama’s vow to release specific plans within six months, administration officials spent most of last year downplaying the goal of a major reorganization. They said they were sidetracked by the need to draft contingency planning for a possible government shutdown and the acrimonious debate last summer over raising the federal debt ceiling. At the same time, Obama commissioned a study of which entities should be targeted, and received the results last June.Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob J. Lew, who will replace Daley as chief of staff at the end of the month, has cautioned that any attempt to reorganize government would face stiff Washington headwinds.“You have agencies that have hard boundary lines, jurisdictional lines, you have congressional committees that have hard jurisdictional boundaries, you have interest groups that are organized around the status quo,” Lew said at a November breakfast hosted by Politico.Officials who led previous reorganization efforts have issued similar warnings. Caspar W. Weinberger, who earned the nickname “Cap the Knife” for his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to merge domestic functions into football jerseys four super-departments during the Nixon administration, complained later of an “unholy trinity” of constituency groups, congressional committees and administrators who built their careers running a particular program.Al Gore’s efforts to “reinvent government” also faltered in the 1990s for similar reasons, but did help shrink the size of government by eliminating thousands of federal positions.Ultimately, if Obama’s plans succeed, they may render moot long-running jokes among former employees of the Commerce Department about the disparate nature of the sprawling department.“We’re kind of like Noah’s Ark, except we only have one of everything,” joked Alan Balutis, a former Commerce official who now works as government consultant, at a meeting of government management experts last year.The timing of the move is likely to draw charges from GOP adversaries that Obama is focused on the politics of his re-election, rather than good policy. It comes on the heels of his cross-country jobs tour and less than two weeks before his State of the Union address. Aides have said Obama is eager to cast his efforts to spur growth against a Congress that the White House said is stuck in partisan gridlock.

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