This from CNN is encouraging:

The poll released Friday...showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans perceive, correctly, that the size and cost of government have gone up in the past four years, when Republicans have had a grip on the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House....

Queried about their views on the role of government, 54 percent of the 1,013 adults polled said they thought it was trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Only 37 percent said they thought the government should do more to solve the country's problems....

When asked if the size of the federal government has increased in the past four years, 72 percent said it had, and 86 percent said they thought federal spending had gone up during the same period.

This is good news--Americans should be aware of what their elected officials are up to. And by the numbers, the basic conservative premise of America remains intact--at least by a slim majority.

Any voter seeking a by-the-numbers overview of federal spending would do well to peruse this Brian Riedl paper, one of Heritage's most popular over the past year. It's chock-a-block with charts and graphs that drive the point home: federal spending has been growing at an explosive rate.

So how will voters' view of spending impact the elections? It is not for us to say. Perhaps our friend Ed Morrissey has an opinion.

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 09:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday USA Today reported on the lucrative business of being related to a Member of Congress or a congressional staffer. According to the report,

Lobbying groups employed 30 family members last year to influence spending bills that their relatives with ties to the House and Senate appropriations committees oversaw or helped write, a USA TODAY investigation found. Combined, they generated millions of dollars in fees for themselves or their firms.

Heritage's Ron Utt weighs in and tells USA Today that Congress is not bound by the same rules as the judicial and executive branches.

For example, laws bar executive branch employees from taking action affecting the financial interests of their spouses or minor children. Federal judges are required to remove themselves from cases affecting the financial interests of their spouses or minor children, or when lawyers or parties to the case are related to the judge. "It's particularly troublesome, because (Congress is) in an environment that has very limited, formal ethical standards to begin with," Utt said.

Utt detailed the confluence of lobbyists and spending earlier this year is his paper, "A Primer on Lobbyists, Earmarks, and Congressional Reform."

Posted by J. Lawrence Scholer at 09:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ed Morrissey, who has spent this week at Heritage's annual Resource Bank Conference in Colorado Springs, shares a few details of his panel discussion on Katrina and the government response.

One story, from a co-panelist, bears repeating:

After almost eight months, much of the debris left behind by the hurricane and massive flooding has still not been removed -- which must happen before rebuilding can begin. One of Steve's constituents hired a private contractor to get the job done at $15 per cubic foot, but was warned repeatedly by FEMA officials that they would not reimburse him for the work since it had not gone through proper channels. After debating the point with FEMA for a while, the Louisianan gave up and applied for removal through FEMA. Instead of spending $15 per cubic foot, FEMA paid the new contractor $35 per cubic foot. Given that New Orleans has millions of cubic feet of debris to remove, the extra $20/cf will explode the costs of the cleanup.

Oh, and one other point about this anecdote: the contractor FEMA hired subbed the job to the original contractor hired by the constituent -- who got the same $15/cf that the constituent negotiated.

In a related issue, much of the debris could be recycled, such as steel and other materials. However, to the extent that anything has been cleaned up, 100% of it is going into landfills, a diminishing resource in the hurricane areas. The contractors hired by FEMA do not get paid any money for material that cannot be documented as ending up in the landfill, where it can be measured. Also, any money that the contractor receives for the recyclable material has to be given to FEMA in full. Without any incentive to spend time separating recyclable material to salvage the raw materials that could be used in rebuilding, it's all going into the trashheap instead.

In so much of the work that we do on disaster response--from specific cases like Katrina to general recommendations on the organization and role of DHS regional offices in coordinating a truly national disaster response system--we stress the role of federalism and the need for the federal government to act as a coordinating party between different levels of government, non-profits, and the private sector.

This isn't because federalism is our pet political philosophy; rather, it's pragmatic. In the aftermath of a disaster--even now in the areas hit by Katrina last year--response operations will inevitably be complicated--far more complicated than can be managed from Washington or, really, by any level of government adopting a command and control structure. Ed's post is a great example of this. Perfectly sensible government action--at 30,000 feet, anyway--leads to madness at ground level.

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 12:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)