Here’s part of Chuck Todd’s interview with President Obama that never made it to air on an NBC News program. Obama said “When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn't work or it ends up being way over cost. And yeah, in some ways, I should have anticipated that just because this was important and I was saying this was my top priority.”
Reporter James Rosen at Foxnews.com noticed that Obama was scolded for this statement at the far-left website DemocraticUnderground.com:
Mr. President, could you please avoid throwing the RWNJ’s [right-wing nut-jobs] any more red meat about government incompetence and being too big and inefficient?”
...Conservatives responded to the Todd interview with incredulity. “You don't expect the president of the United States to say that ‘The problem is this bureaucracy that I've been building up all of these years?’” asked Arthur C. Brooks, a trained economist and head of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.
“I think that he is grasping at ways to explain in technical terms what was fundamentally an ideological problem, and a leadership problem. The truth of the matter is the government is trying to do something the government is ill-suited to do…And that his leadership was largely to blame at virtually every step of the way.”
An editorial in Tuesday’s Investors’ Business Daily also noticed this statement and asked the obvious question:
But if Obama admits that a cumbersome, bureaucratic government can't handle something as simple as IT purchases, why should anyone believe it can manage something far more vast and complex, like the health care system, much less make it better and more efficient?
Perhaps Obama doesn't notice that nearly all of our vast, bloated and intrusive government is bureaucratic and cumbersome, doesn't work and costs too much.
An audit by the Government Accountability Office, for example, found more than 160 areas where federal agencies duplicate efforts and waste billions of dollars.
There are 23 agencies that run 679 renewable energy programs; 15 that run 76 drug-treatment programs; three that oversee the vital task of catfish inspections.
Waste, fraud and abuse cost a total of about $261 billion a year — equal to about 7% of all federal spending.
