USAID

I hope Rubio has time to do both jobs … Trump’s keeping him pretty busy on the international front!

IMO, the rule with few exceptions should be that what are called ‘grants, subsidies, and contributions’ in the Appendix to the Budget of the United States Government should not be remitted to corporate bodies bar under specified circumstances. To do so outside such circumstances should be defined as embezzlement. Corporate bodies which might be appropriate recipients would be (1) inter-governmental agencies, (2) foreign governments, (3) state and territorial governments, (4) local governments, and (5) various parties in the course of disaster relief. I suspect a lot of the intergovernmental agencies we belong to we should either leave or remain only for the purpose of counteracting China’s mischief. In re foreign governments, the rule ought to be that we provide hands-on services, equipment, or credits to buy equipment and very seldom cash bar for rental payments. State and territorial governments might receive a grant to finance Medicaid, a grant to finance unemployment compensation, a grant to finance a residue of the federal highway program, and a general revenue sharing grant. Localities (and some of the territories) might receive payment-in-lieu-of-taxes in re federal real estate, with Indian reservations also receiving a revenue sharing grant. We might also define certain compliance costs associated with federal regulations as torts and provide for state, territorial, and local governments to be indemnified in those circumstances. Pontiac, Illinois has to rebuild its sewer system consequent to an edict of the EPA, that’s a tort.
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In re foreign aid, you have ‘security co-operation’, which should be distributed by the Armed Services for reasons-of-state and you have ‘humanitarian aid’. One type should be ‘development aid’ which addresses abiding skill deficits in the poorest countries and the other type should be ‘relief’ which addresses acute eruptions of trouble. Development aid should be in the form of basic education, agricultural extension, vocational-technical education, and equipment to produce small time public works which might be maintained with local labor. Ideally, in emergency relief situations, various parties work co-operatively with one not being a conduit for the cash of the other, but this may not be possible in all situations. The agencies the U.S. government is working with should be those engaged in building shelters, distributing food, clearing debris off of roadways, building latrines, treating wounds, and fighting epidemics.
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It may be that the institutional culture of USAID is so rotten that the best course of action is to shut it down and build a new agency with a very circumscribed (if not non-existent) franchise to make grants. Would not surprise me in the least.
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‘Grants, subsidies, and contributions’ to individual households (in the form of cash, vouchers, and insurance) have their own problems (they are commonly actuarially unsound and often generate perverse incentives). Federal contracting has its own problems, especially when it is not conducted via sealed bidding. Neither are dispensable and neither are categorically pathological. Grants to corporate bodies distort and disfigure the philanthropic sector and are a way for nefarious characters to construct patron-client relationships. The amount of grant money a character like Anthony Fauci should be able to distribute and a character like Charles Schumer should be able to broker should sum to $0.
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/ rant off.

When this country (inevitably) votes libs back into power, they will not shrink from using this kind of executive order for their own distorted goals. 
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That’s why whole agencies and departments should be liquidated.
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HUD: about 0.5% of the budget is devoted to an office which issues regulations in re lead paint. Transfer that office to the EPA and shut the department down tout court. You can augment the EITC to compensate.
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Food and Nutrition Service (USDA): there might be a sub office somewhere that does something useful. Mostly it’s subsidies for groceries and meals. Augment the EITC a tad and shut this agency down.
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Farm Service Agency (USDA). Shut down entirely. Co-incident with that, have an office of the Department of Commerce which designs and implements a program of countervaling tariffs for farm products.
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Risk Management Agency (USDA). Auction off its portfolio of policies and shut it down.
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Rural Development, Rural Utilities Service, Rural Housing Service, Rural Business Co-operative Service (USDA). Patronage. Shut them down.
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National Institute on Food and Agriculture. Another grant money vent pipe. Shut it down.
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Small Business Administration. We have these things called ‘banks’ to finance small business. Shut it down.
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National Science Foundation: it’s a grant money festival, with scant exception. Transfer the Office of Polar Programs to the Interior Department and shut it down.
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Department of Energy. End all grant and loan programs and sell off loan portfolios.
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NASA. End the grant programs.
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Federal Communications Commission. End the telecom subsidy programs (at one time accounting for > 80% of their budget. It should be a regulatory agency and that’s all.
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EPA. End all grant programs. Send the environmental works projects to the Interior Department. Split the regulatory function between public health and safety (to be retained) and conservation (to be sent to the Interior Department). The regulatory function at one time consumed less than 15% of its budget.
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SAMSHA, HRSA, Administration for Community Living (HHS). Shut them down.
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Administration for Children and Families (HHS). Fish out the refugee care portion and otherwise shut the agency down.
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Department of Justice. End the grant programs and shut down the Community Relations Service as well.
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Department of Transportation. Retain air traffic control, what their is of maritime traffic control, the Merchant Marine Academy, the health-and-safety regulatory apparat, emergency response programs, and the subagency which builds roads on federal property. In re the U.S. Routes and the Interstates, retain the function of defining the routes, distributing the signage, and auditing the degree of repair. Have a grant program for the maintenance of the long-haul Interstates. Terminate all other programs.
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Department of Education: send the NAEP and the statistical collection function to the Labor Department, send the consumer protection function to the Federal Trade Commission, and incorporate a resolutions agency to wind down federal grant and loan programs and sell off the loan portfolios. End all other programs and shut down the department.
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Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Inter-American Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship in Excellence and Education Program, James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation, Vietnam Education Foundation Patronage distributors and memorials politicians awarded to one of their own. Shut them down. We have the three national libraries, the Smithsonian, the National Archives, and the Kennedy Center. That should suffice.
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Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Farm Credit System. Sell off their portfolios and shut them down.
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Federal Home Loan Banks. Transfer some functions to the Federal Reserve and shut them down.
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Corporation for National and Community Service. An impingement on the private sector and local agencies. Shut it down.
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Corporation for Travel Promotion, Vera Institute, State Justice Institute, US Institute of Peace, Elections Assistance Commission, Commission on Civil Rights. Flotsam and jetsam. Shut them down.
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U.S. Postal Service. Put it on the auction bloc and have no lower limit on bids (due to the legacy costs).
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AmTrak. Put it on the auction bloc and have no lower limit on bids (due to the legacy costs).
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Delta Regional Authority. Denali Commission. Delaware River Basin Commission
Susquehanna River Basin Commission. Northern Border Regional Commission. Bits of patronage. Shut them down.
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ExIm Bank. It’s a testament to Addison Mitchell McConnell’s grossness that this outfit continues to exist. Shut it down.
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Let me add the US NRC to Art Deco’s list.

Completely revise 10 CFR 50 so that it is no longer LWR (light water reactor) centric, but embraces non-LWR technology like high temperature helium cooled reactors, molten salt thorium breeders, sodium and lead-bismuth cooled reactors, Carlo Rubbia energy amplifiers, etc.

Fix 10 CFR 50 Appendix B (Qulaity Assurance) so that it isn’t document centric, but rather embraces today’s software engineering way of doing things and is data centric.

Fix the NRC regulatory guides on development of digital instrumentation and controls (operational technology) so that instead of endorsing out of date standards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (some of which are from the late 1980s and 1990s), they endorse modern international standards from the International Electrotechnical Commission which is what much of the rest of the world uses.

Stop using stop-gap measures like regulatory guides and regulatory issue summaries to address use of newer field programmable gate array technology in digital instrumentation and controls, and make the regulations agnostic to technology platform, whether microprocessor / runtime software or field programmable gate arrays / Boolean logic.

Purge the US NRC of environmentalists and Democrats (I repeat myself), and live up to the new mission statement that was put into place by the Advance Act passed by Congress prior to Trump, but never embraced by the NRC until Trump got in office and replaced Christopher Hanson with David Wright as Chairman (think about that, for a moment; Biden’s appointee wouldn’t embrace what Congress ordered him to embrace). Here is the new statement:

“The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was created as an independent agency by Congress in 1974 to ensure the safe use of radioactive materials for beneficial civilian purposes while protecting people and the environment. The NRC regulates commercial nuclear power plants and other uses of nuclear materials, such as in nuclear medicine, through licensing, inspection and enforcement of its requirements.”

Here is the old mission statement –> note the lack of reference about “ensuring the safe use…for beneficial civilian purposes…”

“The NRC licenses and regulates the nation’s civilian use of radioactive materials to provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety, to promote the common defense and security, and to protect the environment.”

I could go on and on and on. I am all in favor of an independent safety agency for civilian nuclear power. It keeps the greedy utility executives honest, and it prevents them from cutting corners on safety. But the flip side has happened: regulatory strangulation has prevent new nuclear construction and raise the costs of operating existing plants to the point of unprofitability. If the FAA (as bad as it is) regulated the airline industry the way the NRC does the nuclear power industry, no planes would be flying. And that’s a fact.