Just like with any organization, I'm sure there is dead weight in government jobs. However, wholesale reduction make no sense for essential government agencies. Cut IRS enforcement, and business owners will cheat like hell. Cut Homeland Security, and lines at airports sprawl out of control - plus those people aren't that highly paid. Cut the Department of Energy, and get oil spilled everywhere including your aquifers and lakes. The issue is effective government, without excessive regulation, not mindless cutting to look good short term.
Originally Posted by Bert Jones
Do you even know what you are talking about?
First, the Department of Homeland Security doesn't run the lines at the air ports, the TSA does.
The TSA and HSA came into existence after September 11, 2001. We HAD airline security before that. The 9-11 attacks were a one-off that can never be reproduced again. If a rag head (or anyone else for that matter) announces a high-jacking, NO ONE will react passively the way they did on 9-11. Passengers will kill the hijacker(s) with their bare hands. They are going to die anyway if the hijacker gets into the cockpit, so why not go down fighting? One mentally deranged passenger that tried to break into a cockpit was beaten to death by passengers already.
And hijackers can't even get into cockpits anymore. The doors are armored, the pilots won't open them, the pilots are armed, and the AF will shoot down any hijacked plane that tries to fly near a big city. So, the rag heads have switched to using shoe bombs and underwear bombs.
We don't need a federal agency to stop that. Private security firms or local police can perform baggage screening just as well as the federal government union mopes I see working for the TSA at DFW and elsewhere.
The TSA was never anything more than a naked attempt by the Dems to expand government employee unions by capitalizing on our over-reaction to 9-11.
Second, the Department of Energy doesn't protect us from oil spills. The EPA does that.
Most of the DoE's functions used to be done by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Let the AEC go back to taking care of nuclear safety and waste and let the Department of Commerce run the National Laboratories (Berkeley, Los Alamos, etc).
The national "energy policy" functions of the DoE are horseshit.
The revival of our oil and gas industries have nothing to do with the DoE and everything to do with Halliburton and others developing new technologies for profit.