Commerce Department Is the Home of Corporate Welfare : * Abolish it: It’s a bloated mass of unrelated programs and political appointees.
Nothing demonstrates the need to streamline the bloated federal bureaucracy more than does the Commerce Department. One of our first steps on the road to a balanced budget is going to be the elimination of this taxpayer rip-off.
Commerce is the home of the most shameless examples of corporate welfare, it performs functions that are already done elsewhere in government and its mismanagement has become the stuff of lore in Washington. But the most persuasive condemnation of the department comes from the business community, the purported beneficiaries of department largess. In a recent Business Week poll, senior business executives supported eliminating the department by a margin of 2 to 1. Why?
Corporate America has seen the need to downsize and streamline to remain competitive in the world marketplace. During 1993 and 1994, Sears reduced its work force by 50,000 and IBM by 38,000. At the same time, Commerce slogged along with more than 36,000 employees. Instead of reducing layers of middle management, Commerce has remained the government’s dumping ground for political appointees, with more then 250.
To improve its competitiveness, corporate America has formed business partnerships and strategic alliances: Disney and ABC, IBM and Lotus. Yet Commerce remains a confused hodgepodge of more than 100 loosely related programs ranging from promoting tourism to zebra mussel research.
Where big business does benefit from Commerce is through the department’s network of corporate welfare programs. The Advanced Technology Program provides multimillion-dollar research grants to many of the nation’s industrial giants, such as General Electric and IBM. Funding for the ATP has risen from $10 million in 1992 to about $490 million in 1995.
Commerce Secretary Ron Brown has defended his department as the promoter of U.S. goods and services abroad. But less than 6% of Commerce’s budget is devoted to trade promotion, a responsibility the department shares with 19 other federal agencies.
The secretary has also lashed out at Republican plans for the department as jeopardizing public safety by transferring the National Weather Service. This is just a scare tactic. Surely no one believes that the National Weather Service, including its network of satellites, belongs in a department in which it must compete for resources with tourism promotion, economic development and export enforcement programs. Our plan will consolidate science programs, including the weather service, into the National Institute of Science and Technology.
In a last-ditch effort to save the department, Brown has been claiming that our plan would cost billions. But after a thorough analysis, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that our plan would save $6 billion--even after we pay for shutdown costs.
