Feds say sequester will harm non-existent agency
Barack Obama and the rest of the leftists in charge of Washington have exploited the looming sequestration – that they themselves developed – to scare Americans with wild claims of rampant government shutdown.
To aid in the dissection of what effect the mandatory cuts will have, the Office of Management and Budget produced a report outlining what agencies would be cut and by how much.
Among the cuts listed is nearly $2 million from the National Drug Intelligence Center’s $20 million budget. When the report was released in September of 2012, though, the agency had been closed for three months.
D.C. fear mongers turned a statistically irrelevant sequester into an apocalyptical disaster while placing unwarranted blame at the feet of the GOP. Compounding those dishonest tactics is a report detailing a fictional hardship to an imaginary government entity.
While duties formerly handled by the NDIC are now under the purview of Drug Enforcement Agency, there is no indication the OMB was simply referring to the center by its former name.
The agency’s budget is listed in the OMB report as $20 million while the DEA is only receiving $8 million to handle its residual responsibilities. Additionally, the non-existent center was listed in a category of its own, not as a subsidiary of any larger department.
While this might have been a mere oversight on the part of Washington bureaucracy, the error is important for a number of reasons.
First, it highlights how utterly bloated the federal government has become. If a government agency in charge of the budget of other government agencies can’t keep up with how many redundant entities exist, what chance is there for any meaningful reform?
Perhaps more importantly it proves, despite what Obama has repeatedly suggested, not all government spending is vital. When a department with a $20 million budget can vanish and even three months later no one seems to notice, I contend that program is superfluous.
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“FOLLOW THE MONEY’ Is it ‘hush money’? ‘pay 4 favors’? sloppy bookkeeping or padding retirement funds? This entire State of Affairs smells to high heaven…begs the question of ‘what’ other fantasy agency are we funding?