Businesses Need Relief From Obama, Not Gov't Reorg
Business: After pushing through one of the largest expansions of government in history, the president now claims he wants to streamline it on behalf of struggling businesses. Pardon us if we're skeptical about his sincerity.
On Friday, Obama pushed Congress to give him the authority to reorganize several government agencies, merging six that deal with trade and business development. The idea, he claims, is to cut duplication and red tape to make it "easier to do business in America." As a bonus, Obama says this will trim spending by $3 billion over a decade.
Obama's sudden realization that the federal government is a bloated mess is welcome. There's no shortage of targets at which to aim. But his proposal should be seen for what it is: a crass political move designed to inoculate himself against charges that he's anti-business.
After all, if these reforms are so important to companies, why did Obama wait three years to propose them, or wait a full year after promising such changes in his last State of the Union address, knowing Congress would never get it done in an election year?
It's just as well, since once you scratch the surface, you realize Obama's reorg would almost certainly do more harm than good. Of particular concern is his plan to mash the lean and effective U.S. Trade Representative office together with the bloated and aimless Commerce Department.
In a joint memo Friday, Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., warned that making the USTR "just another corner of a new bureaucratic behemoth would hurt American exports and hinder American job creation." And former USTR head Susan Schwab told the Washington Post that "I don't think it makes sense to put USTR in Commerce because you'd have to reinvent USTR."
The real problem with Obama's latest gambit is that it completely misses the point. Businesses aren't complaining that the federal government has too many agencies doing the same job. They're complaining that they have to deal with the federal government at all.
On that score, Obama has made their lives far worse by imposing a mass of expensive rules and regulations, to say nothing of the nightmare that businesses know is coming from ObamaCare.
Obama's so clueless about business needs that just last week he told a bunch of Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats that "when we put in place new common-sense rules to reduce air pollution, we create new jobs."
If the president really cared about making it "easier to do business in America," he wouldn't move boxes on an organization chart for political points. He'd undo all the anti-business policies he's already imposed.
