Good news. It's 2017 and we all survived Y2K. But we may not survive the sheer crushing scope of government.
The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would eliminate dozens of paperwork requirements for federal agencies, including an obscure rule that requires them to continue providing updates on their preparedness for a bug that afflicted some computers at the turn of the century. As another example, the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid, a task that consumed some 1,200 man-hours every year.
“We’re looking for stuff everyone agrees is a complete waste of time,” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters at the White House. He likened the move to the government “cleaning out our closets.”
Deregulation is a major ambition of President Donald Trump’s agenda; as one example, he has signed more laws rolling back his predecessor’s regulations than the combined total of the three previous presidents since the process was established by the 1999 Congressional Review Act.
Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government.
It's telling that this was still on the books. And you can how imagine how much else is still there.
Government has become like the royal courts of Europe in which no precedent, title, decree, jot or iota could ever be cast away, in which royal appointments whose reasons no one knew anymore had to exist in perpetuity, in which eccentric customs continued on through the ages.
This is the croft and corruption of power.
And, recognize that the government "resistance" is in no small part motivated by the sheer terror of actually being run efficiently. Every stupid mandate means more power for an agency and work for the people involved in overseeing it.
If much of your work involves rubber stamping meaningless Y2K compliance, you join the resistance against anyone who might actually look at what you do for a living.