'R'
Street
House
convenes ‘Stop
Government Abuse Week’
This
week, the U.S. House
will consider ten bills aimed at curbing government abuse, covering
topics such
as the IRS’ involvement in health care, customer service standards for
government employees and the privacy of an individual’s tax records,
among
other issues. Under the banner of Stop Government Abuse Week, lawmakers
are
pushing legislation intended to address many of the recent scandals,
including
IRS targeting, lavish conference spending and paid leave for officials
under
investigation.
The
timing couldn’t be
better. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released last week put
Americans’
approval of Congress at 83 percent, and 61 percent of those polled
believe the
country is on the wrong track. In a recent Gallup poll, 60 percent of
Americans
think the IRS “frequently abuses its powers.”
Some
of the bills may seem
a bit narrow, but taken as a whole, the package represents a step
forward
toward reining in the inevitable abuses from a growing leviathan. Most
Americans probably don’t realize it’s close to impossible to put a
federal
employee on unpaid leave, even if the employee is under investigation
for
wrongdoing (a practice addressed by Government Employee Accountability
Act,
H.R. 2579). Better understood is the degree to which many federal jobs
don’t
depend on performance, even service-related positions (which the
Government
Customer Service Improvement Act, H.R. 1660, looks to rectify).
H.R.
2565, or the Stop Targeting
Our Politics IRS Act, introduced by Rep. Jim Renacci, R-Ohio, goes even
further, allowing the IRS to terminate any employee who uses their
position for
political purposes. Two bills deal with conference spending, one
designed to
end IRS conferences until the agency implements reforms recommended by
the
inspector-general to avoid abuse of funds, and a second that increases
transparency for conference spending for all agencies and limits the
number of
conferences per year.
For
anyone not employed by the
federal government, these steps should seem perfectly reasonable. The
private
sector experienced tough layoffs, budget trimming and reduced pay
during the
recession, as did many state and local governments. And private sector
employees are constantly evaluated on their performance. It’s time for
federal
agencies to use the same standards, from cutting wasteful spending to
increasing accountability...
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