With tax revenues plummeting due to the economic downturn, you might think that the Department of Education would be putting all its resources into helping students with the rising costs of education. You’d be wrong. In fact, the department just bought twenty-seven Remington 870 12-gauge shotguns, with modified tactical sights and 14-inch barrels (a feature ordinary citizens need to jump through bureaucratic loopholes to legally possess).
They aren’t the only ones preparing for a zombie apocalypse or an unusually well-armed horde of truants; the Environmental Protection Agency recently loaded up on 40 Glock 9mm handguns with extended magazines, the IRS recently purchased 60 short-barreled shotguns, the Social Security Administration bought 209,000 of hollow point .357 ammunition, and the Department of Energy is buying five semi-automatic sniper rifles (SR-25s).
While this might sound like the beginnings of some crackpot conspiracy theory (albeit one more plausible than most), it only serves to highlight the way government bureaucracies are run. Each of the innumerable federal agencies, departments, or administrations has an Office of Inspector General, which essentially serves as the law enforcement agency for each individual department. Yet our tax dollars are already funding federal investigatory agencies like the FBI, which are arguably better equipped to deal with crime within federal agencies.
It would appear that every government agency is filled with would-be Jack Bauers gearing up to play cowboy on the taxpayers’ dime. The scary fact is, however, that many of these desk jockeys are probably ill-trained to do the type of paramilitary or police work that they have acquired the kit for—that’s why we have dedicated organizations like the FBI and state and local police in the first place. Not to mention the simple question of what the Department of Education, for example, could possibly be mixed up in that would require man-stopping firepower in the first place.
But this militia-like weapons stockpiling is only a symptom of a broader problem with taxpayer-funded bureaucracies: when agencies are given money to spend carte blanche, they often lose sight of what they really ought to be focusing on. If you’re managing the Department of Education’s budget, and you have a bit of spare cash laying around at the end of the fiscal year, why not load up on guns and ammo?
After all, if that budget is not entirely spent one year, it’s likely that budgets will be reduced in following years. If a few thousand dollars are spent on attention-grabbing shotguns, one wonders how many millions are wasted on unnecessary but mundane items. Without relentless vigilance, billions of dollars will continue to be blown every year on wasteful acquisitions.
As the Obama Administration and prominent Democrats prepare to extend government control to healthcare, consumer credit protection, and student loans, it seems likely that any new agencies to be created as well as any soon to get funding boosts will run the same risk of losing sight of its stated purpose. The real trouble is continuing to sink money we don’t have into things we don’t need.
The sad truth is that a lot of what goes on in Washington is a lot like buying guns for bureaucrats. While the multitudinous and ever-larger projects and laws that Congress lavishes our resources on may seem to be in the public’s interest, in a government as large as ours, it is easy to lose track of where our dollars go.
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