To achieve results in doing anything, you must perform four sequential steps: you must first Plan, then Organize, then Direct, and then finally Control the result to make sure everything happens as planned. Any parent running a household does this naturally. Businesses must do this to survive. It should be self-evident that our federal government should also do this. But it seldom does.
Parents considering a vacation must plan who will go, where to go, how long to stay, and what to take. They must then organize who is responsible for what and direct them to do it. And finally, they must control the result by verifying, among many other things, that tickets are in hand, the right stuff is loaded up, and there is gas in the car.
Any business must plan what products to produce, the sources of materials and who will make them. It must then organize obtaining the materials, having the people available to assemble them, and direct them to do it. And finally, it must control that the products are of high quality and make sure they are produced efficiently enough to allow a profit for the business. It can therefore sustain its owners or shareholders and be around over the long term to service them.
The federal government should follow this same universal procedure but rarely does. It almost always fails on three of the four steps.
It seems to do only one step well: directing our treasury to write checks. Because tax money is free to them and because many of them live in America’s three wealthiest counties in and around booming Washington, D. C., they seem to care little how well it is spent. This although Americans must work full time till April 18 this year just to pay taxes to support the government.
The core of the problem is that many in Congress only pass laws to further their own reelection prospects. With these laws, and later with the bureaucracy which implements them, no thought is given to the elements of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling necessary to benefit each of us who elected them.
Take Medicare, where the FBI estimates that fraud there ranges up to $65 billion out of a total of $909 billion spent. Seven percent is fraudulent. This compares with credit card fraud of 1.04%. Congress does little because setting up a system to correct this would be admitting that fraud was possible. And this might be used by their opponents in the next election. So the control preventing this fraud is never there, and the planning and organizing is never even considered. The directing which allows the fraud to continue is there as always. It has always been too easy for the Department of the Treasury to print fraudulent checks totaling billions paid for by we taxpayers. Clearly something must be done.
The best solution is for legislation to be passed honoring the Tenth Amendment and moving as many functions as possible back to the individual states where those in office are closer to the voters and more accountable. Another solution is to turn over the fraud investigations to private businesses giving them a profitable percentage of the fraud they discover.
Each of us must insist that government be more efficient and spend our money more wisely. To do so, we must elect those to Congress who wish to limit its size and move more of its necessary functions to the states. America will then grow and prosper.
Vern Wuensche’s opinion pieces have appeared in USA Today and other newspapers. He is a small-town Texas farm boy with an MBA and CPA who founded and continuously ran Houston’s oldest residential construction company for forty-three years. He is a lifelong active Republican, a Christian, a veteran, and an early marathoner who ran for President in 2008 and 2012, visiting 6,000 small businesses in 242 towns in Iowa and New Hampshire.