Pros And Cons Of Downsizing The Government

.

Bureaucracy in general in considered to be an overbearing and redundant process, one of the reasons the public is constantly annoyed with the bureaucratic process is they consider it to be too big and overpowering. In the 1980’s the idea of downsizing the federal government came into fruition and ever since, “downsizing (has become) an inescapable part of politics at all levels of the American government.” (166). A majority of the arguments for downsizing the bureaucracy come from the more conservative side of the political aisle, but they focus mostly on the complaints of the American citizenry. This can be seen with movements like the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which was passed in Colorado in 1992 to limit tax increases for its citizens

However, in reality the government does not have clear goals of what to cut or how much, “although politicians often boldly talk about cutting away the fat, there typically has been little thought about which fat to cut, and how to avoid slicing into the bone” (168). This is because every governmental program is seen to be essential to someone, no one actually wants the government to downsize they just do not want to pay their taxes. This leads to short Band-Aid fixes that lead nowhere and just coasting to the next election cycle, which makes downsizing a weak reform. The idea of continuous improvement, however, works very well. You do not have government workers afraid that their jobs are going to be cut at any minute, so they are able to take risks to improve their product. It is based on the idea of motivating the system to produce better results. This movement is not looking to scrap the plan but to build off of it and morph it into a more productive system. However, continuous improvement also has problems because the quality is improved over an extended period of time and, therefore, is not favored by the American people because they do not see immediate results. It also does not fix the public opinion problem of government being too big. Even though the popular opinion might be that continuous improvement might not be successful I think it accomplishes what it was meant to do and, therefore, is