The U.S. Department of Agriculture has just submitted an acquisition request for .40 caliber submachine guns. Who will be using them? The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service? The Federal Crop Insurance Agency? The Food Safety and Inspection Service? Will they use them to shoot rats in food warehouses and grain elevators?
There is another, more pernicious possible explanation however. Agencies tend to jealously guard their turf, and use it as an excuse to grow and expand all kinds of functions one would not normally consider under their purview. So rather than call in the DEA, the Forest Service instead jumped in enthusiastically to get its share of the drug enforcement money pie. A lot of this kind of expansion occurred following the 1989 creation of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (i.e. the Drug Czar). There was all kinds of "drug enforcement" money being proffered for agencies that became involved in President H.W. Bush's War on Drugs. I know that because as a budget examiner for the Office of Management and Budget I was directly involved in formulating budgets for a number of law enforcement agencies.
Since then the federal law enforcement function has metastasized. Most Americans are unaware that there are over 91 federal law enforcement agencies in existence today. When I was working there in the 1990s, there were about 72, so that is yet another growth industry for government, and a very dangerous one. And this growth has occurred despite the fact that creation of the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to consolidate agencies, not grow new ones.
This occurs everywhere governments are created however, and is why the founders specifically sought a federal government that was supposed to be limited. We can see today how the government has managed to get around that, but it has taken a long time. Don't let anyone tell you the Constitution is irrelevant. It is more important today than it ever has been.
Read more at Examiner.com.
The great thing about having your own SWAT team is never having to go before a pesky judge to get a warrant for your actions. You simply direct your own employees to the target of your choice.
ReplyDeleteThis seems like a great time to get the head of the USDA in front of a committee of Congress and ask him to present his case to them as to why he should expand his power in this way.
ReplyDeleteNear-infinite money buys near-infinite government and in particular near-infinite bureaucracy.
Every day more people are coming to the judgment that a carefully organized effort to repair the constitution via the States’ power to propose and ratify amendments has less risk to our liberty and prosperity than the present trajectory of the federal government and especially the federal bureaucracy, who are too often thugs with clip-boards and their own SWAT teams.
-- theBuckWheat