The Meat Clearver Approach to Governance

Will Wilkinson is on to something here in talking about the sequester's meat cleaverish approach to cutting the federal budget

Meat cleavers work, and they aren't in practice so indiscriminate as they may seem to be. They focus attention, clarify priorities, and lead to the swift discovery of previously unimagined economies.

This is quite true.  Bureaucrats, despite their classical depiction, are often quite creative and adaptive.  And it's often healthy for them to be forced to shift things around, reprioritize, and cut out some of the dreck that lines their budgets.  If done in reasonable measure, such cutting and reshuffling is healthy, like spring cleaning, as it helps to remove some of the non-essential additions to the federal budget that accumulate over time.  As we've found from the sequester, there are funds that routinely go unspent, maintenance work that doesn't need to be done quite so often, and potential creative solutions to problems that don't require the funds that would otherwise have been spent to solve them. 

But then I think Wilkinson takes his point a bit too far

That the effect of the sequester has been relatively benign so far strikes me as a data-point in favour of relatively inflexible fiscal rules, such as debt-ceilings and balanced-budget amendments, capable of somewhat offsetting the diffuse-cost/concentrated-benefit dynamic that otherwise drives democracies toward imbalance and ruin.

There are plenty of areas of bloat in the Federal budget, the Defense Department and the Farm Bill being two prime examples. But thinking you're creating efficiencies by having rules that invite standoff and make it impossible to fix any of the issues that inherently arise in any country is not a way to cut government waste, it's a long term recipe for disaster.  Running the government in the way that we have over the past 2 years, in the way that has lead to the sequester is a recipe for making it a poorly run organization over the long term. Bureaucracies are inherently inefficient, but once you add on the fact that Congress now doesn't even pass a budget till we're halfway through the fiscal year, can't address any important issues because they're too contentious, doesn't have the staff to conduct real oversight, doesn't spend the time to really learn about the issues or about how the government operates and instead spends most of their time scoring political points, well you have a recipe for gridlock and long term disaster.  Wilkinson is right that the all government programs have concentrated sets of beneficiaries who howl every time they're proposed for a cut.  But if none of their issues are being addressed, if every program is untended and is slowly hollowed out by one indiscriminate cut after another, soon ever constituency will be feeling the pain.  The cuts aren't concentrated if every part of the government is taking them.  And that is where we're at right now.  The sequester is set to run for 10 years, and with the lines between democrats and republicans hardening every day, it's easy to wonder whether default is the only policy we have left.