[knightofmars]

Under funding and subsequently under staffing federal organizations to "defang" them or to show them as being ineffective to support a position of reorganization and subsequent merger with another organization to alter who has oversight (as a power play) or to just remove them completely has been a long-time page in the political playbook. This is an sub element of the "starve the beast" approach and has been well documented [1]. To be clear, I'm not here to argue the efficacy of this approach but merely to point out it is real and is happening.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

[JamesBarney]

When rayiner says unproductive I think he means inefficient. And understaffing and budget cuts shouldn't drive efficiency lower, if anything they should drive it higher. Similar to how corporations get more efficient after layoffs.

[rayiner]

“Starve the beast” is a rhetorical boogeyman. Conservatives tried it, and we just decided to run a structural deficit instead. Nobody’s budget ever gets cut. CDC’s budget, for example, has tripled since 1992, adjusted for inflation.

But my point is, even if you think that phenomenon actually exists in practice rather than theory, shouldn’t Democrat-run state and local-level places be a counter-example? School, police, transit, etc. are all mainly state-level services. In places like Illinois and New York and California, it’s Democrats that set the taxes and Democrats that set the budgets and Democrats that oversee spending. In those places, you should see a marked difference between federal services (where big bad Republicans have a say) and state and local services (where it’s all controlled by a one-party Democratic system). But you don’t.