[rpcope1]

There was a related Andy Kessler OpEd in the WSJ recently that shared the same tone (I can't tell if Andy is being sarcastic, but he's full of a lot of bad ideas, so I doubt it). He was advocating for wholesale removal of a lot of agencies, including the FCC, Department of Energy, and Department of Commerce, and made the claim that the FCC could be replaced by a couple of economists. I don't know if they don't understand what all the FCC does and what would happen if you removed the FCC (and just had a spectrum free-for-all), or that a lot of our research prowess comes from DoE grants, or that Department of Commerce runs things like NIST (and that it's laughable to consider disbanding what's likely the source of truth for more than just the US on absolute boatloads of metrology).

I get that there's almost certainly a lot of bloat in the government, but just outright axing stuff doesn't seem like the right way to fix things. I also don't think that we bleed the most money on those anyways, and that entitlements and what to do with them are the real elephant in the room (but of course it's not politically expedient to talk about doing anything to those, at all, ever). Fixing our debt problem (and it's a real problem, no matter what crackpot modern monetary theory believers say) will involve some pain, including likely and unfortunately raising taxes and curtailing benefits somewhere.