[blackeyeblitzar]

I do like your idea of temporary funding as an automatic off ramp. But my experience is that jurisdiction that have things like temporary levies just end up with voters blindly renewing those levies. Why? Because they’re told a scary story of how the basic services they rely on will be first to go (instead of the agencies cutting out wasteful or non critical spending first). If there’s no choice or competition, you end up being forced to pay for them because of these games.

Even if they’re not temporary though, agencies should have clear goals, metrics, and be held accountable to those. For example how many times have we seen wasteful spending on opaque homelessness programs on the west coast with zero results?

In my opinion we need to rethink how agencies are funded. Why do we need to give a bloated government a big tax check instead of having agencies work hard to win customers and charge them fees? Agencies should also (sometimes but not always) be forced to face competition from alternative private providers to keep the pressure of competition on.