Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Who Will Watch the Watchers?

Smaller government = smaller corruption

Now the Office of the Special Counsel of the Federal Government has been raided for suppressing whistle blowers. It should be noted that the OSC was created to ensure that whistle blowers in the government are treated fairly, to call out corruptuion when they see it and hopefully be able to do something about. Workers wishes this were ironic.

There are some 2 million government employees. Using a rule of thumb that they teach you in leadership studies, figure 4% are dishonest. This means there are some 80,000 scufflaws working in the 12 Departments, or about 6,000 per Department. This means there's lots of people to look for ways to take for themselves (or give to their friends, say using sole source or competitively-rigged contracting or loose monitoring of government contracts) the government's some $2 trillion dollars per year. Honest people in government who want to help their citizens have an uphill battle when they see and want to do something about corruption incentivitized bureaucrats.