Why So Many Different Government Programs--Tom Davis

From a Government Executive piece on a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, who for a short while represented me in the House testified:

But the committee's former chairman added Congress itself deserves much of the blame for redundant programs. He noted that the need for a particular service often arises out of jurisdictional greed.
For example, if a member of the Education and Workforce Committee wants to enact a job training program, he or she will write the legislation to ensure it falls under an agency in that committee's purview, Davis said. The same philosophy could then hold true for members of Veterans Affairs and Financial Services committees, who establish similar programs under the jurisdiction of their own panels.
"Under this arrangement, they are all funded differently, measured differently and administered differently," Davis said. "Common sense suggests they should be combined to take advantage of economies of scale, or even just to make it easier for citizens to know these programs exist. We can blame the bureaucracy, but in many ways Congress created the many-headed monster we bemoan in an attempt to protect its jurisdictional prerogatives."

See my earlier post.