On Monday, President Obama said in an interview with MSNBC that one “bipartisan” thing he would like to do in his next term is reduce government waste by consolidating a variety of existing agencies involved in helping American businesses. The idea, said the president, is to streamline the bureaucracy and create a “one-stop shop” under “one secretary of business.” Bureaucratic reform is definitely a good idea, but this proposal is pretty weak. Moreover, the impetus behind the move and the rhetoric to support it are particularly troubling.
Conservative commentators have spent the week criticizing the plan for various reasons, and now the Romney campaign has picked up on the issue with a new ad and some fresh lines in the stump speech. The most common retorts have been that we already have a secretary of commerce, that adding a bureaucrat in Washington won’t help business, and that Obama now wants to add even more regulation.
Despite the recent attention, the president’s proposal is not new. Reorganizing the federal bureaucracy was a topic in his 2011 State of the Union Address , and he proposed a more detailed plan (the one he alluded to on Monday) in January of 2012. That plan involves reshuffling various agencies handling international trade matters into a single department.
The agencies included in the plan are the Department of Commerce, the Export–Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the Small Business Administration (SBA), the United State Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), and the United States Trade Representative (USTR). While the plan isn’t new, this is the first I’ve heard of possibly naming it the Department of Business. I suspect it would eventually have some other, even more obfuscating name, but “secretary of business” gets the idea across well enough during campaign season.
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