Running Against the Bureaucracy

Which 2008 presidential candidate would be most likely to put federal management issues on the agenda and push for a bureaucratic overhaul? Maybe one who's not officially in the race yet: In a piece about former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., who headed the then-Governmental Affairs Committee during his tenure on the Hill, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal, writes that "the federal government's inability to function effectively would likely be a major theme" in a Thompson campaign. "Audits have shown we've lost control of the waste and mismanagement in our most important agencies," Thompson says. "It's getting so bad it's affecting our national security." And that's not all:

The next president, according to Mr. Thompson, needs to exercise strong leadership "and get down in the weeds and fix a civil-service system that makes it too hard to hire good employees and too hard to fire bad ones." He doesn't offer specifics on what to do, but notes the "insanity" of the new Congress pushing for the unionization of homeland security employees only five years after it rejected the notion in the wake of 9/11. "Should we tie ourselves up in bureaucratic knots with the challenges we may have to face?" he asks in wonderment.

Lots of presidential candidates run against the bureaucracy, but it's not every election cycle that one opens his campaign by getting down into the weeds of agency audits and civil service reform. Of course, Thompson's not officially a candidate yet. He's only said he's "looking at" running. (Hat tip: Kausfiles.)