Tilting at the Reorganization Windmill

President Obama has really cut his work out for himself in proposing a huge restructuring of government in his State of the Union address.

Reorganizations are generally thankless tasks. They involve goring a lot of oxes and taking on a lot of sacred cows in pursuit of highly complex, theoretical efforts to make government's organizational chart look cleaner.

The problem is that such reorganizations rarely produce much in the way of savings in the budget. And while every program, office, bureau and department in government has its defenders (both within and outside the bureaucracy), the concept of efficiency and effective operations has few.