Victims of Bureaucracy

Rep. Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, continued his rhetorical assault on the federal bureaucracy this week. In a speech yesterday at the Ripon Society in Washington, Issa once again took agencies and the people who run them to task for operating a system rife with waste and mismanagement.

According to a summary of the speech provided by the Ripon Society, Issa pledged that in his work, he would "look for failures of government. But it is not - and I repeat - it is not about past operations of my committee, whether it was [former chairman Henry] Waxman [D-Calif.] or other people in my party. It's not about the occupant of the Oval Office. The occupant of the Oval Office is usually more a victim of the bureaucracy they did not anticipate and cannot change."

"I want to tell everybody here that if power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then money -- as it grows larger than it needs to be, as it is assigned to programs and administration -- corrupts the very process, " Issa added.

At the same time, he acknowledged that ferreting out waste won't, by itself, erase the federal budget deficit. "I'm the first to say that we cannot wrench $1.4 trillion out just based on waste, fraud and abuse," he said. The committees of jurisdiction are going to have to make big, hard decisions. We are not going to be able to bring as much money into Social Security as we currently do and pay as much out as we currently do forever."