The Balance of Power

The impulse to use the powers of government is strong, even among those who hew to Thomas Paine's principle: "That government is best which governs least."

Witness the Bush administration's record on fiscal policy. Its tax cuts have been designed to rein in government's ability and will to spend. But spending has skyrocketed in the past three years and the decision to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare is the most expensive new program enacted in many a year.

Less observed than its fiscal policy has been the administration's record in the regulatory arena, which also shows conflicting trends.

On one side of the regulatory ledger, the administration has indeed made a big effort to lift the yoke of government from the shoulders of American industry. In a survey of these initiatives published on Aug. 14, The New York Times reported that in the fields of health, the environment, energy, worker safety and product safety disclosure, rules "have been modified in ways that often please business and industry while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly and many others." The Times quoted Office of Management and Budget official John Graham as saying, "The Bush administration has cut the growth of costly business regulations by 75 percent, compared to the previous two administrations."

But it's not only these deregulatory initiatives that have been bulking up the Federal Register in recent times. On the other side of the ledger have been a plethora of regulations to implement the USA Patriot Act and additional domestic security measures. The Justice and Homeland Security departments have been churning out regulations centralizing power in Washington. In one example, the 2002 Maritime Transportation Security Act turned the Coast Guard, now part of Homeland Security, into a big-league regulator for the first time. As Katherine McIntire Peters reports in this issue, Coast Guard officials have worked 16-hour days writing rules that require thousands of ports, big and small, to come up with security plans, and then approving each and every one of the plans submitted.

National and domestic security may be at stake in such cases, but one can hardly make this argument in the instance of government's new war on obesity. In what seems an entirely discretionary initiative, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson has called for "a very major role" for government in combating obesity. As Denise Kersten reports in a compelling assessment of Thompson's program, the secretary has marshaled the resources of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute and other parts of the National Institutes of Health to help in the battle of the bulge. Some of the effort is hortatory, some regulatory, some research-based, but all in all it certainly leans in the direction of the kind of "big-government nanny state" Republicans are given to deriding. And it won't come cheap, inasmuch as the Medicare program has just decided to cover anti-obesity treatments.

But then, who's counting? And after all, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."