By Anson Burlingame
While living and working in Las Vegas in the early 1990’s I observed a new casino (Treasure Island) built and opened one year after the previous, old casino, had been demolished with explosives. Treasure Island was a marvel of technology at that time including a routine event involving a large ship attacking a pirate stronghold, the ship sinking and the pirates winning. About eight hours later the show was repeated with the previous sunken ship back in action, afloat!
My wife and I had watched the demolition on local TV and attended the opening ceremony a year later. My comment at the time was, “If the government had designed, built and begun operations of Treasure Island, it would have taken 20 years”.
If you want something new, innovative, built on time and at or below costs, the last organization anyone would want to build it and operate it would be the federal government of the United States today. Is it any wonder that many Americans want their government to be more flexible, responsive, innovative and cost effective? Just check the results of the 2024 presidential election.
Why is it so hard to “create” within our system of government today? The obvious answer is that our government has clogged the process to build and operate things with a stultifying set of laws, regulations, rules, even “norms.” It also has established a network of over two million employees whose job is to enforce all those requirements. Most bureaucrats, government employees, are rewarded for following all the rules, but no penalties for failing to create something new, faster, better and cheaper.
This new administration in America is trying to unclogged the American process of creating things, in essence designing and building things faster, better cheaper. It is faced with strong resistance from so called “progressives” who want to protect and defend the current system of bureaucracy, even expand it.
It is the current system that got us to the point of frustration by the majority of voters in America in 2024 who asked for a government to do things faster, better and cheaper. Now, two months in to that new administration the screams of resistance are deafening. I wonder if we should have a six month election cycle to better reflect the decisions of “we the people?”
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The author is a retired captain of a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine.