This is a common theme in Republican administrations dating back to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. What you do is you break the government, make it very hard for the government to function, and then you loudly announce that the government can’t do anything.
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Department of Commerce
not an exhaustive set of proposals, the next conservative President should consider whether:
• The International Trade Administration (ITA) and parts of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) should be streamlined and moved to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), along with the Development Finance Corporation; the U.S. Trade and Development Agency; the ExportImport Bank; and other trade-related programs spread across the federal government—as well as considering whether many of these programs should exist within the federal government;
• The Economic Development Administration’s grant programs, which are among a broad set of duplicative and overlapping federal economic development grant programs, should be consolidated with other programs and/or eliminated;
• The Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau, as well as the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, should be consolidated into amore manageable, focused, and efficient statistical agency;
• The US. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should be made into a performance-based organization under the Office of Management and Budget (OMB);
• Alternatively, the USPTO should be consolidated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in a new USS. Office of Patents, Trademarks, and Standards, with all non-mission-critical research functions eliminated or moved to other, more focused, federal agencies; and
• The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.
Almost every element of the department can be viewed through this lens, but with today’s political reality and multiple competing congressional committee jurisdictions, drastic structural change to the department is neither imminent nor likely. Thus, this chapter largely accepts the baseline of today’s department and proposes a bold, but achievable, set of proposals for an incoming conservative Administration.
Whatever the imperfections of the Department of Commerce, it is blessed with many quality civil servants and strong statutory authorities that, directed properly,