Remember the Grand GOP experiment to "Cut Government waste" -- the 8 to 10% budgets cuts across the board for all Federal Agencies, irregardless of individual effectiveness or importance of mission?
Well blindly make such budget cuts, without justification or analysis, can leave some important Governmental missions sorely lacking -- mission statements like protecting the President and the First Family.
Seems $1.7 Billion Can’t Make the White House Safe: Opening Line
by C. Thompson, businessweek.com -- October 01, 2014
[...]
Yet Secret Service Director Julia Pierson testified yesterday that budget cuts attributed to the sequestration rules left staffing for the unit “below optimal level,” Del Quentin Wilber reports. She says they’re down 550 people, none of whom can now be blamed for allowing an armed security contractor with a criminal record onto an elevator with Obama three days before the fence-jumping incident.
[...]
Sadly this "across the board"
Grand GOP experiment is slated to continue each year through 2021 -- all because
the GOP's twin fears of "Debt and Taxes."
Someone should ask if any of them ever had to take out a Mortgage Loan, or finance a College Education -- given how much dread the idea of "Debt" gives them.
Damn the consequences -- the Debt hobgoblin must be fed ... (as long as they never use their Constitutional authority to raise Revenues, to feed it.)
"Cut the Budget! Shut Down the Government! Fear the Debt!" ... those are the 3-legs to the tottering Republican governing stool.
Well in that fear-everything GOP fantasy world, the Sequester Budget Cuts are apparently made with play Monopoly Money, in order to punish cash-flush Bureaucratic Do-gooders;
But in the Real world -- that one the GOP refuses to live in -- Sequester Budget Cuts impact real jobs, real effectiveness, and real mission outcomes ...
Did sequestration cause the Secret Service’s problems?
by Josh Hicks, washingtonpost.com -- October 01, 2014
[...]
Answering Norton, Secret Service Director Julia Pierson said her organization is 550 employees below its “optimal level.”
But GOP lawmakers weren’t buying excuses. “You’re not going to tell us that sequestration is the reason your agents didn’t find evidence” of bullets striking the White House until days after the shooting, said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).
“No I am not,” Pierson replied.
[...]
“I do see the difficulty in trying to operate a critical federal agency in times of fiscal constraint,” Pierson said.
[...]
The GOP sees no such "difficulty" ...
since they ARE the "difficulty."
With 3 Times the Threat Level being routinely endured by the President and his family:
Shouldn't that be met with 3 Times funding for the Secret Service equipment and staffing?
That is a common-sense "Government effectiveness" question that the GOP will probably never ask, given their well-stated hated for all things Government ... especially a Democratically-elected Government, and a Democrat-directed Government.
They rather just "slash and burn" everything, that generations of Americans, have spent their lifetimes, 'directing' our Government to provide. (... things like the safety and security of America's First Family.)
In their fear-everything GOP fantasy world, the "Mission of Government,"
... is to simply Go Away! That, in their shallow world view, "solves everything."