The power to trim government

Opinion: January 30, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Dallas Morning News: We hope President Barack Obama is serious about making the federal government work more efficiently. We call on Congress to give him the power to make good on his — and their — pledge.

In a surprise move earlier this month, the president asked Congress to give him fast-track authority to merge federal agencies, specifically to eliminate the Commerce Department and fold the Small Business Administration and five other trade and business agencies into a single agency. The savings, he said, would be $3 billion over 10 years. He called it the first step toward other money-saving consolidations of federal agencies.

While intriguing, the president needs to offer more detail to move beyond what has become, on both sides of the partisan aisle, an almost reflexive nod toward “reinventing” government. What we haven’t heard, and need to hear from the president, is precisely what duties and responsibilities would go away and what duplication of services would be eliminated. And would some agencies, such as the U.S. Trade Representative, operate better as streamlined, focused units than mashed into a new bureaucracy?

Bigger isn’t always better

Americans want better, smarter government, and efficiency is the true standard of whether government is lean and mean or simply producing more of the same in a different guise. Bigger isn’t always uniformly better and sometimes creates other challenges. One example is the post-9/11 cobbling together of law enforcement and intelligence agencies into the Department of Homeland Security.

Still, Republicans have long talked about making government more efficient. They would be imprudent to let this opportunity pass. Even if the president has opened this door to smaller government for political reasons, the GOP should be quick to walk through it.

Conservatives should see the merit to restoring this authority to the White House. Ronald Reagan was the last president who had the authority to bypass a Senate filibuster by showing that proposed consolidations would save taxpayer dollars and improve efficiency.