The Reorganization Man

Heading into a three day weekend, Saturday's Wall Street Journal has a tremendous editorial, The Reorganization Man. Below are a few of the better tidbits from the editorial.

There he was in the East Room, explaining that "the government we have is not the government we need." That's for sure, and Mr. Obama even added the Gingrichian theme that "We live in a 21st-century economy, but we've still got a government organized for the 20th century. Our economy has fundamentally changed—as has the world—but our government, our agencies, has not."

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Proposals for government reorganization are the elevator music of politics, always present but never leaving much of an impression. Newt Gingrich says he's running in part to apply Lean Six Sigma best practices to the bureaucracy. Al Gore famously drew up a scheme for "reinventing government" in the late 1990s. He abandoned it after the airline unions revolted amid his attempt to reinvent the Federal Aviation Administration.

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This is a President who last year promised a review of all regulations while riding the greatest rule-making wave in American history. Now he's calling for leaner government without mentioning ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, which create so many new boards and commissions that government auditors (literally) can't even count them. We suspect many in the White House were laughing themselves when they came up with this one.