Deflating Government
Over the last 70 years, the federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on helium for military blimps. The program has escaped budget cuts even though it has enough gas to supply the entire world’s need for the next decade.
Now, a death sentence seems inescapable.
The World War I-vintage helium reserve will probably be one of a slew of casualties in a race between the White House and the Republican Congress to dismantle federal agencies and eliminate programs.
President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore already had succeeded in shrinking government by 100,000 people over two years in their “Reinventing Government” program, but the elections sparked a new zeal for deeper cuts.
“Once the election happened, it was like adding a booster rocket to a plane that was gliding along just fine,” said David Osborne, author of “Reinventing Government.”
“Now, the perspective is: We’ve got to reinvent or we’ll die.”
In the second phase of their reinventing drive, Clinton and Gore have sent teams into every agency.
The issues are: What does the government do and should it be doing this? What’s obsolete? Can it be done better at the state or local level? What can be sold or given away? And if it must be kept, how can it be streamlined and improved?
“The administration understands that Republicans would like to take an ax and not a scalpel to the federal budget and agencies, and therefore they’re trying to get a little out front of that effort,” said Thomas Mann, a Brookings Institution specialist on government. “It’s partly opportunity, it’s partly fear.”
The helium reserve is a good example of the administration’s new determination to limit government.
The program survived GOP attempts to kill it in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Gore’s National Performance Review task force placed it on a hit list in 1993 but the idea died at the White House.
Last year, though, the program’s biggest congressional defender, Texas Democrat Bill Sarpalius, was defeated. And now the White House has changed its tune.
“The helium reserve is an obsolete function,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior adviser to Gore. “We do not need as a matter of national security a reserve of helium for blimps.”
Kamarck said there’s no doubt that Republicans are going to try to cut more deeply than the administration.
“We’re going to draw lines,” she said. “It may sound easy to kill the Transportation Department until you look at what’s in it and then you say, ‘Wait a minute. There are safety functions in here.’ Do the American people really want us to get rid of the Federal Aviation Administration? I don’t think so.”