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250,000 new bureaucrats

March 4, 2009 | By Nathaniel Ward

Just how many new government officials will it take to administer the new federal spending the Congress and administration are proposing?

It could be as many as 250,000, Heritage Foundation experts tell the Washington Post.

What's really in the budget?

Despite the recession and the $1.4 trillion budget deficit, the House passed a $410 billion "omnibus" spending bill last week. Combined with the colossal $1.1 trillion "stimulus" bill, the omnibus increases spending for discretionary programs a staggering 80 percent -- from $378 billion in 2008 to $680 billion this year.

And President Barack Obama has now introduced his 2010 budget, which goes even further. Heritage budget expert Brian Riedl analyzed this plan in depth and reveals some hidden truths:

» Read more of Riedl's analysis of the new tax-and-spend proposal 

Other Heritage work of note

  • The New York Times had this to say about The Heritage Foundation's importance in its Sunday magazine: "And several blocks from the Capitol stands the beast of them all, the almost mythical Heritage Foundation, with its $60 million budget and eight-story complex, complete with housing for 60 interns, two auditoriums and two broadcast studios. Heritage is the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis, the names of its founding donors inscribed on the lobby wall for history to remember."
  • Heritage's Rory Cooper explains how the Obama tax plan is already having an economic effect: "entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers ... will cut back hours and eliminate jobs to get under the President's threshold for redistribution." And the proposed cuts to the charitable giving deduction will harm "the charities that these Americans already gave to so generously."
  • The Obama administration has offered to scrap the nation's critical missile defense deployment in Europe in exchange for Russian promises to help disarm Iran. "If hitting the 'reset' button on US-Russian relations mean the United States has to make itself intentionally vulnerable to a potential Iranian threat," Heritage's Conn Carroll argues, "that's a really bad deal."
  • The administration has put forward its vision for health care reform, but it avoids real, patient-centered reforms in favor of bigger government. Heritage experts explain: "President Obama's health care budget proposal is large but surprisingly unimaginative. It depends on old-fashioned, populist, 'soak the rich' tax hikes combined with technocratic tinkering with administrative payment and new software in anticipation of program savings. It does very little to change America's flawed public and private third-party payment arrangements, where value is secured for 'payers,' not individual patients."
  • An activist group has proposed new benchmarks for charitable organizations. Among their criteria for "good" charities: devoting half their resources to marginalized groups and another quarter to "equity, opportunity and justice" advocacy. This report, says Heritage Vice President John Von Kannon (link in PDF), "uses the language of political correctness in an attempt to intimidate philanthropists who may not share their worldview. Like all attempts to impose political correctness, at the same time that it claims to be calling for diversity, the result of imposing the NCRP's standards on philanthropy in America would be a uniformity such as has never existed, nor should ever exist in this country."

In other news

  • The Obama administration is trying to restore economic confidence, the Washington Post reports. Perhaps it could do so by pushing for pro-growth policies that will help recovery instead of harmful tax increases and a return to redistributionist ideas.

Coming up at Heritage

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Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.