The Department of Innovation

November 11, 2017 Greg Penglis 

We don’t have a government department engaged in really long term planning.  We have the same problems going on year after year and no one is set up to do anything about that.  So, it made sense to have an agency dedicated to making the government run more smoothly, with the latest technology, with private industry best practices, and to be able to find out where the inefficiencies are.

This department will prepare the government for the 22nd century by planning long in advance for the future. Also, it will go over the entire federal bureaucracy to remove duplicate programs, waste, corruption, entrenched civil servants that do nothing, and set the government up for minimal resource / maximum output.  This department should be a laboratory for new, creative, and better ways to govern. Could incorporate a private component to inspire private innovation and ideas. Review how we do military contracts and choose weapons systems. Is it for jobs or military needs? Military and weapon systems budgets. Cyber security.

This department will also improve and restructure all interactions of private citizens with the federal government, to include: transparency, simplified forms, all forms in English, removing all racial and ethnic classifications and distinctions for any function of government, give direct access to those affected by specific government policies to reach the people who made the policies, hold “town meetings across the country so people know what services are available, and to open up the process so no agency or department becomes insulated from those affected by their policies, or the general public.

This will be a department that regulates other departments.  Probably the biggest challenge will be the General Services Administration, which runs all the buildings.  The Department of Innovation may replace the General Services Administration.  Salaries and compensation for Department of Innovation to be determined by how much money they save the federal operating budget, how creative they are, and how fast they bring the rest of the government into the latest technology and practices.

Regulations and regulatory agencies may be an obsolete way to govern. Is there a better way?  Probably the most important function of the Department of Innovation is to analyze not just the duplicate and overlapping regulations in place, but to analyze whether the process of regulatory agencies issuing and enforcing regulations is a model we want to continue? 

Regulatory agencies have become their own governments.  They have their own budgets, promulgate regulations within the agency, enforce those regulations, collect fines, and enforce judgments.  They have given money collected from judgments to Leftist special interest groups, like the EPA during the Obama Administration, and they have at best minor oversight from Congress.  Can they come up with a new way to enforce the laws but without the separate and powerful regulatory agencies and departments, with a permanent bureaucracy, where individuals work decades longer than the Representatives and Senators who govern them.