{"id":1530008,"date":"2025-04-12T15:40:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-12T19:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1530008"},"modified":"2025-04-12T15:40:00","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T19:40:00","slug":"might-of-the-living-feds-the-need-to-tackle-the-1500-zombie-govt-departments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/might-of-the-living-feds-the-need-to-tackle-the-1500-zombie-govt-departments\/1530008\/","title":{"rendered":"Might Of The Living Feds: The Need To Tackle The 1,500+ ‘Zombie’ Gov’t Departments"},"content":{"rendered":"

Might Of The Living Feds: The Need To Tackle The 1,500+ ‘Zombie’ Gov’t Departments<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Bob Ivry, Jeremy Portnoy and RealClearInvestigations<\/a>,<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help<\/strong>. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington on April 3, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu\/The Epoch Times<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

They never did. Still, Congress has funded LSC every year since.<\/strong> In fiscal 2025, its 51st\u00a0year, LSC\u2019s 135 employees will spend 95 percent of its now $560 million\u00a0annual budget<\/a>\u00a0paying legal groups to represent Americans in cases such as eviction, domestic violence, and disputes over government benefits, according to Ron Flagg, the agency\u2019s president since 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cLSC would welcome reauthorization,\u201d Flagg said. \u201cWe haven\u2019t hidden from it. Every budget cycle, we go through an exhaustive process before Congress appropriates funds \u2014 dozens of meetings with leaders of both parties. We demonstrate our return on investment, how we help 2 million Americans get life-saving legal help.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Legal Services Corp. now stands as America\u2019s oldest \u201cZombie\u201d program, but it\u2019s far from unique. At a time when the Trump administration is moving aggressively to scale back government, including eliminating the entire Education Department, it\u2019s sobering\u00a0to note that 1,503 agencies or programs live on despite expired authorizations, according to the Congressional Budget Office.\u00a0Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30. The Zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a budgetary netherworld. <\/strong>In a deep dive last year,\u00a0CBO analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. They don\u2019t know how much funding the other programs received.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0total federal budget in 2024 was $6.8 trillion<\/a>, meaning expired Zombie programs take up at least 8 percent of the budget, and likely much more.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of programs don\u2019t get reauthorized because Congress is okay with how they\u2019re operating<\/strong>,\u201d said Josh Huder, former congressional staffer now at the Georgetown University Government Affairs Institute. \u201cThey continue to get annual appropriations because most members think they\u2019re worthwhile.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many Zombie programs now soak up far more funding than lawmakers originally envisioned. The Federal Election Commission, for example, was expected to spend\u00a0$9.4 million<\/a>\u00a0per year before its authorization expired in 1981. Yet the agency continued to receive funding and spent $95 million in 2024, auditors at government watchdog\u00a0Open The Books<\/a>\u00a0found. The Federal Communications Commission was originally allocated $339.6 million per year. Its funding authorization expired in 2020, yet it spent\u00a0$28.4 billion<\/a>\u00a0last year.<\/p>\n

Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency hasn\u2019t addressed the Zombies that are prowling the federal spreadsheets. Given DOGE\u2019s headlong push to first root out alleged waste, fraud, and abuse and ask questions later, experts say, Zombies may offer a ripe target.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne could imagine that if DOGE is clued into the notion of expired authorizations, they\u2019ll think a program is defunct,\u201d said Sarah Binder, senior fellow at Brookings and professor of political science at George Washington University. She said this would be a mistake. \u201cIf Congress is still appropriating money to the programs, they\u2019re not Zombies. They\u2019re living, breathing agencies.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Binder says the fault lies not with the agencies, some of which have become important enough to be household names, but Congress. Lawmakers have made it so difficult to accomplish their most fundamental tasks, such as funding the government for another year, that they hardly ever get around to doing other important things, such as reauthorizing existing programs.<\/p>\n

The Foreign Relations Authorization Act, for example, expired in 2003. Yet in 2024, Congress spent $38.4 billion on 24 of the law\u2019s programs, allowing legislators to influence the White House\u2019s foreign policy and security assistance to other nations.<\/p>\n

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce, now led by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), supported the funding of 346 expired programs, more than any other committee,<\/strong> the CBO found. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, now chaired by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), spent more identifiable money than any other group: $153.5 billion.<\/p>\n

\u201cCongress\u2019 job doesn\u2019t stop when they allocate the money,\u201d said Casey Burgat, professor at George Washington University\u2019s Graduate School of Political Management. \u201cThey have to oversee it. And when they fail to do that they open themselves up to somebody else doing that. In this case, an aggressive executive branch in the form of DOGE.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the 1,503 agencies or programs, 22 remain alive that required a reauthorization vote as long ago as the 1980s, according to the CBO. In addition to the Legal Services Corp., whose authorization expired in 1980, and the FEC (a 1981 reauthorization deadline), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which oversees the country\u2019s power grids (1984) and the Energy Information Administration, or EIA, whose data informs U.S. policymaking (1984), are among the Zombies pushing middle age.<\/p>\n

Congress has appropriated annual funding for EIA since its inception in 1977, the agency said in an emailed statement. \u201cSubsequent legislation has continued to direct EIA to conduct data collection, analysis and dissemination activities consistent with our mission as the nation\u2019s premier source of energy information.\u201d Spokespeople for the FEC, FERC, and the CBO declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Another Zombie, the U.S. African Development Foundation\u2014whose authorization expired in 1987\u2014made headlines earlier this month when its officials\u00a0blocked<\/a>\u00a0DOGE staff from entering their offices in Washington.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Congress has a history of denying or skipping reauthorizations. In the 1980s and 90s, former North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms\u00a0became famous<\/a> for holding up authorizations of the State Department, which he often found insufficiently vigilant against communism. The frequent flare-ups between Helms and the diplomats of State earned him the nickname \u201cSenator No.\u201d And NASA, the widely respected space program, recently went through\u00a0periods of time<\/a>\u00a0when Congress funded it but didn\u2019t reauthorize it.<\/p>\n

The CBO\u2019s list of 1,000-plus agencies and programs with expired reauthorization deadlines offers a window into the variety and volume of federal government activity, from grants to remove lead from drinking water and protect against radon to collecting statistics on prison rape. Lawmakers seem to be nursing a mild obsession with fish. Over the years, they\u2019ve funded without reauthorization a herring study, for instance, and programs to help Atlantic striped bass and tuna thrive. It seems part of a larger interest in wildlife, which includes conservation programs for elephants, rhinos, and tigers and the control and eradication of the venomous\u00a0brown tree snake<\/a>, an invasive pest infamous for devouring a scary chunk of Guam\u2019s bird population.<\/p>\n

Environmental and health programs populate the list, from monitoring water quality at beaches and the Energy Star appliance program to medical care for children with asthma and funding for the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. There are also provisions for improving airport security, protection for railroad first responders, and working capital for the Department of Homeland Security. Like a cherry on top, there\u2019s also funding for the Office of Government Ethics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Congress, whose 29 percent\u00a0job-approval rating<\/a>\u00a0in February was the highest in four years, would probably \u201chave a hard time assembling a list of programs that they\u2019ve authorized,\u201d said Burgat of George Washington University. \u201cIt\u2019s a power void.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Congress Doesn\u2019t Have the Time\u2019<\/h2>\n

\u2018DOGE steps into that vacuum with constitutional limitations. In 1974, Congress enacted the Impoundment Control Act, which prohibits presidents from refusing to spend the money that Congress allocates.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has challenged the constitutionality of the impoundment law, and DOGE is an ongoing test of the separation of powers between the legislative branch and the executive.<\/p>\n

\u201cAuthorizations and appropriations are both law<\/strong>,\u201d said Brookings\u2019 Binder. \u201cAs long as Congress is voting to spend money on these programs, it would be an impoundment to close them. It would be unconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n

To remedy the situation, Congress would have to go through the list of Zombies and decide whether to reauthorize each one, a tedious process that evidently has hovered nowhere near the top of its priority list. \u201cCongress doesn\u2019t have the time to do good institutional housecleaning,\u201d Binder said. \u201cThere are a lot of little programs, but also a good deal of big ones. They don\u2019t have the capacity to keep tabs on the authorizations.\u201d<\/p>\n

For now, Ron Flagg of Legal Services Corp. waits with a cautious optimism, wary about how DOGE will perceive his agency but confident that after a half century, LSC has the ability to stand up for itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the first Trump administration we got a raise in money because Congress members don\u2019t view our work as a partisan issue,\u201d Flagg said. \u201cLSC has an ability to go to Congress with the facts. We publish grants, we tell you how many people were served and how many cases were closed and how technology has been advanced and how funding has been leveraged by volunteers. We\u2019re able to make those points to Congress as part as the annual funding process.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure other agencies have the same ability to advocate for the quality of their work.\u201d<\/p>\n

From RealClearInvestigations<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSat, 04\/12\/2025 – 11:40<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/might-living-feds-need-tackle-1500-zombie-govt-departments<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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