CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – On yesterday’s WSAU Wisconsin Morning News, host Meg Ellefson offered a long list of dubious federally funded research. You and me – the taxpayers – fund university studies on how bumble bees behave when high on cocaine, on why monkeys use one hand and not another when throwing their feces, and on how pigeons respond to games of chance.
I’d like the professors who received these grants to be called up to Capitol Hill to explain how their findings are advancing the human condition. I suspect we’d be told that it’s too complicated for us to understand.
These grants are easy targets for DOGE, the government efficiency office to be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy.
There is another category of waste the DOGE needs to tackle. Our government is full of overlapping programs – each with their own staffs, and offices, and baskets of funding. It’s believed that there are six programs that help homeless veterans find housing. (And, obviously, the problem persists.) Could that be consolidated to two? We have no less than eight programs that feed poor women and children. Some of them give direct grants to state programs that do the same thing.
All of this layered duplication needs to be eliminated.
But as soon as these programs are cut, immediately the big spenders will find people who are impacted. Veteran Jim depends on the Military Housing Assistance Program to keep a roof over his head. No, he won’t become homeless – his case will be moved to the Office of Veterans Housing, perhaps one of the programs that survives. Imagine the mother and child who says she depends on the Feeding Hungry Babies program – which may be consolidated into Women, Infants and Children.
These sob stories will be pushed by government paper-pushers, who don’t want to lose their offices, their jobs, their benefits.
I’m not the cold, heartless person who is throwing veterans into the streets or letting babies go hungry. What I am saying is that duplicate services within our government is legion. Now is a rare opportunity to eliminate and consolidate. We can’t afford to pay for the same things over and over again.
Chris Conley
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