Forget OMB--The Onion Has Ways to Improve Efficiency

Despite OMB's best efforts to trim waste from the government, The Onion believes it is inevitable that billions and billions of dollars will be wasted on unnecessary or absurd government expenditures. So why not make that waste awesome?

Forget bridges to nowhere and researching whether mice become disoriented when they consume alcohol. The Onion would redirect spending on all of these wasteful projects towards things that we could all use. Take the defense budget for example. They spend billions and billions on vehicles that have huge cost overruns, provide little improvement over their previous models, and most importantly, provide little entertainment value for the taxpayers. So, says activist Brian McGill, why not funnel that money into spending on a giant laser that anyone could shoot?

Among the other ideas proposed:

• eliminate farm subsidies and use the money to make the world's largest kielbasa
• eliminate oil tax preferences and use the money to either build a shopping mall in the clouds, develop an invisibility pill, triple the length of summer, or make boomerangs that actually come back to you
• stop funding new prisons until money is allocated to capture Bigfoot (idea courtesy of Rep. Saxby Chambliss)
• take money out of NASA to fund a project that would make cartoon characters come to life (Grover Norquist's idea)

Of course, CRFB supports all of these ideas (especially the kielbasa one), but we worry about how it all would work out in practice. Many of these projects could be subject to the same inefficiencies and failures as the Pentagon, making us no closer to eating a 2,000-foot sausage than we were under the old system. We must be vigilant that we are funding our wasteful spending in an efficient manner, so as to not unnecessarily cost the taxpayer.