When the route to immortality is to become a government program, how can wasteful, dysfunctional bureaucracies be weeded out? Try a "predatory bureaucracy." A predator is an organism that captures and extracts its sustenance from other animals. We can learn a great deal about the federal budget by, as a simple thought experiment, introducing a "predator" into the U.S. government.
First, imagine a bureaucracy, the Agency of Budgetary Control (ABC), established with funds to carry it for only two years. This constraint is critical. In the future, its budget would come only from money it saves taxpayers by eliminating waste inside other agencies' budgets.
Suppose the Bureau of Reclamation requests $600 million for the Las Animas-La Plata dam-building project in Colorado, estimated to produce just $50 million of value to farmers. This dam's damaging ecological consequences and economic costs likely far outweigh its benefits.
The ABC would marshal evidence against the project, employing ecologists, economists and local residents. They'd join with groups such as The Wilderness Society and the National Taxpayers' Union to advertise the dam's high costs. They would oppose the testimony developed by the Bureau of Reclamation. If the dam were defeated, the ABC would receive 10% of the project's expenses. That 10% would be taken from the "prey" agency's operating budget. In that hypothetical case, the Bureau of Reclamation would be punished $60 million. The predatory agency would thrive only if it were successful at eliminating programs.
With its budgetary windfall, the predatory agency could do what all bureaucracies do: add more staff, buy expensive office equipment and diligently pursue a bigger budget. Perhaps all those new staffers could then challenge certain U.S. Forest Service timber sales. Stopping below-cost timber sales is no easy feat - analysts have been arguing against them for 25 years - but if a predator agency stands to gain some of the $160 million the Forest Service loses in such sales, we might expect it to invest millions in an unprecedented campaign to bring fiscal prudence.
That predator agency would harness the fundamental pathology of bureaucracies - the propensity toward perpetuation and growth - for social benefit.
Other bureaucracies in Washington would wise up. A series of successful attacks would have a profound effect upon any bureaucrat's learning curve. Since they'd be uncertain which programs would fall subject to attack, they'd have a strong incentive to avoid proposing dubious projects. Agencies would be forced to be more efficient and productive, or else predators would eat away their budgets.
The system would provide incentives for government to police itself against waste and pork-barrel projects, particularly since it would be much less costly for an agency to decide to end one of its own foolish programs rather than to face the predator. The environmental metaphor is particularly telling. Ecosystems that lack predators become dangerously unbalanced, leading to overpopulation of prey species and a ripple effect of ecosystem deterioration. Introducing a predator into the U.S. Treasury "ecosystem" is an idea whose time has come.