Advice for returning Congress
The Free Press
Mankato, Minn.

Congress is returning to Washington this week with what is being described as a record high disapproval rating.

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll showed 82 percent of those surveyed disapproved of the job Congress was doing.

We know Congress can be the point of all that ails Americans but even this recent survey suggests a discontent, and more importantly, a lack of confidence, in the people’s representatives not seen before.

So here’s our advice on how Congress can improve its standing:

Consider five issues where Republicans and Democrats are closest to each other, and pass those bills with as little posturing, wasted time and acrimony as possible. Refrain from issuing press releases on how one side won the battle.

If we can’t come up with five issues, come up with two. Americans will appreciate the effort.

Consider changes in committee membership if current committee members create too much of a partisan atmosphere or the committee seems to get very little done. If the starters can’t get the job done, bring in the B-team that is willing to work harder.

Consider changes in committee leadership, or overall leadership based on the challenges ahead. Do your leaders have the right skills to make split government work, or are their skills geared more toward creating conflict and disruption?

Never miss a good opportunity to shut up. Think twice before issuing partisan press releases. When calling a news conference ask yourself, “Am I doing this to bolster my side and provide some more soundbites, or am I doing this to show a way forward?”

It’s clear from the recent poll that more and more Americans are not happy with business as usual. A responsive government would change that, and change that as fast as it could.

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Wasting to save?
The Joplin Globe
Joplin, Mo.

The congressionally appointed four-year study related to wartime contracting during the period 2002 -2011 reports $206 billion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The final report estimates that the waste and/or fraud as a result of such contracts might be between $31 billion up to possibly $60 billion over nine years of warfare.

The recommendations in the final report strike us as fundamentally wrong. While we agree that questionable contracting needs to be addressed, the report states emphatically that the solution is to both develop more “core competencies” imbedded in existing government agencies or to expand the bureaucratic oversight of such wartime contracting during wars and, we assume, other forms of military interventions.

In other words, we should expect the government to permanently grow in size to spend more money to stop wasting money in wartime. The other more fundamental error in the report addresses why we contract for such goods and services during wartime.

We can fight the wars with our military alone and pay with our defense budget approved by Congress, then leave “reconstruction” to nonmilitary and nonwartime efforts. But strategically, with our approved Counter Insurgency Strategy (CIS) supported by Presidents Bush and Obama, we must do reconstruction and transfer control to indigenous people during wartime.

So before Congress leaps at the chance to expand the bureaucracy to support wartime contracting, let’s look again at CIS. Is that a strategy that is achievable? Some may call it “nation building,” which we seem to lack the ability to do for the past 10 years and counting.