Lost Sense of Duty

[Geee]

American Spectator:

The mindless gnomes of the General Services Administration and the highly-trained agents of the United States Secret Service have one thing in common: they are all federal civil servants. But the difference between them, and the import of the scandals now hanging heavily over both agencies, are symptoms of something bigger that we ignore at our peril.

We expect very little from the GSA, and we get it. The GSA culture on display in the planning, execution, and celebration of their infamous $800,000 Las Vegas conference was the inevitable result of the permissive "you'll die before you can get fired" culture that predominates many federal bureaucracies. The GSA'ers are fat, dumb, and happy in their jobs and have no interest in being responsible stewards of the public purse. Like so many other dysfunctional agencies, GSA should be disbanded entirely, which can be done without much effect on anything else.

The GSA scandal gives the lie to the liberal ideology. More government isn't better government. More government, and an ever-expanding unaccountable bureaucracy, means more waste, fraud, and misbehavior by civil servants who don't believe they'll ever be fired for bad job performance.

But the Secret Service is not the GSA, the Department of Education, or HHS. It's a law enforcement agency, an intelligence agency and it has close connections to the military. It and the rest of the law enforcement community have a lot in common with the military in terms of culture, mindset and -- most importantly -- sense of duty.