A little catch-up from last week….
A little catch-up from last week….
Last Wednesday, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee considered a bill that would reauthorize the agency that regulates oil and natural gas pipelines at a cost of $695 million over three years. Not the most interesting topic in the world, but I’d offer that there was a larger implication at play: the way government spending seems to go up in direction.
Looking through some of the bill’s statistics, I came up with a figure that struck me as a big deal: spending on pipeline regulation has gone up 90 percent over the past ten years. My first thought was that we’ve been in the middle of an oil and gas boom, and pipeline mileage must have jumped. The answer was yes but not nearly as much: only five percent over roughly the same period.
We actually crunched the numbers and found that, in the last ten years or so, spending on pipeline inspections had increased at a rate ten times faster than the actual amount of pipelines to inspect! I’d have been less concerned if we were getting more in terms of safety than before as a result of the extra spending, but accidents were flat over that time. Paying more and more for the same results is a pattern we see reflected across multiple government programs. I think it’s reasonable when spending goes up by that much to take a careful look at what the taxpayer is getting in return.
So, I had an amendment drafted that would have kept authorized spending on these pipeline-related programs flat, amounting to a 3.5 percent cut in their growth rate. It came out to about $24 million dollars in savings for the taxpayer.
Ultimately, I did an informal count of who was with me on the spending level, and I came up short on getting a majority, so there was no way I was going to get my amendment across the finish line. Accordingly, I had a conversation with Subcommittee Chairman Jeff Denham, and he agreed to work with me in exchange for withdrawing the amendment, and we will see what comes next.
All this amounts to the sausage-making process of creating legislation, but I think this one illustrates two important and recurring themes. One, that we often times don’t pay for results with government, And two, even when it’s highlighted, people are skittish about changing things that might implicate them in being “for” the perception of less safety.
If you’re interested, the attached video shows the Committee debate on my amendment.