Who Expands the Government?

My state of Illinois recently elected a Republican governor. He refuses to sign the state budget, so we’ve been functioning without a budget for months. However, he is issuing endless regulatory orders that do nothing whatsoever but generate mountains of useless paperwork.

Here is just a single example from last week. Every year, all state university employees have to undergo a two-hour long “ethics training.” One aspect of it consists of informing us that we can only accept food (e.g. at conferences) or gifts (e.g. a notebook or a pen at a career fair) from private businesses in the amount lower than $100. Now our governor has decided that this amount needs to be lowered to under $75. This is a change that will affect, I’m guessing, maybe a dozen people a year in the entire state. And the extent of the change will be imperceptible.

BUT – and this is the frustrating part – now all of the endless paperwork that is connected with these “ethics regulations and trainings” will have to be modified to reflect the $25 change in the amount of these non-existent gifts to state professors. Crowds of people will be distracted from doing something useful and into rewriting these documents, reformatting the ethics trainings, changing protocols, and issuing memos.

Mind you, this is just a single example I have given you. I have dozens more, and we just elected this fucker less than a year ago. Nothing whatsoever is being done by him and his office but for the issuing of an endless stream of these orders that are tweaking some tiny little aspect of the growing bureaucratic machine. The state 911 line is being closed down for lack of funds to pay for it, yet we are futzing around with reams of paperwork about the imaginary $25 in gifts that nobody really gives to anybody in the real world.

This is why whenever I hear anybody chirp that Republicans want a smaller government and fewer bureaucratic regulations, I realize that I’m dealing with a clinical imbecile. I worked for several years in the same state under the Dem Governor Pat Quinn, and there was nothing even remotely similar to this avalanche of petty tweakings to the paperwork imposed on us. The bureaucratic machine was there but it was not being expanded in an out-of-control way like it is with the Republican Rauner.