The Government Publishing Office also offers a slew of budget documents, including presidents’ budget proposals (which are generally only implemented in piecemeal fashion). Or head over to USASpending.gov — a website maintained by the government — to review the budgets for individual government agencies.
It is true that you cannot easily see line-item spending by government agencies. Given that the federal government spends (doing some quick math based on the OMB numbers) $220,000 a day, that would be hard to do.
Oh, sorry. Not per day. Per second.
Some of that is on things such as military aircraft, which are expensive. A lot of it, though, is on things like copy paper, which isn’t — except at the scale of the federal government. It’s easy to see, then, how cumbersome it is to review federal spending.
There are processes in place to do so, however. Standing House committees are tasked with oversight of federal departments. Whistleblowers are encouraged to come forward and report on potential wrongdoing. (Here’s the House Budget Committee’s page for whistleblower complaints, for example.) It’s an imperfect system, certainly, but it empowers the people closest to the spending — federal employees — to keep an eye on things even as it leverages the partisanship and desire for visibility of political actors.
Speaking at a rally over the weekend, though, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a different idea.
“We’re going to put the entire U.S. budget on the blockchain,” he said in Michigan, “so that every American can look at every budget item in the entire budget any time they want, 24 hours a day.”
“We’re going to have 300 million eyeballs on our budget,” he continued, “and if someone is spending $16,000 for a toilet seat, everybody’s going to know about it.”
This is a bad idea. It is also one that aligns so perfectly with Kennedy’s approach to politics that it’s hard to believe no one predicted this is where he would end up.
The blockchain — or more accurately here, a blockchain — is a distributed, public database. Think of it like a secure, shared Google spreadsheet to which you can only add new lines of information. Blockchains became popular alongside cryptocurrency, with transactions in bitcoin, for example, being recorded on such a database.
So why doesn’t this make sense for the federal budget? Well, first of all, it’s not really clear what the proposal is. Does Kennedy want to take budget information that’s already publicly available and put it on a blockchain? If so: okay? Feel free.
If, however, he wants to put every transaction on the blockchain, that’s far harder. It’s harder just as a function of scale, with the regional office of the Social Security Administration in Tallahassee now having to record its $250 Staples office supply purchase in a digital record. It’s also harder because the government spends lots of money on things that it doesn’t want to have public, for good reason — like counterintelligence efforts in foreign countries or the development of new weapons. A public blockchain entry of “Black Ops — Kyrgyzstan” would neither help Americans understand the government or help the government serve Americans.
None of this would dissuade Kennedy, certainly. It’s an idea that, first and foremost, implies that the federal government is too inept or corrupt to police itself and that average Americans would be better able to watchdog federal spending. It’s the sort of view of complex systems that might lead a person to think that…
Read More:Analysis | RFK Jr.’s quintessential campaign position: The blockchain budget
