What If….

7/11/22

What if you could allocate your federal tax dollars to those things you want to support? We’ve seen surveys that ask this and similar questions but what about an actual “spend my money here”?

As I write, there are 15 departments including Defense, Education, Energy etc. Under these headings are more departments (ex. Department of the Army within Defense), agencies, services, groups, bureaus, commissions etc. I researched the total number of different entities that make up the federal government at https://www.usa.gov/agencies.  There you will find an alphabetically organized list of the various organizations that make up the federal government but no total number. Then I went to https://www.opm.gov/about-us/open-government/Data/Apps/Agencies/ where again, there are tons of detail but no simple way to grasp the total breadth of the federal government.

Having no way to practically detail the underlying vastness of the administrative state, we’re left with the list of the major departments and perhaps some of the more distinctive agencies/sub-departments on which to decide where to spend our money.

I envision a ballot that lists the Department/Agency, a 30 word or less definition of their purpose and a box provided for the percentage of your tax dollars that you wish to allocate to that group. (It automatically adds up the total percentage points for those who attended public schools and directs the voter to correct their allocation if it exceeds 100. Hopefully they’ll give the effort 110%!) I’ve seen a similar process used with the United Way which allows the donor to direct their donation to specific organizations. Why can’t that work for we taxpayers too?