Thomas Jefferson on Firing Useless Government Employees

We used to be a country. A proper country.

In his First Annual Message to Congress, delivered in December of 1801, President Thomas Jefferson argued that the federal government should fire useless employees as a way to save the taxpayers’ money.

Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies, and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it may never be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, government shall itself consume the residue of what it was instituted to guard.

Jefferson goes on to say that the federal government should keep a rigid accounting of the money that it spends and demand accountability from federal employees to make sure they’re doing what they are supposed to:

In our care, too, of the public contributions intrusted to our direction, it would be prudent to multiply barriers against their dissipation, by appropriating specific sums to every specific purpose susceptible of definition; by disallowing applications of money varying from the appropriation in object, or transcending it in amount; by reducing the undefined field of contingencies, and thereby circumscribing discretionary powers over money; and by bringing back to a single department all accountabilities for money where the examination may be prompt, efficacious, and uniform.

Can you imagine having a President today who suggests that the United States should cut spending, including military spending, in order to reduce the onerous burden of taxation on the ordinary person? Can you imagine Congress passing a real (and intelligible!) budget? It is a near-utopian vision!

In contrast to Jefferson (and the other Founders) our current political leaders constantly clamor for foreign war and bloated spending. The idea that a nation could be safe and secure without a multi-trillion dollar standing military is beyond the cognitive capacity of our oh-so-sagacious rulers. Sad, indeed.