Why The Federal Government Shouldn’t Be Involved In Local Disaster Response
Congressman Rick Berg met with local officials in Ward County today, home to perhaps the worst impact of last year’s Souris River flooding, and he listened to their complaints about dealing with the federal government over disaster response.
Chief among them were slow response times and endless reams of unreasonable and nonsensical red tape. KXMC has a report of the meeting, including this response from Rep. Berg pointing out that dysfunction in Washington DC, particularly the refusal on the part of Democrats to even budget, is causing a lot of the problems:
The challenge we have now is we have spending through September 30th and what’s going to happen is we are going to have some sort of extension, we haven’t had a budget that’s been agreed to by the Senate so right now we are waiting on some sort of resolution and at that point we want to make sure interests here for the Minot Region are part of that solution.
Here’s a question: Why should the Minot area have to worry about national problems in rebuilding our local community and infrastructure? We shouldn’t have to, yet for years federal candidates have been getting themselves elected by promising to get the federal government to do more for local areas.
What that has resulted in is involving the federal government, and all the political gamesmanship and red tape that goes with it, in the minutia of local issues. To the point where just fixing some traffic lights is a project that can take a year or more.
The federal government is simply too large, and is involved in too many local issues, and the only solution is for the federal government to do less.
Our founders designed a sort of government that assigned a few specific national tasks to the federal government, and then empowered the state governments to govern locally. We’ve gotten away from that since our nation’s founding, and not for the betterment of our country.
Tags: federalism, North Dakota News, Rick Berg
