EDITORIAL: Billionaire Mark Cuban makes good points about the bloated federal bureaucracy

Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban has made it clear that he’s no fan of President Donald Trump. But Mr. Cuban is also smart enough to recognize there are widespread problems within the federal government that can’t be laid at the president’s feet, perhaps foremost among them a public sector that is budget-bustingly bloated to the extreme.

After all, if there’s one thing Mr. Cuban understands, it’s that you don’t get wealthy by being fiscally irresponsible.

As The Dallas Morning News reports, Mr. Cuban is troubled by how inefficient and outdated government happens to be, and he suggests a major turn to technology. “The government can and should change into a service like Amazon. We just need new people who have a tech-clue. Government is people-driven; it shouldn’t be. All those people should be gone and their work should be online.”

Mr. Cuban continued: “Amazon does more than most governments. Our government is capable of functioning this way at one-tenth its size. I’m for small government, and tech will make it much smaller and better. No more 10 layers of paper pushers.”

But the federal government continues to support paper pushers. The Morning News cites the IRS and the U.S. Postal Service, two agencies with long-standing and well-known inefficiencies. But those entities have plenty of company. The key reasons for such underperforming, overstaffed agencies: no competition or accountability. There’s no incentive to be efficient, as numerous federal agencies continue to plow through taxpayer money and the federal debt soars past $20 trillion.

Mr. Cuban asserts these bureaucracies and countless others could run on much leaner staffing and much less money, the benefits of which are obvious. But there’s another advantage to cutting the federal government down to size, as pointed out by HotAir.com’s John Sexton.

“Reducing the bureaucracy would save money, but more importantly, it would remove a massive institution (unionized government workers) which serves as a power base for the left.” One of the most damaging aspects of bloated government staffing at the federal level — and assuredly at the state and local levels, too — is the massive cost to taxpayers of guaranteed annual raises regardless of performance, along with unrealistic pension plans that far outstrip what private-sector workers can ever expect to see.

And who pays for those locked-in retirement funds? Private-sector workers, of course. But those pensions are not sustainable in the long term, or even in the short term, as we’re seeing at the state level and in municipalities around the country.

Mr. Cuban is onto something. Many people go on a post-Thanksgiving diet. It’s far past time for government to join them by shedding bodies and bureaucracies.