In a letter to William Johnson on June 12, 1823 Jefferson wrote, “I believe the States can best govern our home concerns, and the General Government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore, to see maintained that wholesome distribution of powers established by the Constitution for the limitation of both; and never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold as at market.”
.
We now have many departments and some were not conceived of at the time the Constitution was adopted. In discussing these departments they will be separated into three categories – Departments that perform functions, departments that legislate, and departments that distribute money. (The last two are unconstitutional and unnecessary).
One of the main bulwarks of our form of government was the division of power between the branches of the federal government – the presidency, the judiciary and the legislative – and with great power left with the states. The tenth amendment to the Constitution reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
That would lead to the conclusion that the departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, The Environmental Protection Agency, Transportation and Agriculture and many agencies should not be a part of our federal government. The states might have those functions but they are not in the Constitution and thus are reserved to the states or to the people.
So, let us consider some of these departments and agencies. The Housing and Urban Development Department is huge. There is no mention of any department or function like that in the Constitution but we have one. It makes its own rules and operates independently It manages the largest reality operation in our country. It does not perform that function very well. Let me restate that. It is lousy.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has become a giant realtor. It builds housing developments, owns houses, loans money and holds mortgages. One of its most famous developments was the Pruitt- Igoe apartments in St. Louis. It consisted of 2879 units in 33 high-rise buildings in downtown St. Louis and was the HUD answer to providing housing to the poor. Within the next 20
years it had become a center for vandalism and several murders and by 1972 only 600 of its apartments were occupied because the rest had been trashed. Even with federal subsidies St. Louis could not afford to keep it going and finally tore it down.
The Robert Taylor Homes was another project in Chicago that was originated in 1962. Forty four years later the 16 story towers consisting of 4300 apartments stretching for two miles is being torn down.
Nearly 186,000 public housing units have been approved for demolition in Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia according to HUD.
.Those kinds of complexes have been tried in other big cities and resulted in the same failures. The latest approach is now to build smaller operations and scatter them throughout the big cities in the hopes of spreading the crime instead of concentrating it in one place. We need to expand that concept even further. The best place for having this operation performed would be to totally remove the HUD
department from our federal government and have this function performed at the state and local level.
There might even be some thought about whether this function of providing massive structures for the homeless and poor is necessary at all but if it is then we know the federal government is not capable of doing it and we should leave this function up to the states. HUD could transfer their mortgages, land, buildings and property to the states and let the states take over this function if they wished to continue it.
HUD was also used to exert pressure on banks to make loans to minorities and the poor which led to the bank meltdown that occurred in 2008. These agencies have bureaucrats that are not elected and are removed from the people and are independent and are not controlled by our Congress.
The next department to be considered is the Department of the Interior.
Many of the functions it performs will be discussed later since it is a department involved in distributing money but it also controls the national parks and all federally owned or controlled land. Our federal government owns 29% of our land and owns 55% of the land in our eleven western states. That seems somewhat surprising since our Constitution does not provide for the federal government to own and manage parks or to own and control land other than what is needed for the operation of the federal government.
Article 3. Section 8 of the Constitution provides for the Congress to legislate and control a district (not exceeding ten miles square) which will become “the Seat of the Government of the United States” and
“to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful Buildings: From this it would appear that the states own and control our land. The legislatures of the states have to consent to the purchase of land and the federal government only has land necessary for it to fulfill its function.
The Department of the Interior has done an excellent job in our national parks and has been zealous in protecting wetlands, in stopping road construction in our national forests, in prevent ing mining and stopping exploring for oil and gas in federal owned lands and generally interfering in anything of a commercial nature taking place on the federal government lands. From the number of fires we have every year in our national forests it is logical to conclude that they do not know how to protect our forests.
The control by Interior of the drilling and mining for oil offshore has resulted in reducing our oil production. The Gulf oil spill has provided an excuse for placing a moratorium on offshore drilling and that moratorium has applied to all offshore water including Alaska and thus significantly reduced our oil production. Ken Salazar, Secretary of Interior, has indicated they have cancelled five potential leases in the Outer Continental Shelf which could hold up to 77 billion barrels of oil.
There were 33 wells operating in the Gulf prior to the spill but only 6 of those wells are now operating due to the moratorium. The Interior Department has refused to obey Judge Martin Feldman‟s order to issue permits and has been cited for contempt of court as a result.
A permit for drilling has also been denied for the National Petroleum – Alaska project and that has led to concern that there will not be enough oil to be obtained from the North Slope of Alaska to continue that production. The pipeline transferring the North Slope Oil was originally completely full and the temperature of the oil was sufficient to make it possible to transfer it through the arctic cold. However, the present volume is only filling about half of the pipeline and there is great concern that very soon the volume will not be enough to overcome the cold temperature and that the pipeline will no longer be capable of moving any oil. We need that oil from Alaska.
The Dept. of Interior has cancelled oil and gas leases on 77 parcels of federal land in Utah and has also stopped eight parcels from a lease sale in Wyoming.
To stay in line with our Constitution we should transfer ownership of the federal property to the states wherein it is located and grant them full rights of ownership of that land and property. The states could then determine whether mining, or logging or drilling or exploring or construction could take place and we might even be able to solve our energy problems. Our government has nearly stopped the logging in our national forests which has contributed to the forest fires that now are common.
It has also deprived our states and businesses of income. In 1991, 8.5 billion board feet of commercial timber was harvested from national forests. That generated $5.5 billion in local income, another $325.5
million in shared harvest receipts and $831 million in federal income taxes. Thus, we have harmed our national forests and reduced income to business, local governments and the federal government as well.
Our federal government and their laws and rules and restrictions are the reason we have energy problems and if the states controlled their own land we might have different rules than at the present.