have various insurance programs through the departments of Labor, Agriculture, HHS, Defense, etc, etc. Why not have a department of insurance? The farmers, veterans, AARP, etc won't like it but if that makes more sense then do it. We have job training programs under Education, Defense, Labor, etc. Why? This can't be the most efficient way to organize things.

At the same time rationalize the cost and results of every single government program. There are two steps here... should we be spending money on something at all, and if so are we getting results worth what we are spending? I could happily strike the "flowers next to the interstate highway" line item. No, it's not much, but a few thousand x "not much" is significant. Every so often we hear about a new program to rehabilitate ex prisoners or keep kids off drugs but we never hear about eliminating the old one. Yes, we should do that stuff but again I'll bet we have duplicate programs with some working better than others. Distill them down by merger to the more efficient model or delete them.

The biggest program that needs rationalizing is the military. We should have a strategy and decide what we need in men and hardware to accomplish that. Senators from Boeing errrr, Washington, etc should not decide our hardware purchases. But also with R&D and new systems. What was the process for deciding to develop and build the F35? What are we getting for a Trillion dollars? Is it just that it's newer and in some way better? Cooler? Or was any rational thought giving to how many F35s it would take to accomplish a mission, the likelihood of success, analysis of casualties vs doing that mission with e.g. F18s? Did anybody compare the F35 cost to revisions to existing planes or a lesser capable new plane? Conservatives love to whine about liberals saying "if it saves just a single life...." How about if it's a military life? Is no price to high to pay? If we could have built additional F18s for $200B vs 1T cost of the F35 but we MIGHT have lost 10 more pilots doing that what should we do? Is anybody willing to do that analysis?