The Government Printing Office on Wednesday published the 2006-2007 U.S. Government Manual, which “provides comprehensive information on the agencies of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches” as well as “information on quasi-official agencies, international organizations in which the United States participates, and boards, commissions, and committees.”

It makes a great indicator as to how the federal government is growing out of control and desperately needs to be scaled back.

Here are just a few offices, departments, agencies, commissions and organizations of the federal government which we just don’t need. This is list not exhaustive; it’s only a sampling of things the federal government is doing that it should not be. I’ll first present the government’s description of the program, and then the reality.

Only one program in the Legislative Branch made the list this year.

• “The U.S. Botanic Garden has artistic displays of plants, exhibits, and educational programs promoting botanical knowledge through the cultivation of an ordered collection of plants; fostering plant conservation by acting as a repository for endangered species; and growing plants for the beautification of the Capitol complex.”

  Run as a side project of the Library of Congress, the U.S. Botanic Garden received $6,275,000 in fiscal year 2005. While one could argue that the Capitol building needs plants, that could be done for far less, and the bulk of the Botanic Garden, if not the entirety thereof, should be sold to a private conservation organization.

Now comes the Executive Branch, the source of all of the remaining programs on this list.

• “The Office of National Drug Control Policy assists the President in establishing policies, priorities, and objectives in the National Drug Control Strategy. It also provides budget, program, and policy recommendations on the efforts of National Drug Control Program agencies.”

  Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol, and it hasn’t worked with drugs. The War on Drugs has become a War on the American People, creating violent criminals out of what would be respectable businesses, overflowing our prisons with nonviolent people and releasing real violent criminals early to make room for them, and gets innocent people injured or killed in police raids gone wrong. The War on Drugs must end and this agency must be abolished.

• “The Department of Agriculture works to improve and maintain farm income and to develop and expand markets abroad for agricultural products. The Department helps to curb and to cure poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. It works to enhance the environment and to maintain production capacity by helping landowners protect the soil, water, forests, and other natural resources. Rural development, credit, and conservation programs are key resources for carrying out national growth policies. Department research findings directly or indirectly benefit all Americans. The Department, through inspection and grading services, safeguards and ensures standards of quality in the daily food supply.”

  And so begins our Orwellian doublespeak section. What the Department of Agriculture really does is this: It drives small farmers out of business to the benefit of large corporate operations. It runs several communist programs of wealth redistribution wherein some farmers, generally the larger ones benefit at the expense of others, generally the smaller ones. It helps to perpetuate poverty, hunger, and malnutrition through its Food Stamp program and other such programs.

  It does nothing for the safety and quality of the food supply that any number of other organizations, already in existence, could not do — and do far better. It promotes whatever policies it wants to, whether they help the environment or not, though generally they do not.

  The Department of Agriculture threw $19.1 billion of your pearls to the pigs in fiscal year 2005, and it should be eliminated.

• “The Department of Education establishes policy for, administers, and coordinates most Federal assistance to education. Its mission is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the Nation.”

  The doublespeak continues. The true purpose of the Department of Education is to ensure that as many people as possible fail to receive a real education. Instead, they are to receive a thin gruel of regurgitated facts presented to them over twelve years of confinement for one-third of their childhood, during which they also learn how to be dependent on the State and other authority figures, sacrificing their own independence, and how to be good consumers with few or no aspirations. This helps perpetuate the virtual caste system set up here in the U.S. which, though few actually notice it, is right in front of everyone.

  The Department of Education spent $57.3 billion dumbing down America’s children in 2005. It must be eliminated and the function of control of education returned to where it properly belongs under the Constitution: the States and the People.

• “The Department of Health and Human Services is the Cabinet-level department of the Federal executive branch most involved with the Nation’s human concerns. In one way or another, it touches the lives of more Americans than any other Federal agency. It is a department of people serving people, from newborn infants to persons requiring health services to our most elderly citizens.”

  That it touches the lives of more Americans than any other Federal agency is certainly true. Its Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is responsible for getting children hooked on prescription psychoactive drugs as early as possible, making sure that everyone is “mentally ill” and in need of “treatment” from the federal government, which of course knows best.

  Among other things, it also encompasses the Food and Drug Administration, responsible for preventing lifesaving drugs from reaching the U.S. market; the Administration for Children and Families, which is responsible for breaking up families and keeping them broken up; and several agencies responsible for delivering socialist health care to various groups of Americans.

  The Department of Health and Human Services siphoned off $66.8 billion of your money in fiscal year 2005. It must be abolished and its useful functions, such as the National Institutes of Health, which sometimes performs useful medical research, turned over to the private sector.

• “The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the principal Federal agency responsible for programs concerned with the Nation’s housing needs, fair housing opportunities, and improvement and development of the Nation’s communities.”

  Ever seen a housing project? Do you know why it’s so different than any other neighborhood, with higher crime chief among the noticeable differences? That’s HUD. It provides rental properties, not only in the projects but through a program known as Section 8, throughout the community.

  HUD also prevents you from failing to sell or rent a property to someone because you don’t like them, or suspect they may be a poor credit risk, or didn’t offer enough money, or any number of legitimate reasons, so long as the person plays the race card on you.

  HUD spent $31.3 billion in fiscal year 2005 on its various programs of poverty perpetuation, all of which would run more efficiently, with less money, and actually begin to help people get out of poverty, once it’s eliminated and its functions transferred to private charity.

• “The purpose of the Department of Labor is to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment.”

  And how do they do that? Like all the other doublespeak programs, they don’t. Instead, they administer a minimum wage, which helps perpetuate poverty, prevent employers from offering jobs to people based on merit and require them to do so based on race, require them to conform to numerous “safety” regulations, most of which are common sense and the rest of which are of dubious merit, burden them with additional costs of complying with government paperwork, and require them to pay for insurance in case they might need to lay off an employee, rather than the employee paying for it.

  One might say that Labor’s programs which help people find and keep work are useful, but they are no different in principle from equivalent private programs, which already exist, and would exist in abundance without it. We don’t need any of Labor’s $11.9 billion drain on the economy in fiscal year 2005. Most of what it does should be eliminated, and the useful programs transitioned to private charities.

Then come a wide variety of independent establishments, government corporations, and quasi-official agencies, virtually all of which advance some anti-libertarian agenda. Due to space constraints I can only provide a sampling of these.

• “The African Development Foundation’s goals are to alleviate poverty and promote broad-based sustainable development and empowerment in Africa; to expand local capacity to promote and support grassroots, participatory development; and to enhance and strengthen U.S. relations with Africa through effective development assistance.”

  Sending large bales of cash to Africa won’t solve the poverty problem there. Africa needs market reforms and more economic freedom for its people first.

• “The Broadcasting Board of Governors’ mission is to promote freedom and democracy and to enhance understanding by broadcasting accurate, objective, and balanced news and information about the United States and the world to audiences abroad.”

  I’ll bet you didn’t know the federal government has a propaganda machine. Actually it has several under this umbrella: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, all of which (usually) make sure the American viewpoint makes it onto the radios and television sets of people in the targeted areas. You think I made that up? That’s their stated purpose: to “clearly present the policies of the United States.”

  Apparently the U.S. news networks can’t “clearly present the policies of the United States” well enough for the government’s purposes.

• “The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment–air, water, and land–upon which life depends.”

  Oh, I just love doublespeak. The real purpose of the Environmental Pollution Agency is to ensure that large corporations can pollute the air, land and water with impunity, to prevent human development where there is even the slightest chance that one so-called “endangered” animal might be displaced, and to make us all pay for their wanton destruction of our natural resources. The EPA needs to go away. People who want to save endangered species can do so themselves; and those whose environments are polluted can sue the offenders out of business.

• “The Federal Communications Commission regulates interstate and foreign communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. It is responsible for the orderly development and operation of broadcast services and the provision of rapid, efficient nationwide and worldwide telephone and telegraph services at reasonable rates. Its responsibilities also include the use of communications for promoting safety of life and property and for strengthening the national defense.”

  At least they’re somewhat honest about their violating the People’s rights to speech and the press. The FCC is primarily responsible for the creation of every telecommunications monopoly in this country, and thinking that it can somehow solve the problems it created is silly. It needs to be abolished along with its ridiculous First Amendment-violating regulations on what we can say or do on and with our telephones, radios, televisions and Internet connections.

• “The Federal Reserve System, the central bank of the United States, is charged with administering and formulating the Nation’s credit and monetary policy. Through its supervisory and regulatory banking functions, the Federal Reserve maintains the safety and soundness of the Nation’s economy, responding to the Nation’s domestic and international financial needs and objectives.”

  The Federal Ripoff System in reality manages a fiat currency through which it’s managed to devalue the U.S. dollar to less than four percent of its value in 1913, the year it was created. It lies about inflation, manipulates the economy to the benefit of the people in power, and is primarily responsible for enabling the massive debt in which most Americans find themselves. On top of all that, it is widely believed to be solely responsible for causing the stock market crash of 1929 which ushered in the Great Depression.

  We were prosperous when our money was backed by gold and silver, as the Constitution specifies. Now we are poor and in debt. We must return to a monetary system based on value, rather than the whims of one man, and abolish the Federal Reserve.

• “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration maintains the United States’ role as a leader in aeronautical and space science technology by improving the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles and by conducting space flight research. It also conducts space exploration activities with manned and unmanned vehicles and utilizes the aeronautical and space resources of the United States and other nations for peaceful purposes.”

  If only it could manage to do that. Created in the Cold War to counter a perceived Soviet space threat, NASA has outlived its usefulness. These days it can barely manage to get two space shuttle flights in a year, and that’s a good year. Private space companies, on the other hand, are not only flying their own space vehicles, but launching their own space stations, at a minuscule fraction of the cost. NASA, too, needs to go away — after they find the lost moon landing tapes.

• “The National Railroad Passenger Corporation was established by Congress to meet the Nation’s intercity passenger transportation needs.”

  Now this is an interesting one. Congress created Amtrak in 1970 to provide intercity rail service. At a time when airplane flights were becoming more and more common and less and less expensive. These days Amtrak costs more than flying, and is still losing so much money that it won’t agree to expand service unless the state it expands into agrees to give it money to cover its losses.

  Amtrak should be sold to the highest bidder, if any, or dismantled entirely. Where rail service really is needed, it can be provided by local and regional governments and private concerns, as many of them have shown in recent years.

• “The Social Security Administration manages the Nation’s social insurance program–consisting of retirement, survivors, and disability insurance programs–commonly known as Social Security. It also administers the Supplemental Security Income program for the aged, blind, and disabled. The Administration is responsible for studying the problems of poverty and economic insecurity among Americans and making recommendations on effective methods for solving these problems through social insurance. The Administration also assigns Social Security numbers to U.S. citizens and maintains earnings records for workers under their Social Security numbers.”

  Last but not least we have Social Security, the most overtly Communist and most overtly unconstitutional program still in operation. FDR threatened the Supreme Court in order to get them not to declare it unconstitutional. That’s how bad this program really is.

  At its root, the program resembles nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, illegal for you and I to run, but one in which we are all forced to participate, whether we want to or not. It takes money from us, ostensibly to provide for us at retirement or disability, but doesn’t have enough money to actually do so. Even if it does manage to pay out, most people will take a heavy loss on Social Security.

  And those people who would rather get a better rate of return for their retirement on the open market are prohibited from doing so, except for one small county in Texas where a pilot project invests the money in the marketplace and everybody has more than enough money for retirement.

  Social Security takes almost 13 percent of Americans’ income and gives them nothing but promises in return, promises it can’t deliver nearly as well as the free market, or in the future perhaps at all.

  Social Security should be phased out. Those currently stuck paying into the Social Security system should be given the opportunity to opt out, and no one new should be accepted into the scheme. After several years, once the system no longer has any participants, it will shut down gracefully with nothing left to do (except enjoy their retirement).

And in a bit of sheer irony, the U.S. Government Manual begins with reprints of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, documents which almost every government agency violates merely by existing.

There are many other pointless, needless and useless government agencies, commissions, organizations, and departments which I simply couldn’t get to and still keep this article readable in one sitting. But feel free to browse through them for yourself, and if you think I missed a program which should be eliminated sooner rather than later, please let me know.

And if you’d like to help scale back the federal government, please consider joining Downsize DC, which is dedicated to eliminating the federal government from the parts of our lives it doesn’t belong in.