“Federal, State, and local governments are responsive, innovative, and effective because of the outstanding work of public servants.”

If you believe that, I’ve got some critical infrastructure to sell you. But Congress certainly seems to believe it, unless they’ve recently taken to passing satire off as Congressional resolutions.

May 7 through 13 is Public Service Recognition Week, and the House and Senate last week both passed resolutions to “commend public servants for their outstanding contributions to this great Nation.”

I am not making this up. The resolution passed by voice vote in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. IfThe Onion wrote laws, they would look like this one.

Cato Institute director of government affairs Brandon Arnold picked apart the resolution and noted that “it reveals Congress’s skewed view of the importance of bureaucrats, and by extension, the government.”

But just how effective is the government? According to the Office of Management and Budget, just 17 percent of federal programs are “effective” while 25 percent are deemed “not performing.”

The federal government wastes billions (trillions?) of dollars each year thanks to mismanagement, fraud, and abuse. As Chris Edwards notes in Downsizing the Federal Government, “erroneous and fraudulent payments to Medicare cost $20 billion annually,” “overpayments in federal rental housing subsidies cost $2 billion a year,” and a single inside deal at the Pentagon “would have wasted up to $2.5 billion of taxpayer money.”

Which invites scrutiny of another provision:

Public servants alert Congress and the public to government waste, fraud, abuse.

I too applaud the whistleblowers who point out misdeeds and fraudulent practices within the government. But the reason we need whistleblowers in the first place is because of the transgressions of other government employees. Essentially, this provision thanks a few honorable civil servants for helping to curb the waste and abuses of other civil servants. If the government truly ran like a well-oiled machine, as these resolutions suggest, then whistleblowers would be altogether unnecessary. — Cato Institute

The whole thing is well worth reading, especially for the two other major absurdities in the identical House and Senate resolutions.

Though Arnold certainly missed a dozen more things the federal government does — usually poorly — for which Congress wants to “salute their unyielding dedication and spirit for public service.” In most of the 14 cases in the resolution, the function is something that shouldn’t be done by the government at all.

Consider: “Public servants . . . ensure equal access to secure, efficient, and affordable mail service.” Only the government has a monopoly on mail, enforced by law, and nobody is allowed to compete with them. Monopolies deliver inferior products and services at inflated prices. Speaking of whcih, postal rates keep rising. A rate increase takes effect Monday, in fact. And the post office is more interested in appearances than in actual service.

Also consider that bureaucrats “teach and work in our schools and libraries.” Our children suffer for it. Government control of education, especially federal government control, has been nothing less than a disaster. It has dumbed down our children, turning them from the next generation of free people into the next generation of disaffected wage slaves who know something is terribly wrong, but lack the mental training to figure out what. (Fortunately, I’m happy to help.)

The resolution also cites government “contributions” to the space program, social security, the environment, homeland security, disaster response, and more.

I have my own list of 15 government programs we should get rid of.

Arnold closes by saying, “If the folks on Capitol Hill truly believe that the federal government is so worthy of praise, I suppose Americans should be pleased that they are wasting their time with meaningless resolutions instead of enlarging it by passing laws that could be far more damaging to our country.”

P.S. They aren’t public servants, in the sense of serving the public, but public masters, who impose their frequently senseless bureaucratic mandates on us all, destroying more and more freedom with every passing day.