Plan, Organize, Direct and Control

Achieving results in any endeavor requires you to perform four sequential steps:  you must first PLAN, then ORGANIZE, then DIRECT and finally CONTROL the result to make sure everything happens as planned. Any parent running a household does this.  Businesses MUST do this to survive.  And our federal government should do this also.  But it seldom does.

Any parent considering a vacation must plan who will go, where to go, how long to stay, and what to take.  He or she must then organize who is to be responsible for what and direct them to do it.  And finally he or she must control the result by verifying among many other things that tickets are in hand, the right stuff is loaded up and gas is in the car.

Any business must plan what products to produce, the sources of materials and who will produce them.  It must then organize obtaining the materials, having the people available to produce them and directing them to do it.  And finally it must control that the products are of high quality and make certain they are produced efficiently enough to allow a profit for the business so it can sustain its owner or shareholders and be around over the long term to service them. 

Our government should follow this same universal procedure but rarely does.  It almost always fails on three of the four steps.  To see this in spades one need look no further than the scandal in the Veterans Administration. At that agency it apparently neither planned nor organized to prevent the creation of a corrupt system which reported dishonest wait times of our veterans to the American public. For years.  It did direct well in writing checks.  But the government’s control in making certain of good and timely care for these veterans and preventing financial fraud did not exist.

As with the Veterans Administration our federal government in everything else seems to do only one step well:  directing our treasury to write checks.  Because the money seems free to them and because many of them live in America’s three wealthiest counties in and around booming Washington, D. C., they seem to care little how well it is spent. This while we Americans worked full time this year till April 21 just to pay taxes to support this government.

The core of the problem is that many in Congress only pass laws to further their own reelection prospects.  With these laws, and later with the bureaucracy which implements them, no thought is given to the elements of planning, organizing, directing and controlling necessary to benefit each of us who elected them.

Take Medicare where the FBI estimates that fraud there ranges up to $60 billion out of a total of $600 billion spent.  Up to 10%:$60 billion.This compared with credit card fraud of .04%.  One would think that Congress would at least at the outset allocate a few billion for fraud prevention to stop this.  But no, doing that would be admitting that errors had been made and could be made.  And the long time training of the many in Congress is never to admit errors.  Doing so might hamper their reelection prospects.  So the control preventing this fraud is never there and the planning and organizing is never even considered.  The directing which allows the fraud to continue is there as always.  It has always been too easy for the Department of the Treasury to print fraudulent checks totaling billions which we taxpayers pay for.  Clearly something must be done.

Each of us must insist on a more efficient government which limits the free money it receives from each of us and then we must elect those to Congress who will insist that LAWS BE LIMITED and TAXES BE REDUCED.

America then will grow and prosper.