Cut the Commerce Department to Boost Real Business

by Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven

We're wasting billions subsidizing corporations that don't need it.

You may have noticed a Census Bureau commercial during the Super Bowl. There's certainly plenty to debate about whether that was a wise use of taxpayer money, but the bureau's work — a decennial count of the U.S. population — is a basic constitutional function of our government, something that can't be abolished.

The bureau is part of the Department of Commerce, which carries out other constitutional functions, such as those of the Patent and Trademark Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

However, the department — which boasts a work force of about 40,000 even in non-census years — has bloated far beyond its historically limited functions. The NIST, for example, has the constitutional duty to "fix the standard of weights and measures," but these days, it also operates an array of business subsidy programs.

That sort of mission creep has occurred across the government and is one reason why the federal budget is drowning in red ink. At $17 billion, Commerce isn't the largest federal department, but cutting even a few billion dollars a year can add up to significant savings over a decade.

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