Americans are flocking to car dealerships to cash in on the Federal Cash for Clunkers program which essentially can give car buyers a $4500 cash credit toward the trade in of an old car for a more fuel efficient new car. The numbers are out and foreign car manufacturers are outselling their American counter parts. Effectively, foreign companies are padding their pockets with American tax dollars. Rather than talk about the program itself, I want to talk about the actual administration of the program. This rather simple administrative program has already proven too difficult a task for the federal government to carry out effectively.

Just this week New York dealerships are leaving the program because of the delays in being reimbursed by the government. Some reports cite reimbursement as low as 2 percent. Dealerships fear they will not be reimbursed. The cash credit is dolled out from the car dealership’s pockets. In turn, the dealerships file a claim with the federal government and ‘should’ be reimbursed. The reimbursements are delayed to such an extreme degree that dealerships can no longer afford to support the program. Claims are backlogged and the fact of the matter is the government is failing to hold up their end of the deal.

Not only has the government failed to carry out the program efficiently and effectively, but the government has also had to inject more money into the program because it could not track how much money had been spent. One week after the $1 billion program was in affect, Congress injected another $2 billion into the cash for clunker ordeal because they were afraid that there was not enough cash allotted to support it. The government cannot handle the administrative aspect of the program nor can it track the money.

This is just another example of the government inability to run a program efficiently. MEDICAID and MEDICARE are grossly ineffective, and financially not sustainable. Social Security is quickly running out of money. The United States Postal Service has to cut back on its services because they are losing billions of dollars a year. Our government cannot administer large (in this case even small) public service programs efficiently.

What is really scary is the proposition of another large public service program (National Health Care) that will be run by the government. If the government was an employee in a company, the government would be fired because they have a long track record of not doing their job. If for some reason, this employee was not fired, the last thing anybody would do is delegate more responsibilities to this person.

Until the government can run its already existing programs effectively, there can be no expectations of it running newer, larger programs any better. Any expectation of this is irresponsible and misleading to the American people. It is time we hold the government responsible for its actions.