WASHINGTON, January 2015 — In President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union, the chief executive followed up on his 2014 promise to move without Congress or the courts and further upped the ante by pledging to take action without any planning. “Let’s make this a year of action. That’s what most Americans want,” Obama declared Tuesday night. It was an expected follow-up to his 2014 vow to act without legislation.
“We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation, or plans, or any logical idea of what will actually result in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help I’ve decided they need,” Obama said Jan. 14, “I’ve got a pen, I’ve got paper, scotch tape, a fax machine, a copier, a phone, and a whole box of those binder clips.”
Emboldened by the dramatic executive orders of 2014, to raise wages of federal contractors and create a federal job training program led by Vice President Biden, President Obama said that the tens of American people that he had actually spoken with at Democratic rallies over the last year were tired of waiting and wanted the government to do “new and different stuff.”
As a result, the President has issued direct executive orders to each of the 456 federal agencies and departments to create a wholly new program with “five or ten new directors and staff, a really cool name and a computer program, to take a brand new action, regardless of what it will actually achieve.” The Office of Management and Budget estimates that this will create “at least 5,000 new full time positions to create the programs and more than 1,000 oversight positions to try to determine what is being done.”
“Our implementation of the Affordable Care Act has proven that you do not need planning, organization or tangible results to go forward with half thought out ideas” according to White House Spokesman Jay Carney. “What matters is that we are creating new programs that show that we are moving forward, while the do-nothing Congress is stuck with the outmoded idea that planning, cost-benefit analyses, and careful execution are needed to spend tax dollars. The Founding Fathers never considered what the Bill or Rights would cost or how it would operate and that has worked. The American experience is to make things happen, and we have a bag full of things.”
“But the federal government cannot create meaningless effort alone” said President Obama in his State of the Union Address, “Which is why I’ve invited the CEO’s of random companies throughout the nation to come to the White House, hear me say the things that I’ve said over the last six years yet again, and then call for them to do something that I have not yet decided on for them to do over the next year or two. This is exactly the kind of meeting that we all need to indicate that the Republicans are not doing things.” President Obama ended his speech with a dramatic flourish that will likely be the rallying cry for his administration: “We will not overspend because we do not budget, we do not plan to fail because we will not plan, and we will not come up short of our goals because we will have no goals.”
