Structural changes you'd like to make to US national government

If at all possible, I'd like to strip congress of the authority to make policy decisions regarding how the individual structuring of funding is distributed and make it so that it's distributed by the department in charge of it. I'm essentially trying to eliminated the ability of congress to create pork such as road projects and bar them from making decisions as those decisions should be made by the people in charge of the road systems.

That's a good plan. Introducing Departmental Legislation (this is called secondary legislation, IIRC, but only for not very controversial topics) would actually have limited surfacing within the Houses.

@Deboss: But then you run into the issue that pretty much none of the people at those departments other than the top few percent or so that require Senate confirmations to take a department head position have to answer in any way to the American public. A vast majority of individuals working for a department are civil servants that don't have to face election, and in most cases are pretty much immune to significant punitive actions unless they're so outright blatant about it even the dumbest voter on the planet can't possibly miss it.

As for my ideas regarding the OP, a few off the top of my head, subject to revision:

• Any given bill submitted has to explicitly reference the part of the US Constitution that authorizes Congress to pass legislation regarding it. On the other hand, the "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" clauses give far too much leeway (the latter particularly being abused by both "main" parties), so the law/amendment requiring my idea would have to be very carefully worded.
• As mentioned by several others, any legislator who takes office has to put any personal assets into a blind trust managed by a neutral third party for the duration of their stay in office. Immediate family members can keep the income from any jobs they may have if not employed in the legislator's staff, but indirect income from dividends and other assets are unavailable to them until the legislator leaves office, to avoid paperwork shuffle games to bypass the trust restriction.
• No earmarks, riders, or other skullduggery to slip unrelated legislation onto a bill. In fact, no slipping anything in under the radar, and every change in a pending bill requires a full up vote. Yes, even minor grammatical adjustments, as they have been used in the past to sneak in legislation where the voting representatives didn't even know it existed. Yes, that makes it more involved to get anything at all passed, but IMO Congress is sticking their thumb into far too many pies as it is, and discouraging it is a feature, not a bug.
• And on that note, another change I would like to make would be to remove the voice vote option. If J. Random Politician wants a resolution or bill to pass, they should damn well be held accountable for their decision with a record of their voting.

Of course, the chances of any of the above happening are pretty much nonexistent, but then I didn't read this thread as being about realism, just about what could be changed.

I don't see that as a flaw with the plan.

Enter Regina.

?

As in, bring back the monarchy. That'd sort a few things out.

Nah, the monarchy still consists of human beings making decisions. Experts are only there till we can replace them with computers.

The problem with Department bureaucracies getting to call the shots without any say whatsoever from the public (or representatives thereof) is that they are, above all else, going to look out for their own interests first, and "serve the public" ain't all that high on the list of interests in most cases. It's certainly not positioned above "preserve the bureaucracy".

Mind you, the current system is hardly golden, with set-asides and such from politicians playing "sugar daddy" for their constituencies or favored groups.

As for computers, remember that to err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer.

Clearly, you need to read your history book more.

Humans can relise they are wrong. Computers can't.

Plus computers don't have morals...

You've never gotten an error screen?

If you're looking for morals you agree with, politicians are the wrong place to look.

edited 10th Mar '12 12:01:42 AM by Deboss

The United States need urgently a new Bill of Rights and mechanism by which citizens can impose legal actions that within a very short time frame reestablish their fundamental rights.

Something akin Habbeas Corpus but much wider in scope.