Obama Announces New Website, Business USA, to be Run By the Federal Government

In a speech this morning on "government reform," President Obama said that his administration has listened to businesses large and small complain about dealing with the federal government. According to Obama, these businesses think that federal workers are just swell, but that the bureaucratic systems they have to navigate are just too dang confusing.

So Obama wants to streamline the bureaucracy, as he's always promised he would, because, he said, "from the moment I got here, I saw up close what many of you know to be true:  The government we have is not the government that we need." So Obama wants the power to consolidate several agencies, to let the federal workforce shrink by 2,000 through attrition, and to save $3 billion over the next ten years by streamlining the bureaucracy .

Not mentioned: Over the next 10 years, Obama has also proposed about $46 trillion in federal spending. Just last year, under Obama's watch, the government we have finalized $232 billion worth of new regulations and just $1.1 billion in regulatory savings. Jobs at federal regulatory agencies, meanwhile, grew by 13 percent. And this was in the year that President Obama started by called for a regulatory review designed to "root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb."

So what does the "government we need" actually need? Apparently, what it's missing is yet another regulatory point of contact—a spiffy new website Obama says is intended to be "a one-stop shop for small businesses and exporters." It will be called Business USA. And it will be run by the federal government.