Infographic: How Republicans and Democrats View Federal Agencies

Democrats tend to view the feds favorably but many agencies are under water among Republicans.

(Illustration: iStock)

Comments

[MasterThief]

Would you look at that. It's almost like one side is objectively worse. That doesn't excuse the Republican politicians seeming to always have enough traitors to betray their voters.
Maybe a libertarian magazine could spend more time appealing to Republicans than cozying up to progressives.

[Juliana Frink]

Masterful response, Thief! Bravo! To the point!

[Wizzle Bizzle]

"Maybe a libertarian magazine could spend more time appealing to Republicans than cozying up to progressives."

Maybe. But first we'd have to find a libertarian magazine.

[Rev Arthur L kuckland (5-30-24 banana republic day)]

Spiked.com

[Chipper Chunked Chile Con Congress (ex NCW)]

I do, in fact, actually pay them. Unlike this place.

[Mickey Rat]

Yes, Democrats are bootlickers of power.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Also financially or emotionally dependent on government. Or both.

[InsaneTrollLogic (Factio Democratica delenda est 5/30/24)]

Both. The two, dependency and bootlicking are far from mutually exclusive.

[CE]

Totalitarian leftists always want to control other people.
The cushy jobs in the nomenklatura ain't bad either.

[Chumby]

Department of Evictions is about to get popular with one party and unpopular with another. The real question is whether blue enclaves will allow the deported illegals to vote once out of the country.

[Don't look at me!]

What do you think mail in ballots are for?

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Kindling?

[eyeroller]

This is hilarious. Republican voters say they want to cut spending, but when you go down a list of categories, for each category they say "no don't cut that!"

Agency bad, spending good!

[Mickey Rat]

Which is why, in a democracy, fiscal restraint is a problem to implement because every line item has highly motivated defenders and less motivated critics.

[BigT]

Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Hmm, we could try putting the total federal budget up for a popular vote.

[CE]

Just change from an income tax to a per capita tax. If there are 250M adult citizens, taxes would be 30K per person if the government spends 7.5 trillion. Every 250 billion in spending cuts would reduce your tax bill by a thousand dollars.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Even if done only for one year, that would be instructional

Another option: don't withhold taxes from paychecks. Let everyone file on April 15, and then figure out where they will get the money to send the IRS.

Either way, my goal is to stick to people hard exactly how much they are getting raped by Uncle Sam.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

One of my pet schemes was to keep everything as it is now, but Congressional budgets are per department or agency whose head requires Senate approval, and are maximums. When you file your 1040, you allocate the full amount among all those budgets. Any excess is returned to taxpayers. Any shortfall is made up by selling assets and firing employees.

[CE]

Across-the-board cuts is the only way forward.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

That's a terrible choice, since they will keep the cuts as low as possible to limit harm to the "essential" departments.

On the other hand, if you were to declare an absolute total budget cut of $2 trillion in 180 days, and tell them to duke it out and allocate those cuts among themselves or be across-the-board, you just might get some finger pointing.

[Zeb]

An idea I've often toyed with is limiting the budget to the previous year's tax receipts.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

That's a good one too.

[Sevo, 5-30-24, embarrassment]

"This is hilarious."

Your post, OTOH, is pathetic.

[TJJ2000]

I don't get it.
Every Republican Category is less than 50% except NASA and Park.

[MasterThief]

The way Elon is going with SpaceX, it might shift on NASA.
I enjoy our national parks. I like having and being able to enjoy vast beautiful lands that remain mostly natural. At the same time, the Federal government has a lot of land that should be open to development and commercial use

[Jefferson Paul]

Yeah, I don't get what eyeroller is rolling his eyes at. I would want the Republican and Republican-leaning respondents to be even more displeased with these government departments, but they clearly don't have a favorable opinion and also have much lower favorability than the Dem respondents who favor every single government department.

[eyeroller]

I'm talking about different polls where they ask Republicans "Do you want to cut spending on education?" and Republicans say "NO!"

The point is, they don't like the agency names, but they love the spending.

Democrats have slightly better self-awareness.

[Juliana Frink]

If democrats were self-aware they would have to hide their true intentions... Oh, wait a minute - that's exactly what they do. That would fully explain why they're such phonies!

[TJJ2000]

LMAO... "Democrats have slightly better self-awareness"
That's pretty rich from the party that can't figure out the difference between a male and female.

[B G]

They could probably save at least $500Bil one-time spending by just cancelling anything left from the "infrastructure" bill and "Inflation reduction" acts which hasn't been spent.

There's at least $3Billion which should be clawed back from CA because the "high speed" crazy train boondoggle hasn't yet made significant progress 15 years after the Obama admin "shovel ready" stimulus package. They'd never get it back, but CA also wasted a ton of "enhanced unemployment" benefits sending them to inmates in the jails and prisons (I'd kind of like to see Newsom have to pay that back out of his own pocket, but just like holding him accountable for abuse of power during Covid, there's no legal way to do that).

[Roberta]

And yet they keep telling us how both sides are equally bad.

The superiority of Republicans over Democrats for individual liberty has been known at since least 30 years ago when Don Ernsberger (co-founder of the Society for Individual Liberty in 1970) reported his survey. He'd expected to find them equally good-bad overall — Democrats better for personal freedom, Republicans better for financial freedom — but was surprised to find no advantage for the Democrats regarding personal freedom.

[Don't look at me!]

but was surprised to find no advantage for the Democrats regarding personal freedom.

Ahem. The party of slavery.

[JesseAz (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

The party or covid authoritarianism. Censorship. Regulations.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

But open borders = liberty, right?

[InsaneTrollLogic (Factio Democratica delenda est 5/30/24)]

Of course, just ask Fiona.

[JohannesDinkle]

Go to one these agencies, enter the office and talk to the employees working there. Almost all are Democrats, either because they believe government is the solution for every problem, or because they crave the security and power of government employ. About 10% of working people in the US are working in some level of government, so they are about a fifth of Democrat voters. Add in spouses and you get a really dependable voter base.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

What if public employees had to give up the right to vote?

[BigT]

Trump is a threat to democracy bureaucracy.
-Elon Musk

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Did you see that video recently, where AI had substituted "bureaucracy" for "democracy"?

[Jefferson Paul]

I searched for it, but didn't find it. Instead my search pulled up the following article from right before the election about how the deep state and entrenched bureaucracies are what protect our freedoms. You can't make this shit up.

https://theconversation.com/undoing-the-deep-state-means-trump-would-undo-over-a-century-of-progress-in-building-a-federal-government-for-the-people-and-not-just-for-rich-white-men-234421

The administrative state has been protecting the rights of ordinary Americans and executing the sovereignty of the people for the past 87 years.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

https://twitter.com/Banned_Bill/status/1853842945767592429

Worth bookmarking to review every once in a while.

[Jefferson Paul]

Thanks for the link. What they keep saying makes so much more sense with that word substitution.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

"Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Justice Holmes was so far off the mark, he wasn't even wrong. Cooperation is civilized; coercion is tyranny. Taxes are to civilization as a bullet is to cooperation.

[Commenter_XY]

Anyone who has a favorable view of the IRS needs their head examined.

[Wizzle Bizzle]

And their receipts.

[Quo Usque Tandem]

In total, about 59.9 percent of U.S. households paid income tax in 2022. The remaining 40.1 percent of households paid no individual income tax. In that same year, about 47.1 percent of U.S. households with an income between 40,000 and 50,000 U.S. dollars paid no individual income taxes. Aug 21, 2024

To that significant percentage, the IRS is only collecting the rich people's "fair share" to which they contribute nothing and from which they benefit.

[John Rohan]

The Department of Homeland Security is such a broad agency, I am certain you would get very different answers from both sides if you broke it down into its components:

USSS
USCG
FEMA
ICE
CBP
TSA, etc

[Ben of Houston]

The democrats have an overall favorable opinion of the IRS?
Sorry, not buying that.

[InsaneTrollLogic (Factio Democratica delenda est 5/30/24)]

Yes, they do as they like to use the IRS on their political enemies.

[CE]

They think the rich are cheating on their taxes, and want to audit them.

[CLM1227]

A lot of democrats don’t pay taxes. Single moms also benefit heavily from tax deductions, so get pretty checks March - May.

It goes with the government dependence that they favor.

[Rick James]

Gotta be honest with you kids, after last week, I'm not clear on where Libertarians stand on the 3 letters.

[JD Joe]

I never thought I would see the day when Democrats had a more favorable opinion of the FBI and CIA than Republicans.

[MasterThief]

Thanks, Obama. He politicized and weaponized them to a degree that the public couldn't ignore.

[TJJ2000]

And the consensus is........
FAR too many Americans want a [Na]tional So[zi]alist Empire.
Instead of a *Constitutional* Republic to ensure Liberty & Justice.

You'll never keep a USA if you consistently try to redefine it illegally.
Your [Na]tional So[zi]alist Empire will collapse. 'Guns' don't make sh*t.

[Uncle Jay]

Most of the alphabet federal agencies should be defunded and disbanded, and now would be a good time to do it since the GOP has the majority.
But I doubt that will happen because republicans are notorious for being gutless as well as myopic.

[CE]

So keep NASA and the Park Service and cut the rest....

Kind of amazing that Homeland Security has botched the job so badly that they have lost the support of Republicans who were the main cheerleaders for establishing it.

[Wizzle Bizzle]

Hey "Reason Staff": So you drop this chart like a fart in the elevator and run out without any kind of analysis. Why would that be??? Hmmmm.... Something something priors. Something something both sides.

Let's see a chart that asks the same question to the Reason staff vs Reason readers. I imagine it would look much the same.

[Thoritsu]

The IRS stands out! Clearly denoting hypocrisy from democrats, which is in their blood. Fund everything, but I don't want to pay...

[AT]

Now, which side do the Reason staff fall on, and why don't we have more articles about their love or disdain for government agency.

[JFree]

Someone is going to realize that Yogi Bear for Prez can build a winning coalition.