The White House Administration is putting together a plan to combine the Department of Labor and the Department of Education. The move is to remove wasteful spending of money between overlapping programs and goals in the separate departments.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the annual budget of the Department of Labor (DoL). A quick web search yields a plethora of ‘news’ headlines stating DoL requested $9.7 BILLION as their budget for 2018. Some of the articles report that the DoL has over 15,000 employees.

What the ‘news’ reports FAIL to mention is that the almost $10 BILLION in requested budget dollars is a “discretionary” budget number. After some digging the TOTAL BUDGET for 2017 was $46 BILLION of your tax dollars of which more than $12 BILLION was moved about in a “discretionary” manner.  If you want to revue the budget you can read it here,  FY2018BIB.

Let’s look at a comparison between a publicly traded corporation and the Department of Labor. Truth in lending, I hold stock in the company we are going to use to compare numbers. Raytheon Company is a publicly traded defense company listed as RTN on the New York Stock Exchange. From their 2017 financial report the company had $25.358 BILLION in REVENUE. The COST of revenue was $19 BILLION which means they had a gross profit of over $6 BILLION. During the year the company employed 64,000 people worldwide.

Hmmm, They have over FOUR TIMES THE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES when compared to the DoL and they are run on a total expenditure of about 40%, well less than half, of the budget of the Department of Labor. On top of that, they MADE OVER $6 BILLION IN PROFIT!

If it wasn’t for the generosity of YOU the American Taxpayer, the Department of Labor would FAIL miserably as a company.

How much of your money do you think is wasted in “The Swamp”?