A Department of Business?

In an interview with MSNBC, President Obama said:

I’ve said I want to consolidate a whole bunch of government agencies. We should have one Secretary of Business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like getting loans to SBA or helping companies with exports. There should be a one-stop shop. Now, the reason we haven’t done that is not because of some big ideological difference. It has something to do with Congress talking a good game about streamlining government, but protective about giving up their jurisdiction over various pieces of government. So, there are going to be a whole things of government that I think we can work on, the first thing though is, let’s go ahead and get settled, how big a government, how do we pay for it?

The president spoke about reorganization in his 2011 State of the Union   A year later, he did propose legislation enhancing the president's ability to reorganize the government.  Though he spoke about it at a January meeting of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, he said very little about afterward.

 And he has not met with the Council since then.

Reorganization

In his State of the Union address, the president spoke in broad terms about reorganizing the government. At NPR, Alan Greenblatt reports that success might not be easy.

"It's not so much that getting the organization right doesn't help, but it's hugely costly," says John Donahue, a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "It's more expensive than most people anticipate."

Obama got a good laugh when he pointed out the seeming absurdity of salmon having to deal with separate federal bureaucracies as they swim out to sea. "The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in salt water."

The reality is that it's not salmon being regulated, but the type of body of water they're swimming in.

"It's true that salmon may be treated by two or three different Cabinet departments," says Donald Kettl, dean of the public policy school at the University of Maryland, "but you don't want to have a Department of Salmon that deals with salmon wherever they live, and then a separate Department of Cod."

The bigger point is that Interior and Commerce have different priorities when it comes to salmon. One is trying to preserve the fish, while the other is trying to promote its sale. Putting salmon management under one roof won't change that dynamic.

For more on reorganization, see Dilbert.