最近，国会山的事情一直很忙，几乎没有完成。自10月25日以来，两党赤字超级委员会的12名成员本周就疲惫不堪，本周的12名成员无需交易就从国会小丑汽车中摔倒了。事实证明，委员会的六名民主党人和六名共和党人在一两个关键点上并不完全达成共识，尤其是在增加对富裕公民的税收来提高收入时。

So, after a well-deserved Thanksgiving recess, some of the lawmakers will pack themselves back into the little car and head for a number of legislative safe houses, where they’ll try to repeal the automatic budget cuts – about half targeting military spending and half targeting domestic programs – that have been triggered by the deficit committee’s failure.

这里不足为奇。到现在为止，大多数人已经习惯了观看立法者使用意识形态来连任而不是为公众服务。直到2012年大选落后于我们，实际上将出现的“立法”实际上只不过是杰出的。

A relatively small program with big notoriety

Elected officials, though, do have ways of at least trying to appear productive, much like a hamster on a hamster wheel appears to be going nowhere fast. A case in point is theStop Green Initiative Abuse Act of 2011,introduced by Representative Chuck Fleischmann, a Republican representing the Third Congressional District in Tennessee. The purpose of the measure is to eliminate the Weatherization Assistance Program, which provides free weatherization services for low-income households.

The WAP, which is administered by the Department of Energy, has historically been ignored by politicians as a cost-cutting target because its annual budget was, at a few million dollars, relatively small. But the program became a favorite piñata of conservatives after its budget ballooned dramatically – to about $5 billion over three years, under the $787 billion economic stimulus program – and program administratorsstruggled to synchronize and implement它的规定和推出。

尽管WAP分配th的0.6%左右e total stimulus budget, the program has been so successfully demonized that it ranks high on tallies compiled by YouCut, a Republican program that allows voters to vote online for the government programs they want cut. “I am also glad the American people directly had a say in this process through the YouCut program. Together we can get our fiscal house in order and get our country back on the right track,” Fleischmann said in a press release about the legislation, which was announced on November 16.

信仰

The congressman says the Weatherization Assistance Program is dispensable because other federal programs, such as the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), “are already in place.” In fact, WAP was created in 1976, five years before the launch of LIHEAP, which provides one-time funding to low-income households to help them cover their utility bills. In many states, WAP and LIHEAP services are administered by the same state agency and offered in tandem. Weatherization improvements, however, provide ongoing energy savings rather than one-time assistance with energy bills.

Fleischmann指出了田纳西州审计长办公室的2010年12月审查，该审查指出：“在研究的近一半中，承包商未能实施关键建议的措施来适当气候化房屋”，并滥用了WAP资金。新闻稿还引用了美国能源部监察长2010年1月的一份报告，称扩大计划“管理不善”。监察长报告中确定的主要关注点是由于对工资和其他实施要求的困惑，许多州的服务推出缓慢。

Other WAP snafus have emerged since then, including,在加利福尼亚的情况下，支持人员之间的计算机训练缺陷。但是，尽管其推出延误，审计头痛，复杂性和管理困难，但扩大的WAP终于在大多数州看到了成功，并且长期将为改装房屋的居住者带来节能福利。扩展计划的目标是气候60万户主；根据DOE估计，到今年第二季度末，大约有484,000个（仅占目标的80％以上）进行了改造。

Unlikely bipartisan support

But as we’ve noted, most elected officials at least try to appear responsive to their constituents, and Fleischmann’s decision to target the already vilified WAP gave him an easy, symbolic, conservative twofer, even if the amount of money the government would save by eliminating the program – $2.1 billion over the next 10 years, by Fleischmann’s estimate, or an average of $210 million annually – is relatively small.

There’s no indication that the measure has any chance of becoming law, although if Rick Perry gets elected president and doesn’t forget to eliminate the Department of Energy, as he promised, it won’t matter.