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by
Ralph Nader
September
8, 2003
The
federal government is by far the largest consumer in the land- hundreds of
billions of dollars yearly. It buys many of the products regular consumers
purchase, including motor vehicles, fuel, drugs, paper, clothing, food,
computers, software, appliances, furnishings, and medical devices. It also buys
less usual products such as construction equipment, buildings, highways and
military hardware.
Connecting
all these purchases with established national missions, rooted in law, to clean
up the environment, promote consumer health and safety, advance job safety and
save taxpayer dollars can itself become a remarkable national mission. If the
agencies and departments which do this buying could receive support and
direction from Congress and the President, Americans would start seeing their
dollars go further and their well-being improve.
This
is not altogether a new story, but it is a largely forgotten one. How many
people know that it was the U.S. Army which decades ago started legitimizing
much cheaper generic drugs by using them in its hospitals? Until then, the big
drug companies peddled the myth that much more expensive brand name drugs were
purer and safer.
Equally
little known is that the opposition of the auto companies to air bags was
significantly broken by the General Services Administration putting out a bid
in the mid-Eighties for 5500 air bag-equipped cars for government employees. GM
and Chrysler refused to bid; Ford did and the rest is history. Back in the
Civil War days, standardized clothing sizes were introduced when Lincoln's
Union forces had to purchase uniforms for its troops.
Here
is the wonderful prospect. Government purchasing specifications pushing forward
the frontiers of innovation or available technologies that favor health, safety
and environmental protection can quickly create large markets. This in turn
offers producers or vendors early economies of scale, lower unit costs and
lower risks. This then makes it possible for companies to invest in innovations
before a consumer market exists. The results are products that become available
to a wider public, just like generic drugs and air bags.
Nearly
thirty years ago, Professor Barry Commoner, the great environmental scientist,
proposed to the Pentagon that it buy solar photovoltaics at a scale which would
drop unit costs and create a growing solar industry. His proposal was not
accepted. But in the nineties, on a smaller scale, the Navy was placing a
projected 20,000 photovoltaics in remote installations for economic reasons.
There is no need to refuel and it is good for the environment. The Pentagon did
its best not to publicize this good deed.
Of
course long-time vendors to governmental agencies often oppose these
innovations which challenge the "not invented here" syndrome. And the
more the federal government leases or outsources its activities to
corporations, the less realizable is this potential of government buying for
important innovations.
There
is another reason why government purchasing is now so important to advance
statutorily based national missions of health, safety, environment, efficiency
and care for posterity. Federal regulation is disappearing.
Why,
you say, are there all those outcries by companies, trade associations and
think tanks about over-regulation. A skeptic would say- how else do these
groups keep raising so much money from their members or benefactors? The
skeptic is right. Most federal regulations on the books are years, if not
decades, obsolete and long since surpassed by industrial practice. They are not
upgraded. Other categories of regulations are: (1) those demanded by the
industries themselves, such as agricultural marketing orders, (2)newer
regulations watered down to levels acceptable to companies that brag about
their meeting or exceeding federal regulations (like meat inspection standards)
and (3) those which are completely written into law by corporate attorneys
(like gas pipeline standards and railroad safety rules).
In
the financial or commercial areas the anemic nature of the rules are legendary.
What's left are regulations that are often violated but rarely prosecuted (like
water pollution violations)?
So
federal regulation as a force for pushing industries faster to become safer or
better in various ways (as the first wave of federal motor vehicle safety
standards did) is largely a myth. This leaves the massive consumer purchases of
the federal government to meet these lawful purposes, as is now being done in
modest ways for the buying of post-consumer content copying paper.
Under
the rubric of consumer sovereignty and the "customer is always
right", do not underestimate the corporate opposition forces. They know
how consequential smart buying can be. Just ask Microsoft, whose monopoly power
has pushed out competitors which can provide the federal government with
software that is more affordable, usable, secure and innovative.
So,
Uncle Sam as smart consumer and shopper needs to become a widely discussed
agenda among citizen and taxpayer groups and their political representatives in
Congress and at the state legislatures. For more information, log onto www.gpp.org and become active.
Ralph Nader is America’s
leading consumer advocate. He is the founder of numerous public interest groups
including Public Citizen, and has twice
run for President as a Green Party candidate. His
latest book is Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for
President (St. Martin’s Press, 2002)
* How About
Using A “People” Yardstick to Rank States?
* Physicians
for a National Health Program, Cable De-regulation
* The Corporatist
Democratic Leadership Council
* Citizen-centric
E-Government
* Has the American
Enterprise Institute Lost Contact with Reality?
* Tax
Cuts While Problems of Homeless Grow
* Giving Our
Airwaves to the Media Moguls
* Let
Technology Work for People