User fees: a betrayal of public service

With today's cynicism-as-worldview, Americans "wisely" comment that corruption is unavoidable. These people should consider when they last paid a bribe to get a driver's license. The marvel of modern governance is that a combination of real enforcement and sufficient resources to deliver services can - gradually - marginalize corrupt practices.

But this is a difficult job and takes constant effort. Now, it seems to be eroding, and a big culprit is "user fees." Take the Citizenship and Immigration Service, which has charged some significant fees since 1986:

Hooked on fees, Congress allowed the growth of a Turkish bazaar of levies, through which immigrants now pay for 90 percent of the agency's budget...

As backlogs and deficits grew, the agency ratcheted up charges to cover its budget. The longer applicants waited, the more they paid.

In 2005, it raised $230 million by charging green-card applicants for about 1 million temporary work and travel permits they needed while waiting for their cases to be processed. About 325,000 interim permits went to people whose applications were later denied, creating a security risk, Khatri said.

The agency raised another $139 million by charging a separate "premium processing" fee of $1,000 -- three times the normal fee -- that is now used by a majority of applicants to speed up the process.

This is not the behavior of a modern agency: it is the blind rapacity of the Third World mandarin, writ large. Have power over someone? Make them pay, then don't give them what they paid for, then make them pay again! In fact, the lead in the quoted article is that the CIS rejected a plan to cut costs and slash waiting times - on the stated grounds that it would deprive the agency of the fees that keep it afloat.

This overall situation was not the choice of the CIS, to be sure: it stems from the slow strangling of the federal government begun in the 80's. Reagan didn't manage to do anything really revolutionary like cut Social Security or the Department of Education in his tenure - but his lasting deficits kept almost all agencies, except the military, straining to maintain their operations with stagnant or slowly falling budgets. Many of the ones that were based on enforcement, like parts of Justice and Agriculture, stopped doing their work seriously (especially in enforcing labor and environmental laws). The ones that perform services on demand, like the INS/CIS, the Patent Office, and the FDA, turned to user fees to keep their budget adequate and growing. The Patent Office and the FDA, which work for business, are more and more in thrall to the bigger and wilier businesses as a result. On the other hand, the CIS, which works for regular people, has become a practitioner of extortion.

Its extortion is disturbingly similar to the habits of the drug companies. Since a life-saving drug is absolutely vital to the customer, why not charge as much as you can wring out of them, up to thousands a month? In the same way, an immigrant has a desperate need for legal status, and will go to any lengths to scrape up the money necessary to cover a new fee. That a public agency would abuse that desperation to line its coffers and preserve its functionaries' jobs is disgraceful. The proper measure of an agency is not whether it can pay for itself, but whether it serves the public. As such, user fees, beyond a small token, should be seen as a pernicious vampirism, incompatible with good government.