Maybe this time they’ll get it right. Maybe the 10th, or 50th, or 100th time’s the charm. Maybe there will be One Bureaucracy to Rule Them All.

Or maybe the city and county of Los Angeles are adding bloat on top of bloat and throwing good money after bad (then again, these days in L.A. is there really any such thing as good taxpayer money?).

On Tuesday, the County Board of Supervisors passed a motion introduced by Supervisor Lindsay Horvath to create a homeless Labor Commission. Apparently this was mandated in County Measure A, the $1 billion, half cent sales tax homelessness spending boondoggle that voters in their infinite wisdom approved in November 2024 to succeed Measure H, the previous $1 billion, half cent sales tax homelessness spending boondoggle voters in their infinite wisdom approved in March 2017.

Measure H, by the way, was called the Los Angeles County Plan to Prevent and Combat Homelessness. Measure A, passed eight years later, was called the Homelessness Services and Affordable Housing Ordinance. Apparently we gave up on the whole preventing and combating homelessness approach, and moved on instead to servicing and housing the people we previously failed to prevent from falling into homelessness and those whose homelessness we didn’t combat. That’s what poker players call a tell.

Anyway, the homeless Labor Commission will be charged with making “recommendations to the Board of Supervisors on compensation issues for contracted nonprofit social service providers including, but not limited to, wages, benefits, pay equity, career development, and cost of living adjustments.”

Translation: This new bureaucracy will figure out how existing bureaucracies can spend even more taxpayer money. The motion identifies who will be eligible to sit on the new Commission: Representatives from the SEIU and other unions that “represent County employees or contracted service providers serving people experiencing homelessness,” along with “representatives from nonprofit social service providers serving people experiencing or at risk of homelessness.” That’s it. No auditors, no business leaders, no accountants, no elected officials, no private citizens with relevant expertise.

This isn’t the fox guarding the hen house. It’s pimps guarding their bottom bitches. The hilarious part is that the whole endeavor is being undertaken in the name of — wait for it — efficiency and accountability. Because nothing says “efficient and accountable” like the Service Employees International Union and homeless nonprofits.

The Labor Commission isn’t the first new homeless bureaucracy the Board of Supervisors has created. It’s not even the first one this year. In April, they established a new, yet to be named agency that, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, will have a budget that will “almost immediately exceed $1 billion.” Around $300 million will come from the County withdrawing its part of the funding for yet another bureaucracy, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). The other $700 million will come from — somewhere. Unicorns passing bars of gold bullion, maybe.

Horvath, who also sponsored that motion, said, “I want to be clear that this is not more government, it is better government.” Reliable sources insist she said this with a straight face.

She said the model for the new agency will be the existing Housing for Health program/bureaucracy within the County Department of Health, the bureaucracy that kept schools and small businesses closed during the COVID pandemic longer than any other county in the country, efficiently and accountably crippling hundreds of thousands of childrens’ educations and families’ incomes. According to reports, 37% of that program’s participants found permanent housing, compared to 29% in the County’s broader network administered by LAHSA.

To politicians and bureaucrats, an 8% improvement among 75,000 homeless people is a real game-changer, a Manhattan Project meets the Apollo Program moment.

Incidentally, Housing for Health served just 1,100 people last year, putting it in the same league as City of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s disastrous “Inside Safe” program/bureaucracy. By the time it scales, it will almost assuredly replicate existing programs’ results.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats at LAHSA and the City of L.A. were positively giddy about another alleged improvement. The 2024 annual homeless population count, aka the “point in time,” or PIT count, revealed that street homelessness had declined in the City for the first time in five years, dropping 2.2% from 46,260 to 45,252, a drop of 1,008 people. Astute observers will recognize a rounding error when they see one.

A particularly astute observer, Tim Campbell, an L.A. resident who spent his career in public service and managed a municipal performance audit program, pointed out that that’s also approximately the number of homeless people who died in L.A. last year.

It’s best not to think too hard about the implications of Campbell’s observation.

Well, that’s one solution to homelessness….

Back in 2021 the Board of Supervisors created a Blue Ribbon Commission on Homelessness that faithfully reflected the demographics of the Board of Supervisors, insofar as it consisted of five extremely diverse women. The BRCH spent two years producing a 111 page Governance Report that made various recommendations as to how the City and County could address the “systemic dysfunction” in homelessness system, all of which were already obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than that of drywall. The Report was another game changer, as it was reportedly read by at least four other people before being game-changingly forgotten.

Then, of course, there is Mayor Bass’s game-changing, efficient, and accountable Inside Safe, which is aptly named because it amounts to agency inside a agency. At this point they’ve succeeded in creating Russian nesting bureaucracies. According to Campbell’s analysis, Inside Safe spent as much as $262,000 per person housed, with no data available on how long each stayed housed or the quality of said housing. For all we know, the City bought each of them a brand new Bentley Continental GT. Also, speaking of Russia, it’s a good bet that apparatchiks in Vladimir Putin’s government are studying Inside Safe as we speak, so as to better understand how to waste public resources for the benefit of the politically well-connected (“Vlad, you’ll never guess what they came up with in Los Angeles this time! We never would have thought of this!”)

All of which brings us to the granddaddy of them all, Project Homekey, another bureaucratic initiative that various politicians promised would Finally Put a Real Dent in the Crisis. It was going to be a Big Deal, a model of efficiency and accountability. The subtle, cunning plan was for Sacramento to heave vast sums of money at cities to allocate for the purchase of hotels, motels, and apartment buildings to convert to homeless housing, and give them a comically short amount of time to buy as many hotel and apartment buildings as possible to provide emergency shelter. The plan was game-changing insofar as it relied on an entirely new honeypot of taxpayer dollars: Federal emergency COVID relief money. It was heady stuff, bureaucrats figuring out how to finagle billions in public funds intended for things like small business and rental relief for working Californians, and use it to prop up the Homeless Industrial Complex.

As we reported over in the Westside Current here, here, and here, the City and County of L.A. spent the money, with extreme prejudice. Years later, thousands of Homekey units remained — and many remain — empty. Turns out that the only thing worse than homeless bureaucracies working at their normal, glacial pace, is when they operate with dispatch.

The scary thing is that it seems the only thing L.A.’s political class can accomplish even marginally competently is to create bureaucracies and then throw obscene amounts of money at them. That really is it. Whether or not those bureaucracies perform the public functions for which they were created is irrelevant. In fact, better if they don’t perform, because their failure will, perversely, lead to politicians hollering that they should get even more money. It’s a sick cycle of co-dependence. Ask yourself: When was the last time L.A. solved a problem, much less one that is literally life and death for tens of thousands of people? Personally, I cannot remember.

Unless and until we break this political group think gridlock, the only things that will change are the names on the office buildings and executive office doors.

This is no way to run a city and county.