Selection Sunday and the Government That Never Gets Cut

Sixty-Eight Teams, One Champion, No Survivors

Selection Sunday is one of the great spectacles in American sports. Sixty-eight college basketball programs have spent months building their case—wins, losses, strength of schedule, conference championships, quality performances against quality opponents. The committee looks at the full body of evidence. The bracket comes out. And then, over three weeks, all but one program is eliminated with complete finality.

No team that loses in the first round gets a second chance because its conference was underrepresented. No team that got blown out in the Elite Eight receives a consolation bid to keep playing because cutting them would be disruptive. You win or you go home. The accountability is total and instantaneous.

I watched the bracket reveal with my nephew last night, and about forty-five minutes in, it hit me: this is the most efficient allocation system in American public life. And it exists for college basketball because no one has yet figured out how to make it into a federal program.

What Zero-Based Accountability Looks Like

The NCAA tournament doesn't grandfather programs into the bracket because they were good in 1987. It doesn't give automatic bids to teams with powerful alumni networks. It doesn't keep underperforming programs in the field because someone on the selection committee went to school there. Performance determines participation. Full stop.

Federal agencies operate on the opposite principle. The baseline assumption in every federal budget negotiation is that last year's funding level is the floor this year. Agencies don't have to justify their existence—they justify incremental increases to their existing budget. The burden of proof is entirely on the people trying to cut spending, not on the agencies trying to keep it. A program that has failed its stated mission for a decade is not eliminated. It is reorganized, renamed, and refunded.

The Department of Education has spent approximately $1.8 trillion since its creation in 1979. American students rank 38th in mathematics internationally, behind Slovenia and Latvia. If the Department of Education were a basketball program, it would not have made the tournament. It would not be in the conversation for the tournament. It would be playing in a mid-week game in an empty gym somewhere in the Mountain West. But it will receive roughly $238 billion in the next budget cycle because that is how the system works.

The Selection Committee vs. Congress

The NCAA selection committee has something Congress lacks: external accountability. The committee's decisions are immediately visible, immediately criticized, and immediately testable. If they put a weak team in the bracket over a stronger one, the stronger team's fan base, coaching staff, and media will spend the next seventy-two hours making the case publicly. By the following Sunday, when the teams have actually played, the committee's judgment is either vindicated or exposed.

Congressional budget decisions face no equivalent accountability. Earmarks are buried in thousand-page continuing resolutions. Agency performance data is self-reported by the agencies. The metrics for success are defined by the programs themselves, and programs define success in ways they are confident they can achieve. Nobody is checking whether the stated outcomes were actually produced. Nobody is comparing the cost-per-outcome against alternatives. The money flows.

My wife's family runs a small manufacturing business in Ohio. When they want to expand, they write a business plan, present financial projections, and convince a bank that the investment will be repaid. If the business underperforms, the loan gets called. The accountability is direct and swift. This is not a radical model—it is how resource allocation works in every functional institution except the federal government and its near-neighbors.

The Bracket We Actually Need

This is not a complicated argument. It is not a new argument. Ronald Reagan made it. Paul Ryan made it. The Tea Party made it. DOGE is attempting a version of it right now. The argument keeps getting made because the problem keeps getting worse—federal spending as a percentage of GDP has roughly doubled since 1960, productivity of that spending has not doubled, and the structural incentives that produce the problem remain unchanged.

What would zero-based accountability for federal agencies look like? It would look like requiring every agency to justify its budget from scratch every five years rather than defending incremental increases. It would look like measuring outcomes against the original statutory purpose of the agency. It would look like sunsets—programs that expire unless affirmatively reauthorized by Congress based on demonstrated performance.

None of this will happen quickly. The constituencies for spending are organized, well-funded, and experienced at protecting their budgets. The constituencies for cuts are diffuse, underfunded, and easily characterized as heartless.

But every March, sixty-four teams that wanted to keep playing are told they're done. Their season was real. Their effort was genuine. The outcome is still no. The tournament is better for it. The country would be better for a government that worked the same way.