No one is surprised when he hears that a government agency is doing its job badly. Some people might be surprised, though, to hear a government agency give advance notice that it’s going to do its job badly. John Koskinen, the IRS commissioner, has announced that this filing season, the IRS expects to answer approximately half of taxpayers’ phone calls, down from the three-fourths its agents answered last season. “All we can do,” said Koskinen, “is try to maximize our services as well as we can; as well as we can is still going to be miserable. You really do get what you pay for.”

When Koskinen says, “You really do get what you pay for,” he isn’t criticizing the country for hiring a cut-rate, slapdash outfit like the Internal Revenue Service. He means the IRS isn’t getting enough money. This year, the IRS’s budget was $11.3 billion. (Though I understand most of that went to auditing Catherine Engelbrecht.)

Without an amenable White House, Congress has no practical recourse against a government agency that’s not doing its job. Congress can’t fire an executive-branch bureaucrat for incompetence. Congress can pass a budget that defunds failing departments, but the president still has to sign it, and a pro-bureaucracy president won’t.

The Department of Health and Human Services has also been on the ropes. Every year we pump billions and billions of dollars into its National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control, and finally, when we actually need them to control a disease, they respond with the focused energy of a toddler on an icy pond. Now the NIH has reported that if its budget hadn’t been cut, “We probably would have had a vaccine in time for this [Ebola outbreak].” Likewise our various border and immigration services. They’d love to enforce the myriad tough immigration laws, but their budgeted billions and billions aren’t enough.

My point, of course, isn’t that they don’t need those billions. Maybe they do; it’s impossible to say. My point isn’t even that with no consequences for doing a bad job, government agencies have no incentive to do a good job. My point is that Koskinen’s announcement represents a new phase of bureaucratic impotence: An agency is relishing its inability to do a good job, because it can use its failure to up its budget. Our system has successfully incentivized incompetence.

Now the small-government guys are in charge of the Congress, but what can they do?

Healthcare.gov cost $634 million to build. According to The Fiscal Times, when you include the state exchanges and the to-date costs of trying to fix everything that didn’t work, “Obamacare websites” have cost “over $5 billion and counting.”

Last year, as the website rollout choked and fainted, everyone wondered why it had cost so much. Conservative pundit supremo Sean Hannity brought a software developer onto his show to talk about the website, and asked the question on everyone’s mind: How much would it have cost to produce a Healthcare.gov that worked? Hannity’s expert said he would have been embarrassed to charge more than a million dollars.

Tempted though it might be, the Republican Congress can’t abolish the IRS. But it could hold a hearing with some private accounting companies to find out how much they would charge to handle the country’s internal revenue. It’s a very big job — even bigger if you have to answer 100 percent of taxpayers’ phone calls — but Congress could get an estimate, put it in a bill, and send it to the president’s desk. And I understand there are actually private disease-research establishments; maybe we could spend the CDC’s budget on one of them. Maybe they’d even feel compelled to do a good job, in order to keep their enormously lucrative government contract. Imagine if, say, an agency knew that if it leaked private tax data, or harassed taxpayers, or permitted an Ebola case to fly coach, it would be fired. Imagine all the money we’d save. After all, the Canadians have private air-traffic control, which — so far as anyone can tell — works brilliantly.

Needless to say, the Republicans’ new seats don’t give them the power to unilaterally privatize anything. But they can use their new hearing rooms to get some quotes, and make some very compelling cases. It’s a start.

— Josh Gelernter writes weekly for NRO and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard.