Criticizing incumbent Leonard Boswell for a lack of organization, attorney Jay Marcus announced his candidacy Tuesday morning for the U.S. House seat in Iowa’s Third District.

“Everybody says they want to downsize government and balance the budget, but to do so, you need a plan,” the Republican from Fairfield said in a press release.

Marcus launched his campaign for the Third District, which includes all of Story County and most of southern Iowa, with the announcement of a wide-ranging seven-step “business plan for a better Congress.”

He said the ineffectiveness of the federal government’s family violence prevention program demonstrates a general need for more organization and research.

The programs cost approximately $6.7 million per year, but Marcus said a recent report by the National Research Council found that “these programs have not been proven to work.

“If 6.7 billion dollars are being wasted in just one area, how much more is being wasted in other areas?” he asked.

In a telephone interview with the Daily, Marcus said the plan he has formulated begins with assembling a staff of professionals from the Third District “that understand accounting and management principles.”

The staff, called “Team Iowa,” will design studies to test government programs before they are signed into law.

“The plan is simple,” Marcus said. “We test programs before we spend vast amounts of money on them, and we get rid of what has not been proven effective.”

He said Iowa State professors would be ideal candidates for “Team Iowa” because they are “people who have the scientific knowledge to design pilot studies.”

Marcus said another objective is expanding college loan programs.

“I would like to see everybody who’s motivated enough to be able to work hard and get through college,” he said. “For a lot of people, it’s going to be very expensive, and the loan programs just aren’t available.”

He suggested that the government forgive loans to students who become teachers, engineers or any other occupation that is a “critical need,” similar to a program that exists now for medical school graduates.

Marcus described college as the doorway to future success.

“A good education is the price of admission to the 21st century,” he said.

“The future of American manufacturing lies in more sophisticated kinds of items,” Marcus said. “What America needs to do is focus on educating people to handle the skilled kind of positions that are going to be in demand.”

He said the creation of 12 million new jobs in telecommunications and other high-tech fields creates a new atmosphere in the job market.

“If you don’t have some kind of higher education, you’re not going to fit into the Information Age,” he said.

Marcus spoke to ISU’s College Republicans Tuesday, but he said he would “definitely be back soon,” adding that he hoped to visit a sociology or political science class.

Marcus, who ran as a third-party candidate for Congress in 1996, has been a business attorney in Fairfield for 25 years. He is the former chairman of the Iowa State Bar Association’s ethics committee and the author of several books on management, crime and drug abuse.