So all of the governments and municipalities of the United States form a quality management system? What problems are contained or reworked by defence spending that are prevented or curbed by education spending? Is the famous Quality Learing Center in Minnesota part of this quality system? 

This article is like "The times we are living through are exactly like Harry Potter," except instead of Harry Potter, it's Quality. The author should be thankful that the SAT got rid of analogies, because these shoes just don't fit. It is taken for granted that any spending to be cut would have prevented problems more effectively than other spending, without a shred of evidence even being reached for beyond the generalisation that some things are "prevention," some things are "containment," and "prevention is more cost-effective than containment." Worse, this proliferation of generalisations is used to sneak through the back door a radical view of government and society that is completely contrary to the ideals of the United States and its constitution. It is cartoonishly bad. 

Just take the politics out of it for a second. The closing statement is complete nonsense: "The enduring lesson, grounded in decades of quality management theory and practice, is that quality must be designed into the system, not inspected into it after the fact. [Great so far.] As this budget proposal demonstrates, when that principle is reversed, the system doesn’t become more efficient. It becomes more fragile."

A budget proposal that hasn't been implemented could not possibly demonstrate such a thing. The author is simply begging the question at that point.