It sometimes feels like we’re carried by the current, floating past events that we know affect us but are beyond our control—at the southern border, say, or with the budget showdown in Congress. We look to our elected leaders to handle these things.
 
Instead of making tough choices, our leaders prefer to join us on the raft. Solving the budget crisis, for example, requires dealing with the pervasive waste in federal programs that GAO regularly reports on. But there’s a reason politicians resist budget cuts, such as removing obsolete subsidies and massive inefficiencies in public union contracts. The groups at the public trough are also the most powerful politically. Politicians like to give things to supporters, not take them away. The game of chicken over the debt ceiling is not about competing visions for necessary budget cuts, but about who takes the blame for them.
 
Washington is long overdue for a spring cleaning. The only realistic way to achieve this is to give the job to an outside commission, subject to an up or down vote by Congress. Then the pain can be shared and politicians have plausible deniability. Here’s Philip Howard's  column in The Hill describing how this could work, and suggesting reforms in five areas that would save roughly $400 billion annually.

• Philip's long interview on C-SPAN’s “In Depth” is available here.

• Sarah Harbison of the Pelican Institute for Public Policy wrote “Collective Bargaining a Bad Deal for New Orleans Taxpayers.”

• The Federal News Network’s Tom Temin interviewed Philip about union controls in the federal government.