Escape from Quicksand
It's hard to keep track of what's being knocked over in the continuing DOGE stampede. Broad public resentment at Washington fuels the deconstruction, and shows no sign of abating. Over time, courts will try to impose some order on the bureaucratic rubble.
The end goal, presumably, is a government that works better and is more respectful of local needs and values. But tearing things down is not a vision for sensible government. Will a better form of government emerge from the rubble?
With the status quo now wrecked, centrist reformers are hustling to present ideas to streamline red tape. But that won't work either. Pruning the jungle is a fool's errand. Each complication, each crossed wire, each claimed right, will cause gridlock.
In Escape from Quicksand, a report published today by Manhattan Institute, Philip Howard argues that Washington needs to abandon the bureaucratic compliance model, and replace it with a simpler framework that empowers designated officials to make tradeoff judgments to modernize infrastructure and achieve public results.
Governing structures created after the 1960s are designed to fail because they presume legal rules and processes can validate correct choices. But law can't think. Law can't decide whether the benefits of a transmission line outweigh the harm of cutting through a pristine forest. That's a value judgment that should be politically accountable, and is not enhanced by years of hearings and litigation. The proper role of law is to provide a framework that delineates the authority to make that decision, and provides public transparency and oversight.
What's needed is not simply less red tape, but a simpler framework that gives designated officials authority to do their jobs. Those officials should be politically accountable. Courts should not get involved unless officials transgress the boundaries of their authority.
But what if ... the decision-maker is Robert Moses, or Elon Musk? Distrust in America has never been more pervasive. But it's relatively easy to build in checks and balances—say, approval by credible oversight officials. What causes paralysis is letting naysayers drag any public choice into court. With a protocol of independent oversight, years of process before a decision—the gridlock that Americans loathe—can be replaced by weeks of review after a decision.
In Escape from Quicksand, Philip explains how this simplified framework, activated by officials taking responsibility, would jumpstart efforts to modernize infrastructure, defense, and other public obligations.
A recent Hoover Institution education summit highlighted the need to liberate teachers and principals from red tape and union controls, discussed in Philip's Hoover essay "The Human Authority Needed for Good Schools."
In "Why the Federal Bureaucracy Keeps Multiplying," management expert Michele Zanini exposes the bloat of managers and administrators, in part because of the growing compliance burden discussed in our work.
In Forbes, Progressive Policy Institute’s Paul Weinstein, Jr. offers lessons for DOGE, quoting our work: "Common sense disappears as soon as it steps into the goo of 150 million words of federal law and regulation."
In an essay for Law & Liberty, "The Age of Trivial Panic," Professor Brendan Dooley cites our work on "the hubris of attempting to subject every decision to a set of operational requirements."