America’s pathetic performance in dealing with COVID-19 is due to sluggish public institutions, not just the poor leadership of President Trump, authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argued in a spirited discussion yesterday with columnist Megan McArdle and political scientist Francis Fukuyama.   

Now is a unique moment, all agreed, when long overdue reforms can clean out paralytic red tape and remake civil service. The goal, Micklethwait and Wooldridge argue in their new book The Wake-Up Call, is to “make government great again.” The debate on how to do this is well worth watching.

But there’s a challenge: Neither party has a vision to fix broken government. How do we get overhaul on the agenda? Tomorrow at 11am EDT, the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh is hosting a forum, "The Issue the Candidates Aren't Discussing," focusing on a recent Newsweek column by political scientist Donald Kettl and Philip Howard. The other participants are the Director of the Center, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, and political scientist Gary Hollibaugh, Jr. You can register for the Center for Governance forum here.