In recent weeks, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has moved to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development, while President Trump prepared an executive order to wind down the U.S. Department of Education. It’s the latest attempt to make government more efficient by eliminating things that it does. Merely shuttering departments, however, won’t get to the heart of the problem DOGE seeks to correct: The American public sector, at any level of government, can’t get things done in a time-effective and efficient manner.
A new Manhattan Institute report provides an antidote to this public malaise in the context of infrastructure. Its author, Philip K. Howard, offers a new governing vision that authorizes officials to weigh tradeoffs and make decisions for the public’s benefit.
Federal agencies need more discretion, not less. Many of the rules they follow are not statutory, and one useful function that DOGE could perform is to identify and eliminate the most outdated and inefficient of them. As Philip Howard, the author of many books on simplifying government and founder of the nonpartisan group Common Good, has pointed out over the years, bureaucrats need more freedom to use their own good judgment regarding the implementation of policy, rather than being forced to follow rules.
Read MoreThey also should give a prominent spot on their team to the lawyer and longtime government-reform advocate Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and numerous other books outlining a new vision for how government agencies should operate. Nobody has thought longer and harder about how to instill a culture of responsiveness and responsibility to government and civil society.
Read MoreA fourth thing: Establish an Office of Common Sense Reform, working directly from the White House, with a statutory limit of no more than 30 employees to prevent it from becoming yet another permanent and oversize bureaucracy. Appoint either Philip K. Howard, author of “The Death of Common Sense,” or Cass Sunstein, who worked on regulatory reform for Obama, as its first director. Give it the mandate to cut through all the permitting requirements, duplicative regulations and other bureaucratic haggles that keep even modest infrastructure projects from ever being completed on time or on budget.
Read MoreFrancis Fukuyama talks with Philip Howard about Everyday Freedom, and how the law has weakened the authority of government in ways that make us less free.
Read MoreEveryday Freedom calls on individuals, families, and communities to exercise newfound authority in the pursuit of flourishing lives. By the last page, the book acts as a mirror, staring back at readers with a challenging question: Are we ready to live up to the responsibilities of such freedom?
Read MoreMuch of the answer lies in Everyday Freedom, a powerful and succinct new book by Philip Howard. As liberals ushered in a wave of fundamental changes to individual freedom and equality beginning in the 1960s — one of the great achievements in human history — they rightly sought to constrain the power of government to impinge on individual rights.
Read MorePhilip Howard is a US lawyer who published a book on The Death of Common Sense in 1995 and has been writing about the subject ever since. His new book, Everyday Freedom, is due out next week. Howard thinks that the root of the problem is “trained helplessness.” People usually know how to fix things — teachers know how to keep order in the classroom, police chiefs know who the bad apples are, local officials know that they need to build new infrastructure. But they are all prevented from using their best judgments because they are trapped in systems that are more concerned with avoiding mistakes (and penalizing people who make mistakes) than on getting things done.
Read MoreIn his latest, “Everyday Freedom,” Howard cites the buildup since the 1960s of laws and rules that were intended to ensure procedural fairness, but in practice have chipped away at officials’ authority to do their jobs.
Modern law, he says, has created “an elaborate precautionary system aimed at precluding human error.” Public officials have learned it’s safer to hide behind highly prescriptive laws and regulations than to risk using their judgment, moral intuition and common sense to solve public problems.
Read MoreSystem failure is going on all around us—the 911 operator who puts you on hold; the outsourced federal “processing centers” that are months behind on essential tasks; the public-school officials who do nothing when told a six-year-old has a loaded handgun in his backpack; the mandatory D.E.I. training that says you can’t say “pregnant women” anymore—now you have to say “pregnant people.” We’ve all seen versions of it. We get steamed up about it. We go online and commiserate about it. But most of us don’t think about it in analytical terms. That’s what Howard does.
Read More“The path forward is not political brinkmanship, but to remove politics and punt the solution to a nonpartisan committee, subject only to an up-or-down vote by Congress,” Philip K. Howard, author of the “Death of Common Sense,” wrote last month for The Hill. “Just as independent ‘base-closing commissions’ decide the politically-difficult choices of which military bases to close, so too an external ‘Fiscal Commission’ could present broader proposals that will have benefits as well as costs for most stakeholders.”
Read MorePhilip Howard talks with National Review’s Dominic Pino about Not Accountable.
Read MoreIn “Not Accountable,” Philip Howard shows in vivid detail how such practices have made government at all levels unmanageable, inefficient and opposed to the common good. He argues that, in fact, public unions—that is, unions whose members work for the government—are forbidden by the Constitution. The argument, he notes, would have been familiar to President Franklin Roosevelt and George Meany, the longtime president of the AFL-CIO.
Read MorePhil is a New York lawyer, author and original thinker whose new book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, is making waves. We talk here about how to make government work better in the face of entrenched interest groups, especially teachers unions and other government employee unions.
Read MoreMr. Howard, a lawyer and writer, first noticed how unions stymie governance during his public service in New York as a member of a neighborhood zoning board and chairman of the Municipal Art Society. “I kept wondering why my friends who had responsible jobs in government couldn’t do what they thought was right,” he recalls. That might be speeding up a land-use review for a construction project or approving repairs on a school building.
Read MoreThe clearest case against [public unions’] flagrant distortion of American democracy is made in a new book Not Accountable by Philip K. Howard, a lawyer who has been a lonely voice for common sense governance since his brilliant book, The Death of Common Sense, in 1994. … If you are interested in your progeny not having their intellects stunted by mediocre martinets, you should read this book.
Read MoreTwo public schools in Manhattan illustrate the high stakes of a political choice that the nation, and many states and municipalities, must reconsider. In 2019, Success Academy Harlem 2 charter school ranked 37th among New York state’s 2,413 public elementary schools, one of which, PS 30, had only about a third as many pupils as Harlem 2, spent twice as much per pupil and ranked 1,694th. PS 30 and Harlem 2 operate in the same building.
Read MoreWith more than a quarter century of pondering government delays and dysfunction, Howard was bound at some point to home in on collective bargaining. He began to see it as one of the biggest impediments to productivity and reform.
“The abuse of power by public employee unions is the main story of public failure in America,” he writes in Not Accountable.
Read MoreGovernors and mayors no longer have authority to fix broken schools, fire bad cops or manage public services responsibly. Public unions have a stranglehold over the operating machinery of government. A governor or mayor comes into office with his or her hands tied by detailed collective bargaining agreements and other operating controls. So what’s the point of democracy? To elect officials who are figureheads?
Read MoreFormer EPA General Counsel E. Donald Elliott traces Philip Howard’s and Common Good’s efforts to streamline infrastructure permitting. “Every successful reform needs a sponsor, someone who is committed to seeing it through thick and thin over the years that it takes to get things done,” he writes.
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