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.
Philip Howard talks with Tom Temin about Not Accountable and union controls in the federal government.
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Leaders from both parties for decades have kicked the can of federal deficits down the road. The Simpson-Bowles recommendations from 2010 — widely endorsed by responsible observers — were never seriously considered either by President Obama or by Republican leadership. Then huge COVID-19 subsidies came along, and the fiscal road now faces a dead end. Unless the deficits are dramatically reduced, Social Security payouts will risk cuts of around 25 percent within a decade.
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Philip Howard fields calls about Not Accountable and his other work with Peter Slen.
Read MoreThose who “underestimated the political power of the [public employee] unions … were mistaken.” That’s the conclusion of a New York Times Magazine cover story on teachers union leader Randi Weingarten. Union power and money were largely responsible for the recent election of Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a prominent union leader. Public union power caused former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to call Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world.”
Read MoreThe pace of modern life is often dizzying, in almost all areas of human endeavor. Astonishing advances in science and technology rush towards the future alongside global threats of war, pandemic, climate change, and scarcity.
But there’s been almost no focus on how things work on the ground. Modernizing infrastructure, fixing lousy schools, reducing red tape in healthcare, and cutting waste in government are largely matters of execution, not policy.
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Today, in a runoff election for mayor, Chicago voters will choose either former teacher Brandon Johnson or former schools CEO Paul Vallas. What’s raising eyebrows is the funding of Johnson’s campaign: Over 90 percent has come from teachers unions and other public employee unions. Vallas has the endorsement of the police union, but his funding is more diverse, including business leaders and industrial unions. Just looking at the money, the race comes down to this: Public employees vs everyone else plus cops.
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Steve Hilton interviews Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
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Philip Howard joins the group to discuss Not Accountable.
Read MoreThe Los Angeles teachers union this week joined a three-day strike by school service workers, such as custodians and cafeteria workers. This means 400,000 students were locked out for three days. Many of these students get their only square meal of the day at school.
It’s not a surprise that the teachers union put its interests above the students. What’s rich is that the teachers union contract is the reason the school district lacks resources to pay service workers more.
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Jonah Goldberg and Philip Howard offer some “fiendishly nerdy ramblings on the nature of public sector unions” and “some hopeful thoughts on how America’s legal and legislative systems could be improved.”
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Accountability is basically nonexistent in American government today. Performance doesn’t matter; many public managers tell me they’ve never seen a public employee dismissed for poor performance. The Minneapolis Police Department had received 2,600 complaints in the decade before the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Twelve led to discipline, of which the most severe was a 40-hour suspension.
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The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot interviews Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
Read MoreOn Wednesday, April 19, Common Good and Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society will host a morning forum “Re-empowering Human Agency.” The event will bring together leading scholars and practitioners to explore how to overhaul legacy bureaucracies that stifle human responsibility. These legal structures have grown ever-denser over the past 70 years, not only in the United States but in virtually all developed countries.
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In “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.
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Phil 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.
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Rich Valdés interviews Philip Howard about Not Accountable.
Read MoreWe read this week, in a column by teachers union president Randi Weingarten, that teachers unions “empower teachers’ professionalism,” cause “higher student achievement,” were heroic during COVID, and create “a more just and fair society.” Ms. Weingarten also accuses Philip Howard of “empty rhetoric.” So let’s look again at the facts: Near-zero accountability, endemic failure of many inner city schools, refusal to return to the classroom during COVID until six months to a year after other schools reopened, and political bullying aimed at closing high-performing charter schools.
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Mr. 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 MoreSchoolchildren all learn that the spoils system in the 19th century was evil. No matter how inept, political hacks got and kept government jobs. The currency was campaign support: Public jobs were for sale to the highest bidder. The idea of “good government” was an oxymoron.
Fast forward to today. No matter how inept, public employees keep their jobs.
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