Communications

The prospect of overhauling government has near-universal appeal. But experts from all sides are dousing the dream with cold water. Changing regulations takes several years. De-regulation will often conflict with statutory mandates. Most of what government does is not controversial—say, Medicare, a standing army, and national parks. Experts such as Brookings' Elaine Kamarck have shown that the impacts of any plausible de-regulation will be at the margin.

Voters have revolted. But laws and institutions don't change just because people are angry. Appointing rebels to run agencies won't change their massive legal superstructures.
 
Real change in American democracy doesn't happen by diktat from the top. Change requires a vision for a better system, backed by broad support of public opinion.
 
What's the new vision? The best hope for a new vision might come from Elon Musk's efficiency commission.

Avoid talking about policy: That seems to be a theme of this presidential campaign. Voters now know that Harris was raised middle class, and that Trump has disavowed 900 pages of Heritage Foundation policy proposals.

But one policy issue is squarely on the table—civil service. Trump says he will designate 50,000 or more senior civil servants as employees at will. Civil servants in this new “Schedule F” will be like participants of Trump’s television show “The Apprentice,” where the punchline is “You’re fired!”

An idea! Policy debate has been largely absent from a campaign season pitting a theme of joy against eating pets.
 
The IDEA came, predictably, from Elon Musk, who offered to run a “government efficiency commission” for Donald Trump. Trump immediately embraced the idea.
 
But what would an “efficiency commission” actually do?

Polls are expecting a divided Congress. One sure bet is that the new president and new Congress will not fix how government works. Change is too hard. All those Washington lobbyists and lawyers are doing fine with thousand-page rulebooks and years-long bureaucratic processes.

Change requires outside pressure. Sometimes it’s a crisis, as in the Depression. Sometimes it’s a shift in public opinion, as in the Progressive Era. Sooner rather than later, pressures will likely require replacing the paralytic and wasteful red tape state. The world order is too perilous to perpetuate an inept governing framework.

Trump and Harris sharply disagree on matters of policy, including immigration, taxes, and foreign policy. They also present different profiles of leadership.

But neither candidate offers a coherent vision to fix the tangled bureaucracy that paralyzes our society—no vision to fix broken schools, deal with homelessness, modernize infrastructure, cut health care red tape, streamline defense procurement, or make government manageable.

Instead both candidates offer symbolic reforms.

The roiling waters around Biden’s candidacy reflect a broad fear of handing the election to Trump. Like most in the free world, we share that fear. But we think Democrats need more than a candidate with mental acuity.

Democrats need a candidate who can begin to deal with the problems that gave rise to Trump. He sees that America has been weakened by internal guilt and indecision, and by an unwillingness to fix what’s broken. Democrats need to pull their heads out of the sand and address obvious weaknesses.

Here is what we think America needs to become strong again.

Now that No Labels has abandoned its third party bid, Mitt Romney has called for it to offer political support to whichever party is willing to accept centrist influence on its governing team—to “help promote the interests of Americans-at-large above those of the rabid partisans.”

America could certainly use some “sensible middle voices” in Washington, but centrism doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. The radical fervor on both sides is driven by a broad and growing sentiment of brokenness. Americans feel buffeted by forces beyond their control, while government fails and flounders.

According to a 2020 survey, about two-thirds of Americans share basic values—including truthfulness, treating people equally, respecting common interests over party affiliation, and a desire for leaders to bring Americans together. Instead, the research group More in Common found, this “exhausted majority” is shoved into competing voting blocs by a relatively small number of extremists on both sides.
 
The disproportionate influence of extremists stems in part from a definitional bait-and-switch.

Sometimes it feels like American culture is going through the spin cycle of a washing machine. Facts aren’t facts (“stop the steal”). Free speech means speech codes. Nondiscrimination means discrimination. Rights are a sword against others’ rights. Achievement is unfair. Human judgment is judgmental. Individuality is identity. Tradition is suspect. The rule of law is a minefield of legal risks, not a framework for social trust. Freedom is compliance.
 
Finding our balance is hard, especially when centrifugal forces have spun many Americans into opposing camps that loathe each other.

Americans now know the Democratic and Republican nominees for president. But there are eight months to go before the election. How will the media fill that time?

We have a suggestion: Let’s talk about how to fix broken government. What’s needed, say, to deal with infrastructure, or homelessness, or healthcare red tape, or, especially, lousy schools?
 
Fixing each of those areas of public failure is not rocket science, in our view. What’s required, however, is to change the operating system—to re-empower people in charge to make decisions instead of slogging through red tape.

Trust in America’s social institutions is at all-time lows. Distrust is like sand in the gears, causing people to question decisions and act defensively. Red tape grows in order to avoid argument: “The rule made me do it.” Institutions lose empathy as well as efficiency. Distrust grows. It’s a downward spiral.
 
We tend to think of institutions such as schools, hospitals and workplaces as inanimate objects. But institutions are the beating heart of a free society—not only providing virtually all products and services, but providing the framework for each of us to earn our livelihood and fulfill our professional ambitions.

The world order is in danger – with major conflicts raging or threatened on three continents. America needs to be strong.   
 
Instead, as RAND defense expert Michael J. Mazarr explains, the Department of Defense is “overgrown with rules [and] bureaucracy,” and “more concerned with following procedure, preserving institutional habits, and hoarding power and resources than generating positive outcomes.” It is imperative that “the United States...overhaul its defense institutions.”

It is also difficult for America to be strong abroad while weak at home.

Trump carried every county in Iowa except one. What accounts for the Trump juggernaut?

Our take is that all his rivals, Biden included, promise to be better leaders of the established order. Trump embodies rejection, even disdain, for the establishment.
 
For years now, Americans have seen that nothing much works as it should. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens explains that Trump is riding “a wave of pessimism.” Referring to Alana Newhouse’s writing, Stephens notes that “brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life.”

Do you feel comfortable about our society, or the state of the world? Most Americans don’t. Nor do they trust the institutions of society, and especially not government. What’s most unsettling is that people in charge don’t actually seem to be in charge. Bad schools stay bad; transmission lines languish on the drawing boards; public agencies are run by the unions, for the unions.
 
An overwhelming sense of futility helps explain the popularity of populist candidates. You can practically feel the ground shaking, but Washington insiders stare wide-eyed at the failures and stay the course.

On the eve of a presidential election year, it feels like American democracy is a ship without a keel. Nothing much works as it should, and people in charge don’t seem able to steer towards solutions—in schools, universities, healthcare, at the border, and, worst, Washington itself. A sense of powerlessness is pervasive, pushing alienated Americans towards populist candidates.
 
Good leaders alone cannot fix this condition, because the powerlessness is caused by system failure.

Politics is a contest about leadership and general values. Is government good or bad? Policy debate engages a much smaller group of experts and interest groups, and is usually incremental.
 
Almost no one talks about system failure. That’s too hard to fix, at least within the confines of the Washington establishment. But history shows that meaningful change is usually the result of system failure and dramatic overhaul. “Punctuated equilibrium” is the name political scientists give these tectonic shifts.

Common Good Chair Philip Howard spent last week in Washington, and was impressed by the staffers and experts who saw clearly the need to 1) give permits to rebuild decrepit infrastructure and 2) remove managerial shackles that make it impossible to fix broken schools, fire rogue cops, and point government in the direction of what society needs. But they acknowledge none of that can happen. The status quo is defended by armies of special interests—public employee unions control government operations, environmental groups command a veto over all infrastructure, rich investors keep their tax breaks, and so forth.

The American experiment is built on the powerful engine of individual initiative. Let people follow their star, and let other people make judgments about how they do. As Tocqueville observed: “No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamor is heard on every side; and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the immediate satisfaction of their social wants.”
 
The July 4th holiday is an opportunity to reflect on how we’re doing.

Voters don’t seem excited by the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch. There’s talk of a third party, but the initiative furthest along, No Labels, hasn’t put forth a candidate or a platform. Most chatter focuses on Republicans who might challenge Trump, but none poll anywhere close to him.

What would happen if candidates presented concrete visions of how to change how Washington works? Two-thirds of Americans support major overhaul. Candidates who present competing visions for remaking Washington might dislodge voter cynicism and stir up excitement.

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.

Those 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.”

The 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.

The 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.

We 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.     

Schoolchildren 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.

Which is the party of good government? Democrats like to claim that mantle, but Joe Klein in his new Substack "Sanity Clause" describes how public employee unions are "an issue no Democrat wants to talk about." Klein, former senior columnist at TIME and best-selling author, is clear-eyed about the unholy alliances that make liberal sanctimony so hard to take. Fixing lousy schools and toxic police cultures is impossible as long as public employee unions call the shots.

Here’s the public failure of the week: Twenty-three schools in Baltimore have not one student who is "proficient" in math—i.e., performing at grade level. Another 20 schools have only one or two students who are proficient. In Chicago, Wirepoints discovered, 33 schools similarly have no student proficient in math, and another 22 schools have no student proficient in reading.

The nonpartisan Campaign for Common Good called today on President-Elect Joe Biden to create a special commission to make proposals on how to make government work better.

The bipartisan Campaign for Common Good will hold a Zoom forum on Wednesday, September 23, to explore the need for a new operating system of government.

The bipartisan Campaign for Common Sense will hold a Zoom forum on Wednesday, July 15, to explore the need to remake public service in America.