Essays & Reports

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they follow are not statutory, and one useful function that DOGE could perform is to identify and eliminate the most outdated and inefficient of them.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.

The litmus test for a good school is its culture—its caring, energy, mutual trust, and commitment to a common mission. Good cultures require teachers to feel ownership of the classroom and principals to enforce standards and values, while red tape and entitlements undermine the authority and human spirit that are essential. Fixing K–12 education requires stripping away bureaucratic and union controls and empowering educators to build good school cultures.

Most Americans know that Washington is overdue for a Department of Government Efficiency. But what should such a commission fix?

The civil service certainly needs an overhaul to establish accountability from top to bottom. The point, however, isn’t to inject a sense of terror in government employees but to instill trust that everyone is held to the same standards.

They 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.

Everyone should read, or re-read, Michael Lewis’s splendid and infuriating book The Fifth Risk, which told the story of the violence done by the first Trump Administration to the government’s necessary experts in places you don’t think of, like the weather service. If there’s anything I’m really fearful about in Trump II—and there are a lot of things—it’s that the regulatory guardrails will be removed by Trump’s circle of oligarchs. But we should also recognize that the regulatory apparatus, and the civil service system, are badly in need of reform. Instead of Elon Musk, Trump’s Efficiency campaign should be led by Philip K. Howard, who has written a slew of books on the subject. You can start with The Death of Common Sense and move on from there.

A 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.

The lynchpin of Donald Trump’s “plan to dismantle the deep state” is to assert authority to dismiss senior civil servants at will: “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.”

Trump’s diagnosis is correct in part but his reform proposal badly misses the target.

Elon Musk’s offer to run a “government efficiency commission” for Donald Trump has triggered enthusiasm in some circles. It raises the question of why Democrats, who say they’re the party of good government, shouldn’t propose their own vision of an efficiency commission.

What would such an efficiency commission do? Trump conceives of it as “a complete financial and performance audit” to “fully eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months….sav[ing] trillions.” Washington is long overdue for a spring cleaning, but improper payments, totaling about $230 billion, are only a start.  

The "rule of law" sits high on the altar of American culture as a core national value. Law in America is as pure as law can be—impartial, precise, and therefore unquestioned, like the 10 Commandments. The mandarins of law debate fine points such as judicial deference but almost never ask doctors, teachers, employers, or civic leaders whether law supports or hinders them.

But Americans in their everyday activities see a different reality. Law is so dense that it is unknowable, and so complex that even large companies with huge legal staffs can't comply—more like the 10 Million Commandments.

American government is suffering a breakdown of authority. It is unable to give permits for transmission lines and housing, deal with homelessness, fix broken schools, or even fire a civil servant who doesn’t show up for work.

Red tape has supplanted official responsibility.     

The accretion of detailed codes, procedures and regulations among numerous agencies at federal, state and local levels are like layers of sediment that have silted over a harbor. It’s hard to get anywhere because it’s basically unlawful to make sensible decisions.    

Public sector unions wield outsized influence over American government. That power prevents effective managerial control and fosters cynicism toward democratic processes. Successful statutory reforms to address outsized union power are unlikely because of the political resources amassed by these unions. To combat the influence of public sector unions, which serve their own interests instead of the common good, this brief explores five possible constitutional challenges that might dislodge union controls and weaken their grip on power.

Everyday 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?

Look at American culture. Something basic is missing. Americans know it. Nothing much works as it should. Simple daily choices seem fraught with peril. In the workplace, we walk on eggshells. Big projects—say, modernizing infrastructure—get stalled in years of review. Endemic social problems such as homelessness become, well, more endemic. Oh, there goes San Francisco. Doing what’s right is not on the table. Who’s to say what’s right? Extremism grows.

Powerlessness has become a defining feature of modern society. Americans at all levels of responsibility feel powerless to do what they think is needed.

Here we are, led like sheep into an election to choose whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump should lead America at this perilous time. A clear majority disfavor the choice. Nor do the hot buttons of political debate between woke progressives vs. right wing conspiracists align with the views of most Americans.

Out in the real world, nothing much about government works as it should, with porous borders, broken schools, and homeless encampments. The list is long. Mandatory speech codes and other indignities of the nanny state fuel growing resentment.

Much 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.

Americans have lost confidence in America. It’s not hard to see why. Broken schools, unaffordable health care, homelessness, decrepit infrastructure, and student mobs at universities readily come to mind.

The last three presidents have come to office promising “change we can believe in,” to “drain the swamp,” or to “build back better,” but government institutions seem beyond their control.

Pundits blame political polarization. But most public failures have little to do with policy or politics: They’re failures of execution.

Trust in institutions is at all-time lows. Schools and hospitals are distrusted by two-thirds of Americans, large companies by even more, and Congress by almost everybody. 

The one trust bright spot is small business, with a 65 percent trust level. What is it that small business has that other institutions do not? Small business retains the human connection. The guy in the local hardware store will talk with you about how to fix the problem. The lady at the cleaners will discuss the stain. The book shop proprietor will describe why she liked a book.

Trump carried every county in Iowa except one, and now a solid majority in New Hampshire. What accounts for the Trump juggernaut? He obviously embodies something that many voters want.

My take is that all his serious rivals, now just Haley and Biden, have promised to be better leaders of the established order.  But Trump embodies rejection, even disdain, for the establishment. As in 2016, he is lapping his challengers with his contempt for the Washington establishment and, indeed, for democracy itself.  Americans are angry, and traditional campaigns based on character, policy proposals, and baby-kissing are not resonating.

Philip 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.

In 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.

System 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.

Put simply, democracy’s hierarchy for managing government no longer exists. Elected executives are largely powerless to manage public employees or redirect public resources. The people below them in the chain of responsibility, such as school principals, police chiefs, and supervisory officials, are similarly powerless. Every day, government employees across America do things that are designed to waste money and be ineffective.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.