How Joe Biden can jump-start America's recovery by reforming government

Reforming government operations won't be accomplished with commissions, czars, or more bureaucratic red tape within the executive branch.  President Biden cannot reform or streamline government operations any more than President Trump could.

While this is an opinion overlaid onto an opinion, the breakdown of functions within the bureaucracy seems to have accelerated when Congress prohibited earmarks.  Earmarks provided a mechanism for individual Congressmen to negotiate and compromise with each other.  Back scratching really is a powerful incentive for compromise.

Ending earmarks has not ended pork barrel spending.   And without earmarks it is certainly easier for party leadership to maintain partisan control over Congress since there isn't any incentive for party members to break ranks and independently reach a compromise.  The pork barrel spending has now become part and parcel of partisan party agendas that are embedded in omnibus spending bills that cannot be opposed without threat of a government shutdown.

Ending earmarks really is a significant cause of government disfunction.  Congress, alone, is the cause of government waste as the political outrage over pork barrel spending by Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, and the TEA Party has shown.  Ending earmarks has only made pork barrel spending a highly partisan issue requiring party line votes in Congress.  Government waste has actually increased rather than decreased.

Rebuilding public trust in government will require Congressional reforms.  There's nothing any President can do to address the failures of Congress.  The executive branch is less of a problem than the uncompromising partisanship in Congress.  Reviving the practice of earmarks will allow an incentive for individual Congressmen to negotiate and compromise.  

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Americans, while deeply divided about many matters, overwhelming agree on one big thing: Government needs a major overhaul.

Poll after poll shows that most Americans believe government needs "major structural changes" and cannot be trusted to do the right thing most of the time.

The Biden administration can reverse this dangerous decline of trust by launching an independent commission to report on why government performs so poorly. By focusing on public operating systems, the commission could address broad discontent in ways that transcend party lines.

Public frustration with government long preceded the Trump administration, which has only exacerbated it. In 2020, infectious disease experts needed authority to deal immediately with the coronavirus, not wait weeks for federal bureaucratic approvals.

State and local governments are more popular than Washington, but they also are failing in important ways. Police chiefs needed to dismiss cops with a history of abuse but were stymied by union rules. Forestry officials needed to build fire breaks to prevent uncontrolled fires on the West Coast, but rigid environmental rules and red tape stymied them, causing immense loss of life and property.

Our national political parties, of course, have starkly different visions of what government should do. But they can surely agree that whatever government does must be done better. This requires long-overdue rebooting of government programs.

They can start by targeting two kinds of perverse legacies: programs that are simply payoffs to narrow special interests and bureaucratic rigidities that hobble effective administration of worthy programs

Many programs fall into the first category. The Jones Act is a classic example. Enacted a century ago, it requires that all cargo shipped between U.S. ports be carried on U.S.-built vessels and operated by U.S. crews — a boondoggle that wastes vast amounts of money to benefit corporate and union interests, weakens national security, and whose rationale Sen. John McCain called "ludicrous."

Many tax provisions (some exploited by Trump personally) benefit a handful of elites at a high cost to ordinary taxpayers. The ethanol program is a gift to narrow agricultural interests, costly to taxpayers and consumers, and supported by a phony environmental justification.

Rules waste taxpayers' money

The second category — bureaucratic rigidity — plagues many federal programs. One-size-fits-all regulations may work for Social Security retirement payments, but not for regulations aimed at safety and quality.

Common Good, a bureaucratic reform research and advocacy group, has shown the perversity of mind-numbing rulebooks and elaborate procedures that are gamed by special interests while obscuring official accountability.

Hospitals and schools are crushed by micromanaging dictates that divert doctors, nurses and teachers from the job at hand. Nearly 30% of the American health care dollar is spent on administration — that's $1 trillion. More than 20 states now have more noninstructional personnel than teachers, in part trying to comply with the tangle of red tape.

Instead of letting officials focus on implementing public goals, these labyrinthian structures seem designed to stymie them. Civil service regulations are designed for a world in which legions of government clerks processed routine documents — not for agencies that must respond energetically to pandemics, oversee safety of consumer products, ensure the integrity of markets and enforce equal opportunity.

As two Volcker Commissions found, civil service rules make managing agencies difficult and accountability virtually impossible; simpler and more flexible rules are necessary for today's complex challenges. Government only works as well as it does because committed public servants find ways to work around these rules to get the job done.

Commission could identify reforms

Like sediment clogging a harbor, regulatory and procedural accumulations have increasingly obstructed government's missions. The solution is for the president, working with Congress, to establish an independent commission to identify which changes are needed.

While the history of past reform commissions is mixed, several have been transformative. The recommendations of the National Commission on Social Security Reform in 1983 secured the program's future for decades. The 1988 commission on military base closings led Congress to a politically manageable approach.

Americans are frustrated and want change. President-elect Joe Biden can start to bring Americans together by organizing a rebooting commission focused on making government work better.

Peter H. Schuck, an emeritus professor of law at Yale University and scholar in residence at New York University, is author of "One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking About Five Hard Issues That Divide Us." Philip K. Howard is founder of Campaign for Common Good. His latest book is "Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left."