Escaping Jurassic Government

How to Recover America?s Lost Commitment to Competence

Donald F. Kettl

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780815728016
• eBook ISBN: 9780815728023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why big government is not the problem.

The Progressive government movement, founded on support from Republicans and Democrats alike, reined in corporate trusts and improved the lives of sweatshop workers. It created modern government, from the Federal Reserve to the nation's budgetary and civil service policies, and most of the programs on which we depend.

Ask Americans today and they will tell you that our government has hit a wall of low performance and high distrust, with huge implications for governance in the country. Instead of a focus on government effectiveness, the movement that spawned the idea of government for the people has become known for creating a big government disconnected from citizens. Donald F. Kettl finds that both political parties have contributed to the decline of the Progressive ideal of a commitment to competence. They have both fed gridlock and created a government that does not work the way citizens expect and deserve.

Kettl argues for a rebirth of the original Progressive spirit, not in pursuit of bigger government but with a bipartisan dedication to better government, one that works on behalf of all citizens and that delivers services effectively. He outlines the problems in today's government, including political pressures, proxy tools, and managerial failures. Escaping Jurassic Government details the strategies, evidence, and people that can strengthen governmental effectiveness and shut down gridlock.

ONE

Failure to Adapt

THERE ARE MANY THINGS WE do not know about the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. But one thing is certain: Dinosaurs went extinct because they failed to adapt. It might have been because the atmosphere became clogged with debris from an asteroid that hit the earth. It could have been the result of massive volcanic eruptions. Although scientists rate the blue whale as the largest creature that has ever lived, dinosaurs as a class rank as the most powerful and fearsome creatures that have roamed the planet. But strength and longevity are no guarantees of durability and endurance. Dinosaurs disappeared when they could not cope with change that wiped out what they needed to live on, even though starfish, turtles, and salamanders survived.

Nothing that gets out of sync with its environment lasts long—and that goes for governments just as much as dinosaurs. There are already warning signs that American government has late-Jurassic-period challenges. Like the dinosaurs, government is strong and powerful. But like the forces that led the dinosaurs to extinction, government is failing to adapt to the challenges it faces. American government struggles with its most important and fundamental decisions. Even worse, it too often fails to deliver on the decisions it makes. That wastes scarce public money and leaves citizens disappointed. It’s a profoundly serious problem that, if government does not evolve quickly enough, could lead American government down the same path that devastated the Jurassic-age dinosaurs. The book is hopeful, however, for the tools for avoiding this future lie within our grasp. We have the ability to escape Jurassic government, if we recover our government’s lost commitment to competence.

It is no secret that American government is in a precarious position. Trust in public institutions is at a historic low. Public distrust in the ability of government to deliver on its promises is high. In far too many areas, government does not perform well. Tight budgets make it hard to launch anything new, and the fiscal pinch is forcing excruciating decisions about what to cut. Oceans of budgetary red ink slosh ahead for as far as we can see. Fed up with government’s intrusion in our lives, conservatives pledge to “starve the beast.” Liberals struggle mightily to make good on the ambitious promises they have made. Public employees find themselves a handy target for everything that goes wrong, since it is easier to target the instrument than what it seeks to accomplish. There is little satisfaction in the government we have and no consensus on how to make it better.

A thoughtful political scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, Todd La Porte, sadly wonders about a “heightened sense of latent dread,” with public problems that are growing larger and government’s capacity to solve them shrinking.1 In fact, an August 2015 poll showed that just 2 percent of Americans were “enthusiastic” about the federal government. Another 21 percent were “satisfied but not enthusiastic.” Three-fourths of those surveyed had negative feelings toward the federal government, including 27 percent who were downright “angry.”2 In yet another poll, taken in July 2015, a third of respondents thought that the government was “too big,” and 28 percent found it “not transparent.” But the biggest problems were that government was simply not managed well: It was “inefficient” (73 percent), “wasteful” (63 percent), “out of touch” (63 percent), and “corrupt” (67 percent).3 There simply is no fixing what ails American government without improving its capacity to deliver on what citizens pay for—and rightly expect to work.

There are explanations aplenty for the sorry state of American democracy, but at the core is a simple fact: We have lost our commitment to competence—to a belief that, whatever government leaders decide, they will deliver on their promises. For more than 130 years, from the late 19th century to the early post–World War II years, we built a government consensus on competence. Led by both Republicans and Democrats, Progressives established the modern American government. They battled fiercely over what government ought to do. But when they reached consensus, there was a bipartisan commitment to making government work.

Along the way, however, an insidious fear grew among citizens, fed by their elected leaders, that government was out to ruin the country and that government itself had become the problem. In her 2015 best seller, set in the 1950s, Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee casts a character, Uncle Jack, as a profound cynic of government. “Cynical, hell,” he says. “I’m a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses.” He goes on, “The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person living in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in.”4 Many citizens and their elected officials managed to convince themselves that Uncle Jack’s fears had come to dominate government and the country. That allowed Ronald Reagan, in 1986, to win lasting applause from the Right—and grudging respect from the Left—when he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”5

The contrast with a century before could not have been deeper. The Progressive spirit—a bipartisan dedication not to big government but to effective government—created the modern American state. It reined in corporate trusts and improved the lives of sweatshop workers. It created the modern executive establishment, from the Federal Reserve to the nation’s budgetary and civil service policies. It fought and won two world wars, built interstate highways, and put a man on the moon. It tackled, more or less well, a new era of social and economic problems, from poverty to pollution.

Starting in the 1970s, however, the Progressive tradition gradually drifted out of sync with government’s mission, as too many citizens and elected officials alike lost faith in government and its ability to deliver. The tradition took on a reputation for big government at all costs and a partisan leaning toward Democrats, instead of bipartisan commitment to competence. Instead of pursuing a commitment to making government work, it grew into a lack of confidence in government to work at all. As the astute political scientist, John J. DiIulio Jr., observed, we have fallen into a deepening spiral of overreach by Democrats, in launching ambitious programs but failing to build the capacity to manage them, and disinvestment by Republicans, in preaching the virtues of cutting government but failing to ensure that the parts of government they believe in actually work.6 On one level, this spiral is a natural product of the partisan gridlock that has seized up the nation’s political machinery. On a deeper level, it has helped create and feed that gridlock, by allowing the two political parties to follow their very different political ideologies to the same unhappy place: A government that too often fails to deliver, that encourages citizens’ cynicism, and that reinforces the ideologies that feed deepening incompetence and latent dread.

But this is not a book about cynicism or pessimism. It has a profoundly positive view of American government and what it can—and must—do for citizens, and it advances that view through a simple argument. We might not like all of what government does, but we are not about to lessen our expectations that it should do it. We might not believe that government can meet these expectations, but it actually does far better, far more often than we think. We can take straightforward steps to help government meet the challenges it faces in the 21st century. And, by doing so, we can reclaim our government and the lost bipartisan promise on which it was built. In the pages that follow, I will explore the challenges that led us to our current predicament and the steps we can take to escape the fate of the Jurassic dinosaurs.

We have been fighting over what government should do as long as there has been a country to fight over. But we need to restore government’s capacity to deliver on what we decide as a country we ought to accomplish. That will not magically unlock gridlock, but we do have it within our grasp to restore confidence that what the government seeks to do it will do well. In the turbulent world of gridlocked politics, restoring America’s commitment to competence would be no mean feat.

ESCAPING MADISON’S “WRETCHED SITUATION”

In a 1788 speech, James Madison wondered about those we elect to govern. “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation,” he said.7 It often seems that, over the past century, Madison’s worst fears have come true. In that time, the scope and power of government grew enormously, from new entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare to the vast array of new government agencies. But there was also the simultaneous growth of a bipartisan commitment to competent government, led by the Progressive spirit. There were fierce battles about just what government ought to do. But once the conflicts settled about the what, there was a surprising (to us today, at least) commitment about the how: with a professional, not an amateur, government.

Reformers on both sides of the political aisle were alert, of course, to the worries about governmental tyranny that preoccupied the founders and led to Madison’s separation of powers. The Progressives developed their own strategy to empower government without unleashing tyranny by building strong boundaries. Some of the boundaries were structural, such as the creation of independent regulatory agencies. Some of the boundaries were procedural, such as a civil service system and a comprehensive executive budget, to constrain arbitrary actions and to put the key decisions in the sunshine for all to see.

Perhaps most important, this Progressive spirit had distinctly bipartisan roots. It did not spring from the roots of big-government liberal Democrats, although that is the meaning the “Progressive” label has acquired over time. In fact, many of the most important Progressive reforms emerged from Republican administrations (see table 1-1), as well as Democratic ones, and these bipartisan roots are the secret sauce that helped the modern administrative state grow and endure. In fact, that is one of the secrets about why the Progressive movement and its imprint on the modern administrative state endured so long. Both parties shared a commitment to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as the president swears in the oath prescribed in the Constitution, and that that principle guided the expansion of the American state.

However, as government became more muscular during the 20th century, both political parties gradually slid away from that bipartisan consensus. Democrats began focusing more on their policy ambitions than on how to fulfill them. Republicans, unable to repeal many programs, fought rearguard actions to weaken those programs by weakening their execution. As a result, confidence in the Progressives’ strategy, including their commitment to a professionalized civil service and comprehensive executive budgeting, withered. The bureaucratic boundaries constraining governmental power softened as we came to rely more on nongovernmental proxies to do government’s work, beyond the boundaries of the bureaucracy. Most important, the consensus around the Progressives’ commitment to effective government melted under the weight of partisanship and gridlock.

Table 1-1. The Bipartisan Foundations of the Progressive State
INITIATIVE	PRESIDENT	PARTY	YEAR
Civil Service Reform Act Advance a professional civil service	Arthur	Republican	1883
Interstate Commerce Commission Regulate railroads and trucking to reduce monopoly power	Cleveland	Democrat	1883
Bureau of Internal Revenue (later Internal Revenue Service—Eisenhower [Republican, 1953]) Collect income taxes	Cleveland	Democrat	1894
Department of Commerce Advance the interests of business	T. Roosevelt	Republican	1903
Food and Drug Administration Protect safety of food and pharmaceuticals	T. Roosevelt	Republican	1906
Federal Reserve Manage the supply of money and credit	Wilson	Democrat	1913
Department of Labor Advance the interests of labor	Wilson	Democrat	1913
Federal Trade Commission Prevent unfair business practices, especially monopoly power	Wilson	Democrat	1914
Budget and Accounting Act Create a comprehensive executive budget	Harding	Republican	1921
Occupational Safety and Health Administration Regulate the safety of the workplace	Nixon	Republican	1970
Environmental Protection Agency Improve the quality of air, water, and soil	Nixon	Republican	1970

This unintended conspiracy, not surprisingly, inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Failure to Adapt
• 2. Government’s Size Can’t Change (Much)
• 3. People
• 4. The Rise of Interweaving
• 5. Risky Business
• 6. Evidence
• 7. Leveraged Government
• 8. Recovering the Lost Commitment to Competence
• Notes
• Index