Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

It’s The Structure, Stupid!

James Carville famously coined “It’s the economy, stupid!” reminding Bill Clinton to focus on economic issues. Unfortunately, given the civic illiteracy of most Americans, an exhortation to focus on the nation’s structural flaws would be met with confusion rather than recognition.

In my Law and Public Policy classes, I emphasized those underappreciated structural issues–the effect of such things as the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the filibuster on democratic deliberation and policy formation. This essay from Lincoln Square may mean that recognition of our underlying problem is spreading.

The essay calls for an honest evaluation of the incentives and disincentives built into our governing structures, and recognition of the fact that economic and social stress will reveal both the strengths and weakness of those structures.

Not all of those problems are governmental. The essay begins by describing distortions of our current information environment–distortions to which I frequently allude.

In the United States, stress is filtered through an information environment that does not clarify reality but actively distorts it. A significant share of Americans consume content labeled “news” that does not perform the function of news. Rather than explaining policy, demystifying institutions, or holding power accountable, this content is engineered to provoke emotional arousal—disgust, resentment, fear, and a sense of embattled identity. Fox News is the clearest and most consequential example, not because it is merely biased or provocative, but because it pioneered a durable model: partisan infotainment optimized for outrage, monetized confusion, and political alignment.

The effect is not simply misinformation. It is misdirection.

As the essay quite accurately notes, this misdirection is amplified by social media.

Of course, it isn’t only the Wild West of the Internet. As the essay reminds us, America has a history of excluding entire populations from our social contract–pairing a rhetoric of democracy with a practice of authoritarianism.

And governmental design decisions compound over time. Constitutional mechanisms were built to restrain the “passions of the masses”–aka democracy. So we have a Senate where equal power is exercised by  states with dramatically unequal populations, a House of Representatives that has kept 435 members despite the quadrupling of the population, gerrymandering that allows representatives to choose their voters… And a Supreme Court, “always undemocratic by design” that has become an “active amplifier of minority rule, weakening democracy’s capacity for self-defense.”

As the essay quite accurately notes, these are not incidental flaws. 

The Electoral College sits at the center of this architecture. Its defenders invoke balance and federalism, but its operational effect is to concentrate political attention on a handful of “swing states.” The very existence of swing states is evidence of democratic distortion. National policy—on climate, trade, war, and public health—is effectively decided by a narrow slice of voters in seven or eight states. Politicians are not incentivized to ask what is best for the country as a whole; they are incentivized to ask what will move a few thousand persuadable voters just enough to reach 51 percent.

And then there’s an imperial Presidency that has steadily accumulated power and a Congress “weakened by polarization and perverse incentives” that “no longer serves as an effective counterweight.” The Presidency has morphed into an executive office increasingly resembling an elected monarchy. (We the People may say “No kings,” but we’re a bit late to the dance….)

The essay goes on to document the real-world consequences of these structural flaws.

We like to believe that America is “Number One,” but compared to other democratic countries, “Americans live shorter lives, experience higher rates of preventable mortality, and endure greater levels of violence. Inequality is extreme enough that life expectancy can differ by more than a decade—and in some cases approaching two—within the same metropolitan area.” We  spend more per capita on healthcare than any other advanced democracy but produce worse outcomes– a “result of a value-extractive system that inserts intermediaries to capture profit, rationing care by price, complexity, and employment status. 

Education, childcare, and family policy follow the same logic. In peer democracies, these are treated as civic infrastructure. In the United States, they are treated as private burdens or market opportunities. Higher education is prohibitively expensive. Childcare costs rival housing. Paid family leave is not guaranteed. These choices shape long-term social cohesion—and political behavior.

Desperation is fertile ground for demagoguery.

In a paragraph that truly “says it all,” the author writes that what matters is how societies are designed: “how resources are allocated, who controls those allocations, and whose lives are deprioritized when scarcity is treated as inevitable.”

If and when we emerge from our Trumpian nightmare, we must correct the systemic flaws that got us here. It won’t be easy.

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I Told You So…

I’ve fallen into a repetitive pattern; when friends or family members express horror at some new evidence of Trump’s ignorance, vanity or lunacy, I typically note that “he’s insane.” Rinse and repeat. On this platform, I have frequently offered the same opinion: in addition to stupidity and ignorance (not the same thing), Trump is clearly and increasingly mentally ill.

There is copious evidence of both his longstanding intellectual defects and his growing lunacy. The most recent–which actually managed to be startling–was the letter he wrote to the President of Norway, expanding on his fixation with Greenland.

That letter read in its entirely:

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.

I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

Where to begin? Perhaps by pointing out that Greenland is part of Denmark, not Norway? That the Nobel Committee is a private entity, not part of Norway’s government? That there are plenty of “written documents” memorializing both Denmark’s ownership and the U.S. recognition of that ownership?  That his obsession with the prize is flat-out nuts, and his assertions of having stopped eight wars is –to be polite, let’s just say–fanciful?

Historian Anne Applebaum’s response (among many) is on point; this pathetic missive proves beyond a doubt that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” As blunt and undeniably correct as her assessment is, there’s little hope that the Republicans in Congress will respond to her plea to stop Trump from “doing permanent damage to American interests.”

Applebaum says that those Republican Congressmen “owe it to the American people, and to the world.” True. Unfortunately, however, most of them have already demonstrated their spineless subservience to a MAGA cult that is equally divorced from reality.

Paul Krugman has offered what may be the most accurate description of where we are with this madman at the helm of the ship of state. He compares Trump’s late-night social media posts and letters to his father’s “sundowning.” Sundowning is a particular type of mental illness that manifests at night–after the sun goes down. (On the other hand, as Krugman concedes, “This might not exactly be sundowning, since it’s not clear that Trump is lucid and rational at any time of the day. What is incontrovertible is that he’s deeply unwell and rapidly getting sicker.”)

Krugman points out that it is unfair to blame a mentally-ill person for his illness–that it is the people around him and the cowards in Congress who are genuinely responsible for enabling behavior that may well bring on the destruction of the world order. He concludes by asking the question so many of us have asked:

How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world’s longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man’s dementia? That’s an important question, the answer to which I believe lies in the straight line from Bush vs Gore and the Roberts Supreme Court, to January 6th, to the execution of Renee Good. However, what’s more important is that we realize where we are right now, that we don’t try to sugarcoat and sanewash what’s happening: A petulant, violent and deranged individual is running America.

We all know it. The clowns and sycophants in his cabinet and our spineless Senators and Representatives know it. As Krugman accurately notes, It would take only eight people — four Republican senators and four Republican representatives — to “switch sides and caucus with the Democrats” to end this nightmare.

But those people would need to be actual patriots–not self-protective cowards averting their eyes from Trump’s all-too-obvious lunacy and the existential global danger he poses.

And from where I sit, today’s GOP doesn’t have any patriots.

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Lessons We Are Learning

The upside of a very down time is that the grifters, clowns and neo-Nazis currently laying waste to American government and our international reputation are (accidentally, to be sure) illuminating longstanding structural weaknesses that have facilitated the damage they’re now doing.

One of those weaknesses is a result of the so-called “privatization” movement–especially as that movement co-opted organizations in the nonprofit sector. When I was still on the university faculty, that co-option was the subject of several of my academic publications.

The privatization movement overall was a response to the belief that government agencies don’t do anything well. (The people who criticise “bureaucratic waste” somehow never notice that similar problems with redundancies and “red tape” are present in any large organization, public or private…) The results of that anti-government bias have been profound–vouchers that send tax dollars to private, mostly religious schools that demonstrably don’t perform any better than the public schools, and the delivery of a wide variety of social services through not-for-profit organizations.

There are several problems with “contracting out,” the practice of paying businesses and nonprofits to provide government services.

With respect to nonprofits, one problem is “mission creep.” Mission creep occurs when a nonprofit organization has become dependent on government dollars, and the government program that they’ve been delivering ends. If the government is launching a different program–one that isn’t really consistent with the nonprofit’s mission–the organization will often contract to provide that service, despite the mismatch with its mission, in order to keep the dollars flowing.

When government benefits are delivered through nonprofit organizations, there is also a significant lack of transparency. Citizens are typically unaware that they are benefitting from a government program. (Remember the guy who shouted “keep your government hands off my Medicare at a Congressman? That was a rather extreme example…)

More troubling is the substantial research showing that the practice of contracting with for-profit and nonprofit organizations to deliver government services “hollows out”–erodes–important government capacities. In addition, managing and monitoring a contract with an outside provider requires skills that differ from those needed in most government work. Those  skills are frequently lacking, increasing the potential for waste (and worse).

The practice of contracting out also masks the growth of government. Delivering services through private or nonprofit entities doesn’t shrink the public sector–it governmentalizes the private sector. Private contractors are a significant portion of the “true” federal workforce, with some studies suggesting that their number exceeds the number of direct federal employees.

Then there’s the state action problem.

In the American legal system, the difference between public and private action matters.  Public or state action is action taken by a unit of government.   The Bill of Rights restrains only government, so it is important to know whether a particular act was public (i.e. governmental) or private.  Government cannot insist upon random drug testing of its employees, for example, although a private employer may legally do so. Public schools cannot insist that students pray, but private schools can. Government cannot ban books, discriminate against women or Wiccans, or deny citizens due process of law. Under certain circumstances, private organizations can do all of those things. The distinction between public and private is absolutely central to American constitutional law and the idea of limited government.

Contracting out can make it difficult to distinguish private from public activity. On the one hand, if a city buys computers or pencils from a private company, that vendor shouldn’t suddenly be considered part of the public sector. But what happens when the city or state engages a private company or nonprofit organization to deliver services that had previously been delivered by government employees? Can the private company engage in practices that would be unconstitutional if the government did them?

All of these issues preceded Trump. But his administration’s efforts to stamp out anything our mad would-be king considers “woke” or “DEI” or critical of him has uncovered a previously unrecognized threat. When nonprofits are dependent on government dollars, they either bend the knee or lose critical funding.

In addition to threats to revoke the tax exemptions of disfavored organizations, the administration has paused distribution of federal grants and loans. Though courts stepped in to block some actions, those initial freezes caused fear and planning uncertainty. Other administration actions have included halting previously-appropriated funding for environmental, health, and community programs, which indirectly hurt nonprofits dependent on those grants.

We need to put “rethinking government contracting” on our list of items to address once we eject the Keystone Kops who are running amok in Washington.

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Fascism Versus Market Capitalism

Thomas Edsall’s columns in the New York Times share a consistent pattern: Edsall poses a question or initiates an inquiry, then contacts several experts, posing the relevant questions, and sharing their responses. Most recently, he explored the mechanisms that have characterized the Trumpian replacement of market capitalism with a “bend the knee in order to earn government’s blessing” approach that–like so much of Trump’s administration–is reminiscent of bygone fascist regimes.

It has become common to label Trump’s administration fascist, but usually that accusation arises in the context of ICE thuggery, the attacks on minorities and the evisceration of constitutional rights–actions echoing the Fascist regimes that focused on whitewashed pasts, and claimed traditional class structures and gender roles were essential to the “social order.”

These comparisons are accurate but incomplete; fascism also–and importantly–engaged in a thoroughgoing and intentional subversion of market economics.

Fascism is sometimes called “national Socialism,” but its approach to the economy differs significantly from socialism. The most striking aspect of fascist systems, of course, is the elevation of the nation—a fervent nationalism is central to fascist philosophy. That nationalism accompanies a union between business and the state; although there is nominally private property, fascist governments control business decisions.

In one of his recent columns, Edsall explored the current echoes of that approach, and how dramatically it differs from former Republican agendas and beliefs. As he notes, Trump and his administration regularly apply a “financial and regulatory chokehold” on businesses, corporations and nonprofits that he believes are antagonistic to him, from electric cars and wind energy projects to service-providing nonprofits and television networks.

“The administration has terminated, to use one of Trump’s favorite words, wind energy projects and ended tax and other incentives for electric-powered vehicles, two industries he believes are the creation of Democratic policies.”

As Edsall notes, the Trump administration’s extensive intrusions into the private sector are in direct conflict with traditional Republican and conservative beliefs, which held that government interference with the free market should be limited. Trump, of course, is  neither conservative nor Republican–for that matter, he appears incapable of developing anything remotely like a coherent agenda, economic or otherwise. For him, government regulation is not ideologically an anathema; it is a tool to exercise power and control in his constant pursuit of self-aggrandizement.

Trump is often referred to as “transactional,” but a more accurate description of his corrupt dealings would be “quid pro quo.” Private sector businesses needing government approvals (or needing government authorities to ignore improper activities)  “bend the knee” in exchange for those desired outcomes. In effect, they have acquiesced to the government’s control of business decisions–the sort of control that characterized fascist regimes.

The administration’s growing chokehold on the private sector are also tools allowing Trump and MAGA to pursue their culture-war aspirations. According to an email to Edsall from a political historian at George Washington University,

The president’s use of the government’s power to approve corporate mergers, the fear — and the actuality — of lost research funding and government contracts have enabled Trump to shift the culture in his ideological direction. Social media companies have lifted bans on far-right hatemongers and made X and Facebook more hospitable to pro-MAGA content. Universities such as Columbia; law firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom; and media institutions like ABC News have reached settlements with the Trump administration to stave off existential threats, including canceled licenses, loss of research funding and revoked security clearances.

CBS, once a key source of critical reporting on the Trump administration, has, for example, been taken over by Larry and David Ellison, Trump allies, who put Bari Weiss, the anti-woke publisher of The Free Press (and a former writer and editor for Times Opinion), in charge of the news division.

The takeover of information sources may be Trump’s most politically consequential victory. As Edsall reports, “key platforms and hubs in the social media complex — TikTok, Meta, X — have been taken over by Trump allies or have shifted right to accommodate Trump,” shielding low-information voters from vital information, and spreading bigotry and propaganda.

These incursions haven’t been limited to the private sector; as noted sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele wrote:

The entire nongovernment community (or — as we might say in tax parlance — the 501(c)(3) sector) has been threatened with a combination of loss of tax exemptions, cuts to federal funding and potential investigations.

Some statistics indicate that fully one-third of NGOS incorporated in the U.S. lost funding in the first half of 2025.

As a professor of public policy noted in his email, every part of Trump’s government is intent upon bringing private institutions to heel.

The old GOP is long gone.

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What Is Government For?

Right now, the United States is being “governed” by a dangerous fool–a madman entirely ignorant of governance, cause and effect, or anything other than his own self-importance. Perilous as the current situation is–and it is–he will be gone, and given his obvious and accelerating decline, probably sooner than later, making it imperative that Americans engage in an important–an essential–debate: what is government for? What are the core responsibilities that markets and individuals and voluntary organizations cannot provide?

In my last few posts, I’ve emphasized that there are two questions pertinent to the operation of governing institutions: what and how–and I’ve explained the importance of the “how.” Today, I want to talk about the “what.”

I think most reasonable people look to government to provide essential infrastructure. There’s broad agreement about its responsibility to build and maintain physical infrastructure. There is far less understanding or agreement about social infrastructure–what is sometimes called the “social safety net.” Ideologues of the Right dismiss efforts to strengthen that social infrastructure by labeling it “socialism” (a label that is supposed to justify a hysterical repudiation of whatever the proposal may be). That response ignores the reality that all first world countries have mixed economies. The issue isn’t whether we should “socialize” certain activities, it is the much harder questions of which ones and why.

Resistance to expansion of America’s social infrastructure– our inadequate social safety net– keeps millions from accessing medical care. It keeps working people impoverished and mothers out of the workforce. It reduces economic mobility and amplifies historic inequities.  Ironically, it costs considerably more and delivers much less than is the case in other first-world countries. As researchers have amply documented, the inadequacies of our social infrastructure push numerous problems downstream: Jails and prisons become de facto mental-health providers; emergency rooms substitute for primary care; Police and courts manage crises unrelated to public safety. Our insistence upon limiting “help” via means-testing adds millions in bureaucratic costs.

Despite the claims of “fiscal conservatives,” keeping safety nets inadequate doesn’t save money or eliminate costs—it adds many and reallocates others inefficiently.

And what about the argument that “big” government (i.e. government administering a more capacious safety net) erodes individual liberty?

The new mayor of New York begs to differ. And I agree with him. As Heather Cox Richardson recently reported,

The policies [Mamdani] promised are not simply about lowering costs, he said, but about “the lives we fill with freedom.” For too long, he said, “freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it.” “Here,” he said, “where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home.”

Mamdani’s speech was a declaration of a new kind of modern politics that focuses on “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” For decades, the Republican Party has called for dismantling the government, arguing that regulations and taxes were destroying Americans’ freedom from constraints. But for most Americans, government regulation and investments in social welfare like education and infrastructure guarantee freedom to build a life that is not cramped by preventable obstacles, including those imposed by the wealthy and powerful.

The idea of government regulation and a basic social safety net to permit Americans to live their lives to their fullest potential was a key principle of the New Deal launched by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, and Mamdani was right to note that the New Deal was born in New York City.

A number of political philosophers have argued that liberty is, indeed, “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” When every day is a struggle for survival, the promise of “freedom” to follow one’s dreams rings pretty hollow.

For a long time, proponents of a minimal state have argued that the absence of social supports results in a system where “merit” allows talented individuals to prosper. If our current government demonstrates anything, it is the idiocy of that assumption. The “captains of industry” who have clawed their way to power are anything but the best and brightest–they are beneficiaries of a social system that elevates some at the expense of others, and they are busy dismantling another important part of our social infrastructure: the rule of law.

When we rid ourselves of the current kakistocracy, we need a national discussion about the nature of liberty and the dimensions–and costs–of our social infrastructure, and what we expect government to do (not to mention what we expect a legitimate government to refrain from doing….)

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