Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Meanwhile, In New York…

I continue to be impressed with New York’s Mayor Mamdani, who seems intent upon–gasp!–fulfilling his campaign promises. It isn’t simply the “big stuff”–balancing the budget and erasing the previous administration’s deficit, securing funding for vastly expanded childcare–.as one media outlet has reported,

Six months into his term, 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani has overseen some notable achievements. He has lowered crime rates, won legislative concessions for two of his top priorities in Albany, delivered a rent freeze (through the Rent Guidelines Board he largely appoints) on regulated apartments, and eked out a budget hours before its deadline, while welcoming hundreds of thousands of sports-crazed revelers from around the world into city streets this summer without major incidents. He’s won praise among many who see housing production as key to delivering a more affordable city by releasing a robust “Block by Block” plan to encourage construction as well as identifying ways to speed permitting approvals.

All impressive, but I am even more impressed by an initiative that has received far less publicity: the announcement of a Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew –a new unit in NYC government composed of tech specialists charged with making city services work better for the public.

Perhaps because I was born shortly after the Ice Age, and did not grow up with newfangled things like the Internet and Iphones, I frequently struggle with technology that my grandchildren find intuitive–and I am willing to bet that a lot of other older Americans struggle with me. When access to government sites is complicated or confusing, it is infuriating–and I don’t face the sort of added barriers that may confront folks whose first language isn’t English.

In his announcement of the Pit Crew, Mamdani explained its importance.

In 2026, nearly all of the services city hall offers New Yorkers are dispensed through digital platforms…New Yorkers should not be forced to navigate systems that are confusing, outdated and burdened by bureaucracy. The PIT Crew turns that model on its head. These teams will move quickly and deliberately to solve real problems, make City government easier to use, deliver for working New Yorkers and advance our agenda of affordability and public excellence.

As the linked article notes, this initiative tells us a lot about Mamdani’s approach to governing, which–among other things– offers a model for how government can make our lives easier.

Improving the mechanism by which citizens interact with their municipal government isn’t just about efficiency. Making those interactions simpler and more intuitive is also intended to improve the way government works. As Mamdani has insisted, “every confusing step and every dead-end portal makes it more difficult for government to deliver for New Yorkers, and for New Yorkers to trust that government is working to deliver for them.” Meanwhile, every simple and straightforward experience New Yorkers have on city platforms “rebuilds that trust.”

That is the mission with which the Pit Crew is charged.

As the linked article explains, it has long been conventional political wisdom that politicians shouldn’t “waste” political capital by investing it into improving existing government services. Instead, they should focus upon claiming credit for new policies, an approach that is thought to be more politically fruitful. (That attitude–that political axiom– is one reason why our infrastructure is decaying.) The smart politician cuts the ribbon for a new highway, not for fixing potholes.

Mamdani has announced filling 100,000 potholes so far this year…

Unlike his predecessors, Mamdani seems invested in the nuts and bolts of administration. In his speech announcing the PIT crews, he insisted that a focus on performance dramatically increases the chances of having better results. As he said, “City Hall is building a team that performs well and executes well. You better believe that our chances of delivering well for New Yorkers are increasing dramatically as well.”

The linked article calls his approach a form of civic education.

One of the most charismatic politicians in America is using his political honeymoon to explain in simple and accessible terms how the public sector works. Even before Trump, political explanations about public administration have typically been used to bash the bureaucracy, not to uplift it.

Second, it is a form of accountability. Mamdani is asking us to hold him accountable to outcomes. And he sees those outcomes as directly tied to administrative capacity. On high-stakes issues he is betting on City employees rather than consultants. City officials set the goal as: “Deliver exceptional products and services in the hands of the public that raise expectations for what government can deliver.”

Doing the job well! Wow…what will he think of next?

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Term Limits

The Chattering Classes have spent lots of time on the need to reform the Supreme Court; they’ve spent less attention on how  Congress can be improved. But there is one truly terrible idea that has gained wide public acceptance–term limits. 

Whenever I hear someone tout the benefits of imposing term limits, I think of H.L. Mencken’s comment that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

So what’s wrong with imposing term limits on the people we elect to the House and Senate? Let me count the ways. 

The most obvious problem is that genuine governing power would shift to unelected and anonymous staff members. When We the People elect someone new, it takes that individual a considerable period of time to learn the ropes. The workings of Congress are complicated. Newly elected Representatives employ–and depend upon–knowledgable staff, most of whom have been on Capitol Hill for years, until they have become familiar with the (often arcane) rules that govern the legislative process. Frequent turnover would result in vastly increased dependence on those staff members–who are not elected, and whose identities are generally unknown.

We the People can defeat elected officials; we cannot fire staff.

Term limits would also result in the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise. Competent legislation requires deep familiarity with increasingly complex policy areas — the budgeting process, the intricacies of the tax code, national defense, healthcare, housing… Term limits would force out members just when they are becoming genuinely expert, shifting power not only to those unelected staff members, but also to the lobbyists and executive-branch agency personnel who do stick around and understand how to work the system.

 

Term limits would thus create a constant “churn” of inexperienced legislators, and those inexperienced folks would be at a huge disadvantage in negotiations with career bureaucrats, seasoned lobbyists, and the executive branch. That disadvantage would hamper a legislative branch that–under the Constitution–is supposed to be the first among equals. (Under the Trump administration, we’ve already seen what happens when the Executive Branch assumes powers that are rightly exercised by Congress, and it isn’t pretty.)

 

In a very real way, the broad public support for term limits is a sign of American civic illiteracy–a disinclination to exercise  the term limits we already have–the vote. Term limits are a way to avoid our democratic obligation to use the power of the ballot to remove Representatives or Senators of whom we disapprove–a lazy way to avoid our duty to evaluate our elected officials and re-elect or defeat them by casting informed ballots. Term limits are a mechanism that takes decision-making away from the voters rather than empowering them.

 

Then there is the more subtle consequence of “relocation” of authority. Political science research into the experience of  states that have adopted term limits tells us that ambitious “term-limited” politicians often just move to a different office–moving from a state legislature to Congress, then back to a statewide office, for example. Advocates of term limits who think those limits will deter career politicians will find that what they think of as a “fix” for incumbency just adds churn. The research on states with term limits has also confirmed a significantly increased influence of lobbyists and executive-branch staff, a loss of institutional memory, and little to no evidence of reduced polarization or improved lawmaking, outcomes that proponents of term limits fondly believe will occur.

 

That research has also uncovered a counter-intuitive outcome–reduced accountability. That’s because a representative serving a final term is a “lame duck.” Lame ducks have a reduced incentive to be responsive to constituents–after all, they can’t be re-elected.

 

I certainly understand the current disgust with Congress and the low quality of our current representation. Too many of our Representatives and Senators are embarrassing know-nothings and/or culture warriors, and too many of those who do know better have proved to be spineless in the face of MAGA hostility. (And too many are too old–imposing age limits may well be appropriate and far less dangerous, and there are other rules that might improve representation.)

 

But the answer is not term limits. The answer is to improve civic education so that Americans elect better people and hold them to a higher standard–not to cede the power of the vote. 

 

 

 
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Vindictiveness–Not Governance

It’s the firehose. It’s what Steve Bannon memorably called “flooding the zone with shit.” Reports that once would have consumed media observers and television pundits for days, if not weeks, flash by, making little impact, despite being outrageous breaches of law and democratic norms.

Take, for example, this recent article from The New York Times reporting that, in documents filed in federal court, Trump administration officials admitted halting “billions of dollars in funding for energy projects to states “based solely” on whether they backed President Trump in the 2024 election.”

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The article detailed how Trump has weaponized federal funding of education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure during his second term. The White House has leveraged the budget as a tool to reward its allies and hurt the president’s foes. And the article reports that the administration is completing a “set of rules that would provide the president even greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants.” (As I recently explained, such regulation would make it easier for Trump to fund only projects that aligned with his agenda–an anti-science “agenda” of vindictiveness.)

What is so gobsmacking about this effort to take control of the nation’s tax dollars away from Congress–where the Constitution vests that authority–is how overt and shameless it is. As the Times article reports,

“The risk that the Trump administration is willing to go to extreme lengths to politicize grant-making is not a hypothetical,” said Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning group. He previously served in the Biden administration.

“If they are willing to be that blatant about it,” Mr. O’Connor said of the court filing, “then I think we should take seriously when they put forward a framework that would allow for the extreme politicization of grant-making across all of the federal government.”

The admission that the grants had been awarded based solely upon support for Trump were made in a lawsuit filed by California researchers. Among the revelations was the fact that the Energy Department had recommended canceling more than 600 grants awarded by the Biden administration for a wide range of energy projects. The grants awarded funded  projects in both Republican and Democratic states.

But in October, the White House budget office, led by Russell T. Vought, terminated only 284 of those grants. In a social media post announcing the news, Mr. Vought pointed to the motivations: “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” he said.

In the lawsuit filed by the California researchers, a lawyer representing the Energy Department conceded that “the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators, and that none of the grants were terminated “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

Trump has openly threatened to slash funding for “Democrat agencies,” while Vought–a primary author of Project 2025–has announced additional spending cuts targeting Democratic-led states.

The Times reports that these grant terminations cut off funding for upgrades to electrical grids in states like California and Oregon; efforts to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations in Colorado; and large hubs to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuels in California and the Pacific Northwest.

The scale and shamelessness of the corruption is breathtaking.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio issued a joint statement condemning the politically motivated grant cuts, calling them an “outright un-American” weaponization of government.

“This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: It terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election,” they added. “This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views.”

In what I am coming to call the “before times,” an admission of this sort would trigger weeks of coverage and calls for resignations. In Trump Time, it was just another Friday….

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Now Bicycles Are Woke?

If there is anything that characterizes the Trump administration more than its incompetence, it’s the bigotry, the all-out assault on DEI and anything perceived to be “woke.” With the ascension of Trump, the South really did rise again–this administration is nothing if not a latter-day Confederacy.

We’ve watched Hegseth demote highly competent Black and female officers, we’ve seen ICE arrest (and murder) people based upon their skin color and perceived ethnicity, we’ve watched bureaucrats revoke support of research if the description of the study contained “woke” words. We’ve watched Republicans favor immigration by White South Africans over that from “shithole” countries (i.e., those with predominantly Black or Brown citizens). We’ve seen a massive effort to eradicate anything suggesting a concern for or focus on that hated DEI–any effort to promote respect for diversity, equity and inclusion of previously marginalized folks has been characterized as discrimination against  the White males they are convinced God wants running things.

But now, the war on “woke” being waged by the incompetent clown car that is our federal governing apparatus has really hit a high note (or should I say a low note?). As The New Republic reports, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has announced the  termination of funding for what he called (I’m not kidding!) “DEI bike lanes.”

Under previous (woke commie!) administrations, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has promoted the installation of bike lanes in order to make the nation’s road safer for everyone. It had advised that “providing bicycle facilities can mitigate or prevent interactions, conflicts, and crashes between bicyclists and motor vehicles, and create a network of safer roadways for bicycling.”

According to the linked report,

The removal of this guidance is part of a wider push to remove road safety materials from the department’s website—including guidance about bike lanes and speed cameras.

One of the safety tools that the FHWA removed was the Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool, or PBCAT, which was designed to record detailed accounts of crashes involving bicycles, pedestrians, and motor vehicles, in order to help prevent them in the future.

If a reduced emphasis on safety seems bizarre…okay, nuts…the mindset behind this sudden attack on bicycles seems equally demented. A Department of Transportation spokesperson was quoted defending the decision in a statement to NPR, and his statement was, shall we say, illuminating: “This is a common-sense approach, despite the Left’s belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda.”

Evidently, the fact that the “good Americans”–those driving cars–have also been shown to be safer when those “Leftists” on bikes are confined to bike lanes is irrelevant.

You might think Secretary Duffy would be focusing on air safety, which has certainly taken a hit during the Trump administration, but Duffy is clearly a man able to concentrate on a number of other truly important matters, like making life more difficult for Americans who opt for “woke” transit options like bicycles.

I’m going to cut this post short and go contemplate my navel…..

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Who Cares?

Bigotry has a way of rebounding against the haters. That inconvenient consequence is now apparent in MAGA ‘s war against (dark skinned) immigrants.

Is your grandmother in a nursing home? Has a loved one been moved to hospice? Is someone in your family disabled? If so, welcome to Trump’s deportation obsession.

The American Prospect, among others, has reported on the crisis in what we call “Care work.”

As the report notes, immigrants from countries like Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of others make up the majority of people who serve the aging, frail, sick, disabled and dying. These immigrants “bathe their clients, change adult diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional.” And they are the targets of Donald Trump’s hatred.

America today faces a worsening shortage of care workers, as the population ages, needs expand, and deportations increase. Too few people are willing to work for low pay in nursing homes, hospice care, home care, and as personal care attendants for people with disabilities. These jobs start at $20 an hour or less, and max out at around $25 for experienced people.

The dearth of care workers isn’t attributable only to massive deportations. Most care workers are paid by the government– few people have the means to self-pay. Hospice work, for example, is financed by Medicare, and as anyone with a family member in long-term nursing home care is aware, most such care is funded by Medicaid. Care facilities that support independent living for people with disabilities are mostly funded either by Medicaid or the VA. 

Even before Trump’s efforts to fund tax reduction for the rich by eviscerating funding for programs helping poor Americans, federal dollars were inadequate to the need. Now, even those dollars are under threat from Trump budget cuts. 

The combination of shrinking federal dollars and mass deportations threatens the ability of nursing homes, hospice facilities and other care facilities to continue operations. As the linked article notes,

TRUMP’S WAR ON IMMIGRANTS has cut deeply into the care workforce. The strategy of using ICE to intimidate immigrant workers into self-deporting, even when they currently have legal work status, is all too effective.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently told an interviewer, “I went to a Dominican barbershop in Harlem, and the owner was telling me that everyone in the barbershop had [legal] status. And yet most of them were terrified to come to work because they know that for so much of ICE’s operations, it has little to do with legality. It has to do [with] profiling, and it has to do with a vision of creating the largest deportation machine this country has ever seen.”

Trump hasn’t stopped with ICE and deportation–he’s is ending a legal immigration system called Temporary Protected Status. At the beginning of his second term, Temporary Protected Status applied to an estimated 1.3 million people who were facing a variety of dangers in their home countries. Trump has ended that protected status for people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Liberia, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (while, as I have noted previously, extending the welcome mat to White immigrants from South Africa.)

Unsurprisingly, our rogue Supreme Court has facilitated these efforts. Its decision in Mullin v. Doe gave the president additional power to arbitrarily end Temporary Protected Status. The linked report estimates that some 331,000 Haitians who are currently in the U.S. with protected status are now at risk of summary deportation–and some 30 percent of those Haitians are estimated to work in the care economy.

Ai-jen Poo, the founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the coalition Caring Across Generations, told me, “The end of Haitian TPS will be devastating for hundreds of thousands of families who rely upon Haitian care workers. Providers will close their doors, jobs will be lost—for citizens as well as immigrants. The entire industry was already buckling under the pressures of cuts to Medicaid, and high workforce turnover due to low wages. At a moment when the need for care is surging, particularly on the part of our growing aging population, we should be expanding and strengthening our care workforce, not gutting it with cruel and misguided policy.”

It’s too bad that no one in the Trump administration knows any history, which is replete with lessons about the rebounding effects of hate. In 1492, for example, Spain ejected its Jews. That population included a large number of the country’s doctors, lawyers and artisans–and (because the Church decreed that Christians couldn’t charge interest) all of its bankers and lenders. The expulsion decimated Spain’s professional and financial sectors. 

Here, MAGA bigotry is “just” killing grandma…..
 

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