Tag Archives: government

The Work Of Governing

An unfortunate side-effect of Americans’ fascination with celebrity is their accompanying confusion of fame with competence. That inability to understand the difference–especially when it comes to political campaigns– is largely a result of widespread ignorance of the day-to-day grunt-work of governing.

John Sweezy, the long-ago (now deceased) Republican chairman of my county party used to say that every citizen should be required to serve two years in government, and prohibited from staying for more than four years. While I disagreed with his four-year edict, I completely understood the benefit of a two-year stint that would introduce citizens to the distinctly unglamorous realities involved.

I served as Corporation Counsel in Indianapolis for a bit over two years, many–many–years ago, and it was an education. I was disabused of the then-widespread notion that civil servants were largely folks who couldn’t find private sector jobs–my co-workers were some of the brightest and most hard-working people I’ve ever known. Most of all, I came to understand the realities of government service, along with the difficulties of weighing competing public interests.

In one of her recent Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson illuminated those lessons by recalling the efforts that averted a threatened Y2K calamity.

When programmers began their work with the first wave of commercial computers in the 1960s, computer memory was expensive, so they used a two-digit format for dates, using just the years in the century, rather than using the four digits that would be necessary otherwise—78, for example, rather than 1978. This worked fine until the century changed.

As the turn of the twenty-first century approached, computer engineers realized that computers might interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000 or fail to recognize it at all, causing programs that, by then, handled routine maintenance, safety checks, transportation, finance, and so on, to fail. According to scholar Olivia Bosch, governments recognized that government services, as well as security and the law, could be disrupted by the glitch. They knew that the public must have confidence that world systems would survive, and the United States and the United Kingdom, where at the time computers were more widespread than they were elsewhere, emphasized transparency about how governments, companies, and programmers were handling the problem. They backed the World Bank and the United Nations in their work to help developing countries fix their own Y2K issues.

Those of us who were adults in the run-up to the turn of the century still remember the dire warnings. Planes would fall out of the sky, computers would fail to work, the funds in your bank account would be inaccessible…on and on. Preachers of some religions predicted the end times.

None of that happened, not because the threat was unfounded, but because public servants worked for many months to correct the problem. As Richardson wrote,

In fact, the fix turned out to be simple—programmers developed updated systems that recognized a four-digit date—but implementing it meant that hardware and software had to be adjusted to become Y2K compliant, and they had to be ready by midnight on December 31, 1999. Technology teams worked for years, racing to meet the deadline at a cost that researchers estimate to have been $300–$600 billion. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration at the time, Jane Garvey, told NPR in 1998 that the air traffic control system had twenty-three million lines of code that had to be fixed.

Richardson followed her description of the problem and its solution with what I will label “the moral of the story.”

Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with. In the aftermath of the Y2K problem, people began to treat it as a joke, but as technology forecaster Paul Saffo emphasized, “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job.”

I don’t know how to make the majority of American voters understand that when they cast a ballot, they need to vote for someone with the skills or background to understand the job–someone who is competent to fix the sorts of problems governments encounter. When they vote for an entertainer, or culture warrior, or “outsider” who proudly claims to know nothing about politics or government, they get what they vote for–and governing suffers.

After all, most of us wouldn’t choose a doctor who’d never been to medical school…

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I Repeat Myself

A reader recently asked me to repeat a previous column explaining why calls to run government like a business misunderstand the nature of both. I found it–it was from late 2016–and I agree that in the era of Musk and his “government efficiency department,” it’s once-again timely. It was called “The Business of Government.”

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Americans like to believe that government should be run like a business. That belief–pernicious and naive– helped elect Donald Trump, and its persistence is evidence (as if any additional evidence is needed) of the public’s profound lack of civic literacy.

Should government be run in a businesslike fashion? Of course. Is managing a government agency “just like” managing a business? Not at all.

A former colleague recently shared an article addressing the differences between business and government. Addressing the myth that anyone who can run a successful business can manage government, the author noted

This is not a 21st-century — or even a 20th-century — phenomenon. In a classic 1887 article, Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Princeton University, maintained that there was a “science of administration” — arguing, in effect, that there were principles of management that transcended the context in which they were applied. “The field of administration is a field of business,” wrote Wilson. “It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics.”

Later observers and scholars of public administration thoroughly discredited this notion. The pithiest statement on the topic came from Wallace Sayre of Columbia University, who argued in 1958 that “public and private management [were] fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects.” In 1979, Graham Allison, then dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, used Sayre’s comment as a launching point from which to examine similarities and differences. He noted that both private firms and governments must set objectives, develop plans to achieve those objectives, hire people and direct them toward the achievement of objectives, and manage external environments. But he observed that the way in which these things occur is often fundamentally different from one sector to another.

The article lists some of the important ways in which private enterprises differ from public ones.

Government is about this thing called the “public interest.” There is no such animal in the private sector. Private firms care about their stakeholders and customers; they do not generally care about people who do not invest in their businesses or buy things from them. Thus, accountability is by necessity much broader in government; it is much more difficult to ignore particular groups or people.

Private-sector performance is measured by profitability, while performance measurement in government focuses on the achievement of outcomes.

Compromise is fundamental to success in the public sector. No one owns a controlling share of the government…. The notion of a separation of powers can be anathema to effective private management. It is central to the design of government, at least in the United States.

Government must constantly confront competing values. The most efficient solution may disadvantage certain groups or trample on individual or constitutional rights. In the private sector, efficiency is value number one; in government, it is just one of many values.

Government has a shorter time horizon. In government, the long term may describe the period between now and the next election. Thus there is a strong incentive to show relatively immediate impact.

Government actions take place in public, with much scrutiny from the press and the public. There is no equivalent of C-SPAN showing how decisions are made in the corporate boardroom. Corporate leaders do not find it necessary to explain their every decision to reporters or even to employees.

When corporate executives are elected to run cities or states, they often expect to operate as they did in their companies, where they made the decisions and others obediently carried them out. But legislative bodies–even those dominated by the political party of the chief executive–are not “minions.” They too are elected officials, and they bristle (rightly) when a mayor or governor or president presumes to issue orders. Successful relations between the legislative and executive branch require negotiation, diplomacy and compromise–and those aren’t management skills generally found among corporate CEOs.

Trump and most of his cabinet nominees lack any government experience. Most also lack any education relevant to the missions or operations of the agencies they have been tapped to lead. They don’t know what they don’t know.

And it has become quite obvious that the concept of “the public interest” will be new to all of them….

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As we prepare for Trump II, nothing in those last two paragraphs has changed…..

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That GOP Retreat From Reality

Watching the Republican Party morph into a cult has been extremely demoralizing–especially to the millions of sane Americans who once called that party home. I have detailed many aspects of the spiraling lunacy–the denial of climate change, the efforts of Christian Nationalists to neuter the First Amendment, the failure to admit that Donald Trump is mentally-ill and getting worse–basically, the Republican insistence on “facts” that are demonstrably untrue.

A recent editorial by Thomas Edsall in The New York Times explores yet another aspect of the GOP’s increasing retreat from reality: science denial.

In “The Polarization and Politicization of Trust in Scientists,” a paper presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, James Druckman and Jonathan Schulman of the University of Rochester and the University of Pennsylvania wrote:

Consider in 2000, 46 percent of Democrats and, almost equivalently, 47 percent of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists. In 2022, these respective percentages were 53 percent and 28 percent. In 20 years, a partisan chasm in trust (a 25-percentage-point gap) emerged.

Edsall quoted Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, who warns that distrust of science is “arguably the greatest hindrance to societal action to stem numerous threats to the lives of Americans and people worldwide.” As he pointed out, Americans died because they had been led to believe that mRNA vaccines were more dangerous than a bout of Covid.

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued, turbocharged anti-science conspiracy theories and attitudes on the American right, vaulting them to an even more influential place in American politics. Bogus notions — vaccines may cause autism, hydroxychloroquine may cure Covid, climate change isn’t real — have become linchpins of MAGA-era conservatism.

Edsall argues that the roots of Republican science denial go back at least 50 years, to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and passage of the  Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

These pillars of the regulatory state were and still are deeply dependent on scientific research to set rules and guidelines. All would soon be seen as adversaries of the sections of the business community that are closely allied with the Republican Party, although each of these agencies and laws was backed by a Republican president, Richard Nixon.

These regulatory efforts made science a part of political debates, since federal agencies like the E.P.A. and OSHA “are considered adversarial to corporate interests. Regulatory science directly connects to policy management and, therefore, has become entangled in policy debates that are unavoidably ideological.”

Edsall quoted an academic article that found antipathy to science taking hold during the Reagan administration, “largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science — particularly environmental and public health science — became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes.”

Republican distrust of science became far more prevalent when an ascendant religious right began its takeover of the GOP. Religious fundamentalists supported creationism over evolution, and religious and political skepticism of science became “mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing.”

Meanwhile, individuals who are comfortable with secularism, and thus secular science, concentrate in the Democratic Party. The process of party sorting along religious lines has helped turn an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.

These days, when political tribalism shapes identity, people are more and more likely to accept scientific findings only when those findings align with their political beliefs. Edsall noted a recent survey that asked, “How much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” Strong Democrats saw severe risk potential; strong Republicans close to none. As another scholarly paper has put it,

The fundamental principle of science is that evidence — not authority, tradition, rhetorical eloquence or social prestige — should triumph. This commitment makes science a radical force in society: challenging and disrupting sacred myths, cherished beliefs and socially desirable narratives. Consequently, science exists in tension with other institutions, occasionally provoking hostility and censorship.

There is much more in Edsall’s essay, but the central message is clear–and very disturbing.

It is easy enough to make fun of the “anti-science” folks who–as one Facebook meme has it–use smartphones incorporating  scientific discoveries to post anti-science diatribes to a science-based internet. But the consequences of the GOP revolt against evidence and empiricism has spread to rejection of other facts incompatible with religious beliefs, and to growing contempt for medical and other scientific expertise. It powers not just climate denial, but the GOP’s growing antagonism to vaccination and other public health measures.

You’d think “pro-life” people would notice that antagonism to science is often incompatible with life. You’d be wrong.

There’s a reason Scientific American endorsed Harris–only the second time it has endorsed a Presidential candidate.

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Trust

Back in 2009, I published Distrust, American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence. The book was largely written as a rebuttal to Robert Putnam’s argument that America’s diversity was the cause of diminished levels of public trust. That trust levels were (and remain) troublingly low was incontrovertible, but I argued that the culprit wasn’t diversity, but a pervasive loss of faith in a wide variety of American institutions–especially government. I wrote then and believe now that the remedy lies in policy reforms that would make American government (and businesses, nonprofits and religious institutions) worthy of public trust.

Rather than attempting to limit diversity through divisive measures such as building a wall between the United States and Mexico or imposing stricter immigration quotas, I emphasized the need to begin with government reforms: elimination of gerrymandering, electoral wins that reflect the popular vote, and proper functioning of checks and balances. (And this was before the horrifying decisions rendered by a Supreme Court dominated by Trump appointees.)

Research confirms the importance of public trust. Trump’s nasty, gutter-level approach to politics is only possible because we have seen a precipitous erosion of that foundation–the loss of a widespread belief that most people in government and the political class have the public interest at heart and are ethically and intellectually competent.

Because I spent so much time immersed in the literature documenting the importance of trust, I was interested to come across an article from the Guardian about Denmark, and how it became the world’s most trusting country. As the sub-head read, “There are real benefits to a society where people feel safe enough to leave their babies and bikes on the street. How have the Danes achieved this level of faith in their fellow citizens?”

Over the years, Denmark has emerged as the good faith capital of the world. Nearly 74% of Danes believe “most people can be trusted” – more than any other nationality. On wider metrics, such as social trust (trusting a stranger) and civic trust (trusting authority), Denmark also scores highest in the world, with the other Nordic countries close behind.

The article details the various ways Denmark’s trust manifests itself, but the effect is summarized in a statement by one young person:“You have the feeling that people have goodwill. I think it’s a top-down reaction. We have a system that supports, and that creates the baseline for our trust in each other.”

Exactly. It’s the integrity of the system.

America’s White Supremicists attribute Nordic public trust to the relative homogeneity of the population, but research suggests a different source: the welfare state.

 “That was founded very much on mutual trust,” Rosenkilde says. Denmark has a universal model of welfare, which holds that all citizens have the right to certain fundamental benefits and services. In the UK and the US, we have a “residual model”: bare minimum benefits for the poorest and skeleton services for everyone but the richest. “I think the whole idea of people being as equal as possible is very much underpinning this trust,” Rosenkilde continues. “We have this connectedness because you don’t have a lot of people that are very poor or very rich.” Equality, Rosenkilde says, has decreased over the past three decades, as Denmark is caught up in the neoliberal drag of the globe: its Gini coefficient has crept up, but by that measure it’s still the sixth most equal country in the OECD.“

A nation is an imagined community,” Korsgaard says. “What does that mean? It means I’m able to think of myself as part of a community with someone I don’t know. And in order to do that, they have to look more or less like me. They cannot be super-different when it comes to class.” (Emphasis mine.)

Researchers admit that Denmark struggled as immigration made the population more diverse, but they emphasize the importance of class homogeneity–the absence of huge gaps in income–as a major reason the country has been able to cope with other kinds of heterogeneity. As one scholar put it, diversity required renegotiation. “OK, you can be part of this community, even though you’re not white, even though your birth language is not Danish,’ and luckily, I think that is more or less settled.”

As the article concludes, “This really is the most unbelievably equal country, and while trust is a constantly negotiated state, that appears to be a good place to start.”

In November, if we are very lucky, perhaps the U.S. will once again have a functioning government that can address income inequality and begin to restore both the rule of law and public trust.

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What The Good Guys Are Doing

Sometimes I feel like a motorist driving past a spectacular wreck. It’s hard not to rubberneck. And these days, government sure looks like that wreck–here in Indiana, where a gerrymandered legislature focuses on everything but the common good, and in Congress, where the wheels have come off the legislative vehicle, and the entire enterprise looks more like one of those old Keystone Kop movies than a genuine effort to govern.

It really is important to remind ourselves that–while we are craning our necks to look at the destruction–other cars are moving properly down the highway. While the local and national members of government’s lunatic caucuses are attacking democratic institutions and neglecting pressing problems, a wide variety of “good guys” are devoting their time and resources to solving those problems.

Recent headlines have reported the extension of broadband Internet access to millions of people, the eradication or control of several diseases around the globe, multiple acts of charity and philanthropy, and scientific progress on a variety of threats to the environment. You can probably point to many more nuggets of good news.

What triggered this post was a story I came across detailing the work being done by Matt Damon, the movie star, to address the threats posed by lack of access to potable water.

Evidently, when Matt was young, he took multiple trips around the world with his mother, and witnessed what life was like for communities living with the global water crisis. Then, while filming a movie in Sub-Saharan Africa, he spent time with families in a Zambian village who lacked access to water and toilets. Those experiences “inspired a commitment to helping solve the global water crisis. In 2006 he founded H20 Africa Foundation to raise awareness about safe water initiatives on the continent.”

While his foundation brought water to families in need in Africa, the A-list actor realized he needed more expertise to solve the world’s water and sanitation crisis. Fortunately for him, a partner who could help Matt do more, faster, was a meeting away.

In 2008, during an annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, Matt met Gary White, an engineer from Kansas City who had gained an international reputation as a water and sanitation expert. Realizing the global impact they could have together, Matt and Gary’s organizations came together to create Water.org in 2009.

In their book, The Worth of Water, Gary and Matt invite us to become a part of this effort—to match hope with resources, to empower families and communities, and to end the global water crisis for good.

My visit to Water.org prompted a google search for other efforts focused on water–especially efforts to clean Earth’s increasingly polluted oceans. There are, it turns out, several: The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization developing and scaling technologies to rid the oceans of plastic. (The organization uses what it calls a “dual strategy”– intercepting plastic in rivers to cut the inflow of pollution, and cleaning up what has already accumulated in the ocean and won’t go away by itself.) The Ocean Conservancy is studying the effects of climate change on the oceans of the world, and working to ensure that the oceans get the government funding and attention they require. The Ocean Rescue Alliance is conserving reefs through restoration, research, eco-Tourism, & education.

There are several others, and that’s just efforts directed toward the planet’s oceans. Scientists are working on a wide variety of technologies intended to ameliorate the worst effects of climate change; multiple non-profit organizations are addressing daunting social ills. In short, there are a lot of very good people doing very good things and ignoring the wreckage that is America’s current, overwhelming political dysfunction.

There are, of course, reasons that this blog focuses on that dysfunction rather than on what the “good guys’ are doing. The most obvious is that–as a former professor of public policy–governance and policy are my areas of interest.

That said, it is also the case that government remains the pre-eminent mechanism through which people and communities can act; a non-functioning government negates or hobbles the efforts of those good guys. The lunatic caucus in the U.S. House threatens everything from citizens’ civil liberties to world peace; the chokehold of the GOP supermajority in the Indiana Statehouse prevents urban Hoosiers from exercising local control and undermines  public schools in rural areas, among many other travesties.

I will continue to focus on the wreckage that is America’s current political environment, but every so often,  I do want to recognize that there are a lot of “good guys” out there, and that many of them are making a real difference.

If only we had a government that was helping, rather than hindering….

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