Issue #12, Spring 2009

Reinventing Reform

How to make sure big reforms work after the political limelight dims.

Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted By Eric M. Patashnik • Princeton University Press • 2008 • 248 pages • $22.95

Reforming government is a difficult and thankless task. Political leaders find that reform is almost always unpopular in the short term because it disrupts existing power arrangements. And if they manage to produce reforms that bear lasting and positive results in the long run, they are often out of power by the time the reforms bear fruit. I should know–I’ve been there.

As the person in charge of the National Performance Review (a.k.a. "Reinventing Government") in the Clinton Administration, I was reminded on a daily basis how hard it is to achieve the overall goals of a government reform movement. Presumably simple things, such as closing obsolete offices, were likely to step on the toes of a powerful congressman or senator who was accustomed to using the office for patronage purposes. Expensive services that should have been outsourced were often unionized, and the attempt to make them competitive angered powerful unions. Stricter regulations on industries were likely to cause them to assert that they’d have to raise prices or stop serving customers.

And when we were successful, credit was often missing. In teaching public policy and public administration, I have tracked the innovations of the National Performance Review for many years and watched, with resignation, how many of them went from reform to status quo, with no credit given to the original reformers. And yet, sometimes, reforms do last, and even stay coherent enough to gain recognition years later. My final reform activity before leaving government was to put together the Aviation Safety and Security Commission, created by President Bill Clinton and chaired by Vice President Al Gore in the wake of the crash of TWA 800 off the coast of Long Island in 1996. The Commission’s report, issued in early 1997, recommended a series of changes in Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations, with the goal of achieving a dramatic reduction in airline fatalities in a decade. In order to achieve that goal, the FAA was instructed to make substantial changes to their regulations regarding airline safety. There was much kicking and screaming on the part of industry and the FAA along the way.

I left government shortly after the report was finished, wondering if anything at all would happen as a result of it. Ten years later, I was teaching at Harvard when I picked up the New York Times to read an article discussing a significant improvement in airline safety over the past ten years. That in itself was gratifying. But what was more gratifying, and totally surprising, was that the article gave credit to reforms begun by the Aviation Safety and Security Commission–and then the "Today" show even picked up the story and ran a ten-year-old clip of a much younger Al Gore, announcing the reforms!

The lesson for reformers is not to despair; while some reforms fail, others succeed, and their task may not, after all, be a thankless one. This lesson is extremely important for the Obama Administration. They have a mandate to re-do the entire financial sector of the American economy, provide national health insurance, and reform our energy sector to save the planet. Like reinventing government, these are all wonderful goals in the abstract, but they will be hard to achieve. The new President even made a nod to this problem in his inaugural address, warning of sacrifices and unpleasant decisions ahead. But how can we know which will succeed, and how can we better guide more of them toward that goal?

How and under what circumstances reforms succeed is the topic of University of Virginia political scientist Eric M. Patashnik’s excellent book, Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted. It’s an important book, for obvious reasons–as the Obama Administration settles in to a long, hard slog of reform across the broad swath of government activity, it will need to understand not only how to get reforms passed, but how to make sure they’re carried out.

The last time the United States had an economic crisis as serious as the one we now confront, Franklin Roosevelt was President and Washington, D.C., was a sleepy Southern town that housed a small and relatively limited federal government. As Roosevelt whirled through his unprecedented 100 first days in office, he created not only policy, but the organizations that would implement policy. Even then, the entirely new and rapidly expanding federal government still fit easily within the geographic limits of the District of Columbia; it didn’t need to spill across the Potomac and all the way to Baltimore, as it does today.

Indeed, the biggest difference between then and now is the large and complex permanent government that is, depending on your politics, Roosevelt’s best or worst legacy to America. It’s not only expansive, but intricate, with bureaucracies layered upon each other, all of which are necessary parts of implementing reform and any of which could derail it. This means that, for the Obama Administration, getting the policy right is only the beginning of a very complex process. The recovery packages (for there may well be more than one) will have to be implemented through a maze of federal, state, and local bureaucracies, each of which is bound by a further maze of statutes and regulations. Such things didn’t exist in the 1930s–if Roosevelt wanted to build a bridge, no one demanded an environmental impact statement. Hopes that a stimulus package would be ready for Obama’s signature on Inauguration Day were shelved thanks to partisan back-and-forth, but the real impediment to getting the money into the pockets of welders and carpenters will be the bureaucratic maze of modern government.

Issue #12, Spring 2009
 
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Sam Rose:

The popular saying "too many cooks spoil the broth" applies to the mass of legislation that has gone awry while in the process of being finalized, or failed dismally to solve the problems the bill is supposed to address during implementation, for the simple reason too many legislators took a hand in crafting it.



Laws should not suffer from amendments or intercalation just to preserve the integrity of our so-called two-party system of government. A case in point was the raging controversy focused on how to provide stimulus package to revive the economy from -- the distinction is mere tautological -- either bankruptcy or insolvency. Many Democrats went for stiff regulation, triggering calls even for bank nationalization to ensure more accountability and transparency in the use of the funds. But, predictably, their Republican counterparts pushed for less regulatory standards and, where they thought cogent, called for abolition of regulation in the name of capitalist enterprise.



Of course, in view of the economic catastrophe that resulted from such neoconservative prescriptions, House Republicans have ostensibly become timid in their advocacy for less government. But the resulting legislative package, in the process of approval, has suffered drastic cuts to the extent most economists agree the amount pegged to bail out the banks and other lending agencies -- as one estimate put it -- is short of the target. Some place it roughly at $3 trillion.



Understandably, most Republicans are rather diffident, hence truculent in their defense of less government interference, to help craft more stimulus packages under a regulatory regime of bank nationalization. And because of what Kamarck calls 'the "side payments", horse trading and other leverages that they continue to exert before any legislative appropriation is approved, many now doubt that the economy will be revived quickly to save the millions who are homeless and in need of jobs and medical care.



Must we redraw the two-party system to eliminate this form of wasteful legislation? Should the Constitution be repealed to allow a committee of experts, drawn from the public and private sectors, to frame the laws our economy needs to bail itself out of its agonizing crisis? The Beltway may think it's acting swift to provide the necessary legislative succor and prevent the U.S. economy from entering a pre-New Deal type of lingering Depression, but the financial injection appears too weak to infuse the much needed elan to revivify it. While admittedly a fixture of our populist-oriented democracy, the two party system creates costly, unnecessary, and wasteful gridlock in the pursuit of legislative objectives aimed at eliminating crises as the ones the capitalist system has been undergoing since Hoover and Roosevelt's times.



And the Constitution -- yes, the fundamental law of the land -- must provide the underpinning for such a solution.







Apr 30, 2009, 2:12 PM

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