More than 80 percent of Americans believe that an overhaul of the federal government is needed, according to a Clarus poll, but legislative change is still not at hand. The reason? Chairman of Common Good Philip K. Howard says that it’s a battle of rhetoric.
“The roadblock is not ideological, but structural,” Howard said in an essay in the most recent Ripon Forum. “Congress must change how laws are amended if it wants to take back control of government.
“Our system favors the status quo. The rules of Congress make it almost impossible to repeal or modify old programs, no matter how broken or obsolete. Part of the blame lies with the Framers: they thought they would deter big government by making it hard to enact new laws. What they didn’t anticipate was that the same checks and balances make it hard to amend old laws. The second part of the blame lies with post-1960’s culture changes, weakening authority in favor of individual rights throughout society, including within Congress. Speaker Sam Rayburn’s authority is a distant memory. All that’s needed to keep programs in place is a few congressional supporters.”
Howard’s essay argues that American government is a “vetocracy,” a term coined by political scientists Francis Fukuyama, where any small group is capable of preventing change.
“Government is broken not mainly because past lawmakers were stupid, but because legislative programs almost never work out as planned,” Howard wrote. “Like riding a bike, you must lean this way and that to stay upright. But Congress almost never adapts laws when circumstances change. So they crash. It’s hard to find a government program that isn’t broken to some significant degree. The flaw is usually in implementation, not the regulatory goal. Most Americans think the FDA should approve new drugs. But should the approval process cost a billion dollars and take a decade? Environmental review of infrastructure projects is supposed to be 150 pages and take a few months — not run 10,000 pages and delay projects by a decade.
“At this point, 50 years after the surge of regulation that began in the 1960s, American government is, literally, out of control. Laws and regulations passed decades ago plow into the future irrespective of changing needs and priorities. Government is too big, but not because it’s designed to work this way. Government is too big, and wasteful, and ineffective, because neither Republicans nor Democrats in Congress have the ability to adapt old programs to new realities.”
To reverse the growth of these out-of-control regulations, Howard says, Congress needs to change its rules to reassert control over existing law. In addition, Congress should take responsibility for all legislative programs.
To make such fixes, Howard wrote, independent committees could be authorized by Congress to make overhaul proposals and then vote the proposals up or down. He also said that congressional committees could have presumptive authority to change existing programs as a way of making them work more effectively. The committees would also be accorded deference by majority vote except in unusual circumstances.
“It’s not that hard to bring programs back to reality,” Howard wrote. “In many areas, broken programs can be readily fixed by creating clear lines of authority and accountability. For example, combining overlapping programs into one coherent structure only takes a few legislative lines. Streamlining infrastructure red tape from 10 years to two years can be achieved by giving the White House authority to resolve disputes among agencies. The total legislative package needed to cut through the red tape and unleash a surge of infrastructure investment — enhancing America’s competitiveness, creating a greener footprint and creating 2 million jobs — is less than three pages.
“Of course, no legislative reforms will work with hyper-partisanship. That’s just a formula for continued paralysis. Because the real enemy is the status quo — a huge, bloated blob of ineffective government programs — and continued stalemate is the worst possible result. The only way to bring big government under control is for Congress to reclaim its authority to regularly update existing legal frameworks.”