Real People, Not Regulations, Are the Key to Accountability

To cure the deviant subculture of government, abandon bureaucracy and put humans on the spot.

Reuters

How government became a deviant subculture is a story of good intentions gone awry. We tried to avoid government abuse by replacing individual responsibility with detailed rules and objective legal proceedings. Never again would officials play favorites or indulge personal prejudices. Government would be an efficient assembly line.

What we achieved instead was what philosopher Hannah Arendt called "the rule of Nobody." Instead of an automated assembly line, government became a bureaucratic jungle, with all the pathologies of a culture without responsibility or accountability: savage politics disconnected from actual accomplishment; hyper-inefficiency; and a universal sense of powerlessness, causing a downward spiral of selfishness and cynicism. "Nothing is impossible," one public employee observed, "until it is sent to a committee."

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The cure is basic: Reconnect public goals to real people. Humans, not tangled bureaucratic proceedings, must have responsibility to make choices -- whether to approve a power line, balance budgets, or maintain order in the classroom. Trust is not necessary. Protect against bad choices with checks and balances: Give some other identifiable official responsibility to approve an important choice. Accountability is key: Tocqueville noted that as long as a democracy retains "the right of taking away the power of the officers whom it had appointed, it has no reason to fear any abuse of their authority." Thus, he concluded, democracy can leave officials "to their own free action instead of prescribing an invariable rule of conduct, which would ... fetter their activity."

A revolution is required. Pruning the jungle is a fool's errand. We must abandon the bureaucratic tangle and replace it with a radically simpler structure in which public goals are linked to individual responsibility.

Restoring human control of government will require at least four radical changes in government's basic operating system:

Restore accountability to public service. Over 20 million people work for government at all levels. That's one in seven American workers. Many are indispensable -- teachers, cops, environmental inspectors, food and drug regulators -- but they work in bureaucratic structures that guarantee maximum ineffectiveness. Their agencies are also unmanageable. Hiring is done through 19th-century civil service protocols, daily assignments are dictated by rigid work rules, and firing public employees is basically impossible.

End civil service as we know it, including the idea of lifetime careers. Keep neutral hiring (to prevent spoils), but revive the freedom to manage and fire personnel. An independent ombudsman can guard against unfairness. Public employment is supposed to be a merit system, not lifetime guarantee.
Sunset all budgetary programs. Most of the budget is consumed in programs that don't come up for legislative reauthorization. Congress must be forced to make the tough choices needed to set priorities. A constitutional sunset amendment would require Congress to periodically make new findings and adjust programs accordingly. What about entitlements? The idea of permanent entitlements is morally corrupt, an open faucet that no public official can adjust as circumstances change. Special education, for example, has burgeoned beyond any expectation, now consuming over 20 percent of the total K-12 budget. This leaves almost nothing for, say, pre-K education or programs for gifted students. Is that fair? The fee-for-service structure of Medicare is inefficient by at least 30 percent, wasting $150 to $250 billion annually. Just think of how those wasted dollars could be used -- for example, to build an efficient energy grid.

Every public dollar involves a moral choice. Congress must be forced to face this responsibility.
Regulate by results, not red tape. A crowded society requires government oversight to prevent pollution, avoid abusive workplace practices, and oversee the quality of medical care, among other goals. But regulatory codes are literally incomprehensible -- over 2 billion words of binding law at all levels of government -- and often counterproductive. Why should it take an average of eight years for an infrastructure project to undergo environmental review? Why should doctors, teachers, and factory foremen spend hours each week filling out forms no one reads? Radically simplify regulation so that it sets goals and guiding principles rather than purporting to be an instruction manual for all life activities. Regulation must be understandable. Regulatory disputes should focus on right and wrong, not bureaucratic compliance. Other countries are going in this direction. It's the only way regulation can work sensibly.
Disrupt the political game. Political leaders are seedy salesmen, making unrealistic promises and generally treating the public like idiots. Here's a brilliant idea: Let's stimulate the economy by subsidizing inefficient state and local governments. Or another one: Let's eliminate the EPA altogether. Political rhetoric is untethered from any responsible view of reality.

Nasty politics is nothing new, but success used to hinge on what political leaders achieved. Politicians today have given up on actually achieving public goals. A confluence of the forces of powerlessness -- overwhelming bureaucratic inertia, a culture of avoiding responsibility, and an addiction to special-interest money -- have transformed politics into a game disconnected from public purpose.

Here, change for its own sake is what's needed. End the revolving door: Prohibit lobbying for five years after public service. Amend the Constitution to permit limits on campaign spending and contributions. Institute public financing of campaigns -- $10 billion every four years is a bargain compared to the estimated $200 billion or more in annual special-interest giveaways.

A radical makeover of government should be based on one guiding principle: to restore individual responsibility and accountability. Only real people, not rules, make things happen. Government is no different than any other human activity in this regard. Today, the buck never stops. That's why politicians can get away with a lifetime career of pointing fingers. The fact that it will take a revolution to revive America's founding principle of individual responsibility only demonstrates how deviant government has become.

I. A Broken Office

Donald Trump often appears to be a president in rebellion against his office. A president, we have come to expect, hastens to the scene of a natural disaster to comfort the afflicted. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, President Trump arrived tardily and behaved unseriously, tossing rolls of paper towels at storm-battered residents as if he were trying to drain three-point shots.

We have come to expect that when the national fabric rends, the president will administer needle and thread, or at least reach for the sewing box of unity. After white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting “Jews will not replace us,” President Trump’s instinct was to emphasize that there were good people among the neo-Nazis.

The peppy mixed messaging of I Feel Pretty is only the latest reminder: American culture doesn’t fully know what it’s talking about when it talks about attractiveness.

Every once in a while I’ll re-watch an old episode of Friends, because it’s familiar and soothing and there. The other day, Netflix served up one of those flashbacks the show would sometimes air to poke light fun at the friends and at the visual absurdities involved with being alive in the ’80s: Rachel in chintz, Ross and Chandler in tragicomic Flock of Seagulls bouffants, etc. Watching the meta-nostalgia, I was reminded of the existence of a minor character who nonetheless plays a major role in the show’s universe: Fat Monica.

Fat Monica is technically just a younger—and slightly larger—version of Standard-Issue Monica; what becomes wincingly clear, though, as the Friends flashbacks play out, is that Fat Monica differs from the other Monica not just in scale, but in kind. Padded by her former girth, Monica Geller—the person who categorizes her hand towels and designates committees for the planning of birthday parties and is, in general, in thorough control of her life and her Type-A-tastic self—undergoes a transformation: Her voice gets higher. Her movements become jerking and awkward. She giggles a lot, uncomfortably. Remember when, in those late-series episodes of Family Matters, Steve Urkel would go into that flashing box and emerge as the suave Stefan Urquelle? Fat Monica’s metamorphosis is a little like that, but in reverse: The transformation depletes her dignity rather than compounding it. She becomes bashful. Childish. Foolish. Watching the proceedings, you start to wonder whether Monica Geller, for the purposes of the flashback scenes, was given a fat suit or a lobotomy.