Commentary: Our Government Is Showing Its Age

It is worth considering today when our democratic system of government is struggling. One explanation for our troubles is that hyper-partisan individuals – on the red right or the blue left, depending on your preferences – are gumming up the works. To a degree, this is true.

But as understood by Parkinson, an amusing and insightful student of government, it is often more productive to take a look at the works themselves. We may wish to fall back on another Parkinson observation about ailing institutions: “From the first signs of the condition, the progress of the disease has been encouraged, the cause aggravated, and the symptoms welcomed.”

In other words, the preferred solution to systematic governmental dysfunction is to keep doing the same repeatedly, which brings to mind the old saw that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Like any monopolist, government has strong incentives to abjure adaptation. Entrenched bureaucracies have vested interests in the status quo. Outside groups that interact with government are primarily concerned with protecting their interests, not process. Also, there is a lot to be said in favor of following laws and honoring precepts in the Constitution. Respect for tradition and consistency promote stability and engender public confidence in their system of government.

But it goes much too far to allow our governance system to drift into obsolescence. To do that is to forget an essential aspect of the nation’s founding. America was created by reformers who took practical considerations into account. As one student of the Constitutional Convention wrote, they sought “revision of our domestic institutions primarily on the ground that only by invigorating our general government could we assume our rightful place in the international arena.”

The first generation of American leaders, it is worth remembering, amended the Constitution 12 times in the first two years, adding a bill of rights and altering the way presidential elections were conducted. Tinkering to improve the machinery of government has been a regular feature of governance until recently.

We can do a great deal to make government work better by avoiding the temptation to focus on the specific outcomes we want, and instead thinking about the processes that make our system more efficient and credible to all sides. And it wouldn’t take a constitutional amendment to effect real change. In that spirit, we offer illustrative fixes of our system that will make government work better for us – all of us.

Congress. In the beginning of our republic, the operational concept was that Congress set the nation’s course and the president executed it. When that changed under activist presidents at the start of the 20^th century, Congress objected. Many members, including Democrats, took umbrage that President Wilson decided to deliver his annual message in person, rather than send it in writing. They did not want the chief executive to encroach on their turf.

Today Congress has little claim to setting the government’s course or getting basic things done, even passing a budget. The institution, which has not been reformed significantly in 50 years, is tied in knots.

So, what kind of fixes could there be? The best overall course is to create a permanent joint committee on reform. Currently, we have a congressional reform committee in the lower chamber, but fixing Congress as a whole necessitates that legislators in both chambers roll up their sleeves.

A few ideas suggest the sort of things that this committee should consider.

The first should be to get members of Congress back to work. The House convenes only a little over three days per week, on average. The rest of the time they are out of town courting voters or raising money to help them court voters. Time spent campaigning is time not spent governing.

One solution is to have the House in session for three weeks a month and then give them a week off. This would reduce the number of time-wasting flights back and forth to districts and ensure that the members have extended time on the job they were elected to do.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, the Senate could become more efficient by eliminating senators’ ability to put “holds” on nominations. This is often done for issues irrelevant to the nomination – for instance, because a senator wants to pressure the White House for a concession on a related issue. Several years ago, the Senate ended the practice of “secret holds,” which allowed members of that chamber to obstruct the process without accountability. But the hold lives on and wastes a huge amount of time. There is a ton of work to do, and the Senate should vote up and down on presidential nominations and move on to other business.

The broken congressional budget process has made a mess of our nation’s finances. This past year, Congress failed to adopt a budget and flirted with a government shutdown and a default on the nation’s debt payments. The current process for budgeting gives legislators few incentives to budget, to say nothing of budgeting wisely.

The whole thing should be scrapped and remade into a simpler, results-focused exercise. This might entail doing away with the budget committees and the tortured budget resolution adoption. Instead, have the president set a proposed budget for spending and taxing, then let the appropriations and taxation committees pass their bills. If the president finds them sensible, he signs them. If not, he can veto them.

Executive branch. The more government has grown and the more that Congress delegated responsibility to the executive branch to oversee that government, the greater the president’s burdens have become. Currently, the executive branch has around 180 agencies funded at more than $6 trillion per year. Nobody can possibly manage that leviathan, and few presidents or cabinet members have experience managing huge organizations (or even small ones). Moreover, in modern U.S. politics almost all sensitive or significant agency policy decisions are funneled through the West Wing. Having policy amateurs and political cronies in the White House directing these agencies is a recipe for disaster, and a reason why all recent presidents have experienced governance failures, like the Centers for Disease Control’s bureaucratic bungling of the nation’s response to COVID-19.

Congress and the president have a shared interest in avoiding the blame for debacles. Accordingly, they should partner to do two things to make government more manageable and less prone to gaffes.

First, they should agree to annually enact legislation to eliminate unnecessary and failed programs and departments. Finding these is not difficult; indeed, each year the president suggests various programs for elimination in his budget. Yet Congress pays little attention because it is not consulted. They should produce the list together, then Congress can vote on it, the president can sign it, and they can all claim credit.

Second, Congress and the executive should create a new cabinet-level position to oversee management of the federal government. Right now, that duty is on the shoulders of the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who already is busy overseeing budgeting. The government is huge and needs someone experienced in managing an immense, complex organization.

The head of the OMB, as the late scholar Ronald C. Moe proposed, would be accountable to the president and Congress and responsible for the day-to-day guidance of the government’s financial management, information technology, and all other wheels of its administrative machinery. In addition to fine tuning, this office of civil servant managers should annually propose larger structural changes to the executive branch, such as redesigning agencies to meet the challenges of the day.

The judiciary. Some may remember Charles Dickens’ novel “Bleak House,” the story of a legal case that dragged on for decades. Dickens correctly claimed that he had many precedents to draw on.

It is a story for our times, not least of all because Dickens’ book helped move Britain toward judicial reform. As the Democratic Party’s platform in the run-up to the last election noted, “The number of cases in federal district courts has increased by 38 percent [and] federal circuit court filings have risen by 40 percent… but we have not expanded the federal judiciary to reflect this reality in nearly 30 years.”

The simple truth is that the United States needs more judges and more specialized courts, such as those for bankruptcy, to move cases along. Efficiency is not the only judicial matter that needs reform. The effectiveness of a government branch is also a matter of credibility. This is a burning issue today when so many view the Supreme Court as too partisan.

We don’t favor enlarging the court, as that will make it seem an even more partisan instrument. We do favor the creation of heightened standards for Supreme Court justices, who are the only U.S. judges not covered by an ethical code. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted:

“Over the last two decades, almost all members of the Supreme Court have been criticized for engaging in behaviors that are forbidden to other federal court judges, including participating in partisan convenings or fundraisers, accepting expensive gifts or travel, making partisan comments at public events or in the media, or failing to recuse themselves from cases involving apparent conflicts of interest, either financial or personal.”

The Supreme Court can institute such a code on its own. It could also beef up rules on financial disclosure and acceptance of gifts, and do more to require justices to explain their recusal decisions.

Elections. A half-century ago, Harvard University professor V.O. Key observed, “If the people can choose only from among rascals, they are certain to choose a rascal.”

Currently, our congressional elections are ill-structured to elect candidates who can and will govern. Our century-old system of partisan primaries creates contests where candidates must run to the extreme left and far right to win. The effect is to fill the Senate and House with officials who, even if they aren’t actually rabid partisans, must behave that way in office. Having won low-turnout primaries in which the voting was mainly done by true believers, members of Congress are utterly beholden to ideologically extreme voters, niche interest groups, and powerful donors. No wonder they are out of step with average voters.

Elections can be restructured to orient elected officials to govern better. Alaska, for example, has created a nonpartisan primary where all candidates for U.S. senator must compete. The top four vote getters then move on to a general election where voters rank candidates from most appealing to least appealing. This process favors the candidate that is most broadly acceptable to voters.

We need more of this kind of innovation around the ballot box. The U.S. Constitution makes elections largely but not entirely a state responsibility. There is a long history of the federal government supporting state elections reforms. Congress should enact a grants program to support state experiments, whether they want to try ranked choice voting, abolishing partisan primaries, or other means to better translate voters’ wishes into competent governance.

Practical considerations, such as those that motivated the Founding Fathers, depend on the potential for their acceptance. Our suggestions above are not wildly radical. They draw from the ideas of experts in those areas of government.

Equally important, the great majority of the American public is weary of the bitter partisan squabbling that gets in the way of getting things done. Voters have an appetite for something new. A recent Pew Research Center study revealed that that 42% of respondents favored complete reform of government, and 43% want major changes.

That almost unheard consensus of 85% stands in sharp contrast to the partisan bickering that goes on today. Our leaders should heed this call to restore faith in government.