“Philip Howard here. I enjoyed your discussion with Jen Pahlka. Here are a few notes:
1. This current system needs disrupting, but I fear DOGEs indiscriminate cuts are making the status quo look good. Here’s Peter Drucker, criticizing Gore’s reinventing got: “patching. It always fails. The next step is to rush into downsizing. Management picks up a meat-ax and lays about indiscriminately. …amputation before diagnosis.” (from Management, revised ed).
2. Most of the newcomers to the realization that govt is paralyzed (Ezra Klein, Dunkelman etc) think that the red tape jungle can be pruned, or organized with better feedback loops (Pahlka). This is falling into Gore’s pit. There’s a fatal defect: the operating system is designed around legal compliance–instead of human authority to make tradeoff judgments. Law should be a framework setting the boundaries of authority, not a checklist. That’s why some reforms I championed (page limits, time limits) haven’t worked; there’s always another legal tripwire. I describe what a new framework should look like in this recent essay. https://manhattan.institute/article/escape-from-quicksand-a-new-framework-for-modernizing-america
3. Public unions: Democracy loses its link to voters–quite literally–if elected executives lack managerial authority. The main tools of management– accountability, resource allocation, and daily direction–have been either removed by union controls or are subject to union veto. Government is more like a scrum than a purposeful organization. There’s a core constitutional principle –private nondelegation–that prevents elected officials from ceding their governing responsibility to private groups. Stone v Mississippi: “The power of governing is a trust…, no part of which can be granted away.” That’s the basis of the constitutional challenge we’re organizing. The Trump admin could transform state and local govt by invoking this principle.
Fwiw, I see these points– authority to make tradeoff judgments, authority to manage— as microeconomic necessities, not policy positions. Nothing can work sensibly until people are free to make things work. We’re organizing a forum at Columbia Law School, The Day After Doge, on the morning of April 23. Here’s the lineup. https://www.commongood.org/the-day-after-doge. Let me know if you’d like to weigh in.”
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