Paul Ryan on mission to make sure ‘government doesn’t hurt’

It’s a sentiment he often has in visiting self-help centers, including those for the poor, homeless or drug abusers, but it can mean a lift when delivered by the country’s third-highest-ranking politician.

“What I try to do in these visits is to learn and to help share their stories so that cross pollination occurs, so good practices, best practices, can be learned, discerned and shared, and then the question ultimately is, ‘Can government help, or can you make sure that government doesn’t hurt,'” he said in an interview.

“In a lot of cases you worry about the government’s involvement, you don’t want them to stifle and over regulate but in most instances the question is, ‘Can you let government allow these great ideas and practices to flourish and replicate without screwing up the idea?'” he added.

That’s exactly what former NFL linebacker David Vobora, the founder of Adaptive Training, was eager to hear. While he said the impact on his team from the Bush-Ryan visit was “vast,” his hope was for the House speaker to follow through once back in Washington.

“President Bush said that the veterans are still leading from the front. Paul Ryan heard that loud and clear, and we hope that the leadership and Ryan continue the fight,” said Vobora, who described his talk with Ryan as “meat and potatoes stuff.”

Closer to Washington, Ken Falke, the founder of another innovative wounded warrior center, Boulder Crest Retreat of Bluemont, Va., said he hopes Ryan will follow through by nudging Congress and the Department of Veterans Affairs to be more open-minded to and supportive of alternative help centers.

Falke, who has met Ryan, said, “It’s not a matter of money … it’s a complete lack of innovation” by the VA.

Ryan, who goes out of his way to visit innovative help centers, said he gets it, and he added that he sometimes returns from those meetings to suggest to committee chairpersons that they hold hearings on what he witnessed. He also reaches out to Cabinet departments and the philanthropic community.

“By just bringing attention, you bring notoriety,” Ryan said. “You bring attention to phenomenal works so that they have a leg up on getting support on getting donations, on telling their story and getting more people to participate and getting involved. It’s basically to revitalize civil society, and that’s the point.”

He’s evangelical when it comes to promoting private service groups and protecting them from federal interference.

“The most intractable problems so easily can be solved with people working together. There are homegrown local problem solvers that are solving these problems in spite of government and we should allow them to flourish, take route, and expand,” he said.

“If you sit in Washington and try and command and control a solution, you often fail and overlook what really works. And that’s why we have to get out, decentralize and get out into the communities and see what actually works and encourage people to solve problems instead for the government to do it,” Ryan added.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]