Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans who now is the White House “
infrastructure
czar,” said words in an interview the other day that desperately need to be heard and modeled.
Congress needs to listen, too, and act accordingly. And it should take a cue from leading reformist advocate Philip K. Howard, as will be discussed shortly.
INFRASTRUCTURE CZAR MITCH LANDRIEU’S MIXED NEW ORLEANS RECORD
Speaking to New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Mark Ballard, Landrieu said, “Washington needs to
learn how to make decisions faster
and get money down to the ground quicker where people live.” He spoke of “breaking down the stovepipes between all of the different departments. … We’re spending a lot of time in the redesigning of how the federal government is working with itself. … When you get the ‘way’ right, you can build a lot of things. If you don’t get the way right, you can’t build anything.”
What he means is what conservatives and centrist reformers have been saying for years: Too many regulatory hurdles burden both government and the private sector, so projects take too long and cost too much. Likewise, civil service laws and rules, public-sector unions, and the Administrative Procedure Act all hamstring efficiency. So too does the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires that the local “prevailing wage,” essentially meaning the union wage, be paid to workers on all federal contracts. By at least one estimate, Davis-Bacon requirements cost the federal government
some $11 billion extra per year
, which is money that otherwise could be reallocated toward more projects (or, perhaps, to debt relief).
Even conservatives who believe the 2021 “infrastructure” bill was several hundred billion dollars too large (I am one of them) should wish for the money to be put to the best effect.
Landrieu himself almost certainly doesn’t support all the reforms that conservatives would push, but he has a record of successfully pushing for flexibility from bureaucratic rigor mortis. As mayor, he implemented a series of reasonable reforms to New Orleans’s civil service system, still maintaining solid worker protections but
giving more flexibility to supervisors
to reward or discipline good or bad performance.
What was true then remains true now: Such reforms are desperately needed. For decades, reformist author, lawyer, and advocate Philip Howard, best known for 1995’s The Death of Common Sense, has called for what amounts to a revolution in administrative practices and legal-system standards to provide just such flexibility. His new book,
Not Accountable
, calls for the elimination of public employee unions,
arguing that they are unconstitutional
while promoting massive inefficiency and sometimes corruption. No less a liberal standard-bearer than President Franklin Roosevelt adamantly opposed public-sector unions as being inimical to the public good.
Surely nobody in the Biden administration would take on the federal workers’ unions to that extent, unfortunately. And on regulatory and administrative gout, alas, there’s only so much leeway for administrative or executive reforms. Under President Ronald Reagan, Director of the Office of Personnel Management
Don Devine
did prove that major efficiencies can be achieved by better management, and perhaps Landrieu would be wise to consult both Devine and Howard for ideas.
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Still, even today’s subject-matter “czars” must follow the laws, which is why the bigger responsibility belongs to Congress. The laws must be changed to give executives room to operate. Perhaps Congress should create a commission to recommend revamps of civil service laws, the Administrative Procedure Act, and regulatory reform in general.
If would-be reformers such as Landrieu really do want to streamline how government operates, Congress needs to change laws so as to give them leave to maneuver.
