Power to the people

Philip K. Howard: In the last 50 years, government has become more and more sclerotic — where not only can it not do things, but it doesn’t let other people do what’s needed. Teachers have lost control of the classroom; they don’t have the authority to maintain order. Officials can’t give a permit for new infrastructure, so President Obama gets $800 billion in 2009 to stimulate the economy, most of which is supposed to be spent on infrastructure, but five years later, turns out only 3.6% was spent on transportation/infrastructure. And now, this year, we have this sort of botched response to the COVID epidemic where public health officials in Seattle sit on their hands for weeks while they wait for approvals to pass through the eye of the Washington needle. Meanwhile, the pandemic is spreading. In the case of the George Floyd killing, the policeman involved pretty obviously didn’t have the right character to be a policeman. He’d had something like 18 complaints in his 19 years on the force, only two of which resulted in discipline, but that’s because under the union rules, it’s almost impossible to discipline police for anything, much less terminate them. Colleagues described him as “tightly wound,” and that’s just maybe not the type of person you want walking the streets with a loaded gun. But the people in charge of the police department didn’t have authority to make those types of judgments.

Every day, you get another example of this kind of powerlessness that this modern red-tape state has created. So, we’re arguing that you can’t repair the system — you need to replace it. You need to replace it with a system more like what the framers intended, which is one that sets lofty goals and that has guiding principles but where human beings actually have the authority to take responsibility and other people have the authority to hold them accountable.

WEX: You’ve talked a lot about Washington, and you’ve written that “common sense is illegal in Washington.” I would posit that it’s also illegal in many statehouses, in many school boards, and many city councils. So, how do you get buy-in at the point of implementation, at the state-local-community level, not just from Washington?

PH: You actually have to get the American people, ultimately, to understand that we’ve built government on a false premise: that, somehow, governing can be better than people, and it can’t. We elect people; who we elect ought to be important. They ought to be allowed to make decisions, and we ought to be able to kick them out of office if they don’t make the right ones. If the schools are not working, then we ought to kick people out and put new people in schools, but we can’t do that today because we don’t give the principals the authority to run a school. It’s this disempowerment all the way up the chain of responsibility. Teachers have lost control of the classroom; principals have lost control over deciding who’s a good teacher and who’s not.

And then, the result of all these broken links in the chain is it doesn’t actually matter that much whom we elect because the pattern of democracy, really for the last 34 years, has been a kind of alternating power of parties, as if they’re in their own deal: kind of “First you fail, then I fail.” So, in our forums, for example, in schools and healthcare, we’re going to focus on what will it take to give back to teachers, or to nurses and doctors, the freedom to focus on doing their jobs.

WEX: I’m going to play devil’s advocate a little bit. You mentioned returning to a system closer to what the framers imagined. On the accountability point, the easiest way to have accountability is at the lowest level of connection to the issue at hand. So, our current system, and just living in a 21st-century world power with a globalized economy, not to mention the Left’s distrust of federalism, seems very difficult to bring back to ideas of subsidiary and localism, which were on the framers’ minds in terms of decision-making, representative democracy, and the scope of government. How would you envision localizing accountability?

As a second question: The framers’ conception of government was buoyed by an understanding of the necessity for strong families and strong external institutions, private and religious. That’s something Yuval Levin writes on often. Our institutions are failing and flailing, and some of that is definitely government’s fault in suffocating them out of healthy existence, but some of the fault should also lie with the inability of our institutions to faithfully perform their respective missions and functions. How does a platform focused on government reform think about the issues and institutions that influence society and governance that are themselves outside of government reform?

PH: OK. So, you have two questions, and they’re really, really good questions. How does subsidiary work in a crowded, interdependent society with global trade and all that kind of stuff? That’s the first question. And the answer is, there are some levels of decisions, such as trade policy, where decisions have to be made on a national basis by people in the White House. There’s just no way around it. We’re not going to have 50 different treaties with the same country, or whatever. But, one advantage of moving to a regulatory framework that’s more principles-based is that it has a built-in aspect of subsidiarity.

I’ll give you an example of a program in Australia a couple of decades ago. They replaced their thick rulebook on nursing homes with 31 general principles. Have a home-like setting, respect the dignity of the residents, and such. Experts scoffed. But before, the nursing-home operators were getting away with murder; within the year, the nursing homes were twice as good. They ran a study, and what they found was when people came to work and they didn’t have their noses in the rulebooks, they could internalize these principles, and they could focus on what the residents needed. And they could run their nursing homes in different ways. Most states have something like a thousand rules for their nursing homes. It’s just absurd. You’ve got to have two pictures on the wall, the window has to be this big, so many peas on the plate. It’s unbelievably granular.

When you create the principles-based system, it’s not deregulation. The state regulator still comes in and looks and sees how the nursing home is doing, and if something isn’t good in one way or another, it tells the nursing home, and they have an argument about it, and then there’s discussion, and generally, they work things out. That’s what happens in Australia. But it allows the people in the nursing homes, all the stakeholders, including the residents and their family and such, to have much more of a say in how it works. So, principles-based government allows people to solve problems in their own ways. It embodies subsidiary, whereas command-and-control rules is just central planning.

The second question, about the decline of institutions, family institutions, extra-government institutions, is indeed a tragic weakness of our society — the breakdown of the family and other institutions, such as those that Yuval Levin has written about and I’ve written about. You know, in my last book, I said, “Everybody talks about the rise of individuals. Nobody talks about the rights of institutions.” But institutions are, in fact, the mechanism through which most people actually derive much of their identity. We work with other people in an institution, we’re able to accomplish things because we’re working together in this business or this nursing home, or whatever it is. And one of the aspects of institutional weakness — it’s really just killed them — is not only the central planning aspect of government that doesn’t let institutions do things in their own way, but also the absence of accountability. You cannot have a healthy institution if people know it doesn’t matter, that performance doesn’t matter.

The reason is not because there are lots of bad people that you want to fire. It’s because the knowledge that performance doesn’t matter makes the energy dissipate, like letting the air out of a balloon. Why should you work hard and do the extra mile when the person next door isn’t, or might not be? And so, the combination of central planning rules that doesn’t let people think for themselves and innovate and the absence of accountability has resulted in these kind of very moribund, listless institutions, particularly with social institutions, because they don’t have the energy and the excitement of making a difference.

WEX: The Campaign for Common Sense was in the works, obviously, before the coronavirus, and you’ve touched on this a little bit, but can you speak to the ways that the COVID pandemic and its handling, and even the protests, has influenced or changed the ways that you or your colleagues were thinking about the campaign and the problems you seek to approach? Not that tens of thousands of people dying is an opportunity, but do you see the moment as one that lends itself to structural change?

PH: I think the COVID tragedy and the George Floyd tragedy both underscore the need for a governing system that allows the people in charge to make practical, sensible choices, and those choices will always be complex and involve risk. There is no such thing as one correct way to come out of COVID.

But, just from the get-go, when the red tape got in the way of dealing with the pandemic, and then when the pandemic had spread and the hospitals in the big cities started to be overwhelmed, how did the hospitals deal with it? They threw out the rulebooks. So, what does that tell you about the rulebooks? You couldn’t possibly follow the rules and deal with these issues. And it’s a really important point: The rulebooks that are thrown out are not ones that say, “You need to have a safe hospital” or “have a clean hospital.” They’re rules that dictate exactly how to accomplish that. They tell you exactly what kind of disinfectant to use. It’s that kind of granularity that causes failure.

Back to your question, COVID illustrates it with the botched response at the beginning. It illustrates it with the need for the hospitals to throw away the rulebooks. And it illustrates the need for government. We can’t deal with COVID without government. We can’t. We are going to need some protocols. We do need to do a much better job providing personal protective equipment. There are all kinds of things government needs to do that it didn’t do very well. But, it also can’t get in the way of people doing their jobs, and that’s what it did.

WEX: What does the time horizon for a campaign such as this look like, and what does a win look like?

PH: The short-term goal is to enter the 2020 debates. We want people to talk, we want the candidates to talk about system overhaul, and we want there to be public demand for them to talk about system overhaul.

The longer-term goal is to build constituencies for reforms in all the areas that we’re going to be dealing with and more: accountability of police and other public employees. We’re going to do something on the legal framework for COVID recovery, where we’re going to talk about COVID liability — the need to prevent this country from getting bogged down in the litigation nightmare of all time. Things like that. How would we reduce red tape in schools and in hospitals? We’re going to come up with specific reform proposals.

We’re not trying to do this all alone. We’re trying to engage the interest and involvement in leading institutions and universities and think tanks like AEI and Progressive Policy Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute. So, we’ve got a number of institutions who have already agreed to co-host forums with us. So, we view our role, in part, as a catalyst for people to think bigger, for the institutions who have been talking about reforms or why things don’t work for a long time to think a little bigger and say, “Well, what would happen if we just remade these institutions? If we remade the laws? What happens if we actually could hold people accountable?”

And, I think if you look, a lot of the things, reforms that changed through history, you’ll find people who created a kind of a new vision that people found attractive, and that powered it. That’s the idea here. And it could turn into many different things, but mainly, the idea is to have people think about how government should work, and how schools should work and such, in a different way. We empower people. Let people wake up in the morning, think that they can make a difference because of the way they do things, because of their ideas and their hard work. That’s really what America’s about.