"When you deplete the ones you should regard, will you repent before we send a message?"
"When you deplete the ones you should regard, will you repent before we send a message?"
This country has a lot of problems. Someone really needs to do something about that.
This week’s soundtrack: Husbandry - “Woke Dreams ”
Today is the federal holiday known as the observance of George Washington’s birthday, though it’s colloquially known as Presidents Day (where I grew up, in the great state of Illinois, we got both Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday. That kicked major ass.). This reminded me about conversations I had with progressives in the 2016 and 2020 (and even as recently as two weeks ago) election cycles about the Senior Senator from Vermont and, thus, how hard it is to do government without bringing in lots of people./
I say this not because I think one way or another about Sen. Bernie Sanders (broadly, I think he’s an important force in American politics and I think having a torchbearer of LBJ-style governance is valuable, but I’m not alone in noting that he’s been a comparatively ineffective legislator and, well, he’s old as hell with all that comes with that), but rather that I think he – like many “big idea” politicians running for elected office – can be disappointing because the ideas soon run into the realities of politics, gridlock, the courts and the general slow nature of progress in American government. A lot of people running for office seem to perpetually say “someone should do something about this!” and many don’t have a particular solution (Sanders, to his credit, does. He just don’t have a plan as to how to execute the solutions). Gun control comes to mind, but most issues follow this construction (and the political right is way better at mining the “here’s a problem, our solution either doesn’t exist or involves violence).
I don’t say any of this with happiness and, broadly, I am of the Internet Hippo argument regarding tempering centrism or moderation. It sucks.
You probably already discerned this, as my Jan. 16 newsletter noted the lurching rightward movement of the window of acceptability in modern American politics; I get frustrated with the idea that “extremists on both sides” exist equally.
Those are the caveats for me to say that movement is really fucking hard in government, mostly because government is complicated. Any politician running for office – Sanders is the easy example, even a prolific real estate developer couldn’t build a damned wall, which is way easier than, for example, expanding Medicare to every person in the U.S. or making college free – can argue for any particular program they support in a campaign, but those things often reflect an idea more than execution. Execution is difficult.
Two easy examples are the Healthcare.gov debacle and the early COVID-19 rollout. In both cases, the feds tried to be tech-forward and failed (comparatively) because the complicated systems didn’t work and because the ideas sounded better than the execution. In the both cases, the various state health systems did not always line up, priority-wise, with the presidential administration. In the former case, this was outsized because the site construction was not particularly useful and less preparation was done than necessary. In the latter, the lack of a wide-ranging policy regarding who was using the sites was a problem (as in: Doing a web-only registration system for the oldest Americans was not going to be an effective way to get people vaccinated) no one anticipated.
Connected to all of this is is the problem of modernization of the federal workforce. This week, our show put out a two-part interview with former DHS CHCO and current National Academy of Public Administration fellow Jeff Neal about modernization within the context of it fully stalling over the past four years since NAPA put out a pretty long whitepaper on how to modernize the workforce.
(Full disclosure: GovExec, my employer, is partnering with NAPA to release the whitepapers and our show will have the authors of the papers on. We’re also going to run some arguments against some of the concepts in the whitepapers, including one tomorrow. More than anything, my impression – and I haven’t talked to my bosses about this, so I could be totally wrong – is that we’re trying to host and foment the conversation about kicking effective government into gear.
One more caveat unrelated to the immediately above: We’ve covered a lot on the show about artificial intelligence and machine learning as solutions to a lot of these problems. A generation has grown up with web-based customer service and chatbots, though a person is always more helpful. My point is that we’re not nearly there yet for automated customer service; how many times have you screamed “operator!” into a phone during a call with your cable provider? While government is working toward this and chatbots are coming, the future isn’t here just yet. At least not fully, considering the Baby Boom generation is still in power.)
What Neal and I didn’t cover in either parts of the interview is why regular Americans – who are not employed by the executive branch agencies – should care. We touched on it some in noting that some agencies get screwed over by a backwards set of workforce policies – the dreaded red tape in HR, the often-backwards telework policies, bad tech, etc. – and thus can’t serve the public. The easiest example that we cover a lot on the show is IRS; with poor workforce policies, every taxpayer who needs to contact IRS spends much more time on the phone, waiting. That shit sucks.
Pretty much any policy needs people to implement it. For all of the (rightful) uproar and blame thrown around about the Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio and the lack of maintenance and/or skirting of safety regulations by Norfolk Southern, someone’s gotta actually write and enforce the law. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that many laws without enforcement means that crimes – mostly the ones that will make shareholders money – happen more often. If no one is updating or checking compliance with rules, what’s the incentive for Norfolk Southern to comply? Nothing but being a good corporate citizen (bwahahahaha). What’s the incentive to cut corners and run afoul of the rules? Everything, including great profits. See also: The meat industry, both during the early parts of the pandemic and, of course, more recently.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot when it comes to the debt ceiling and “our bills” or whatever (I won’t get into the way that government spending actually is divided, as that’ll almost certainly be a full newsletter later). When people talk about cutting government spending – Neal and I did cover this in our conversations – they seem to forget what exactly that means. Yes, there are loads and loads of wasteful programs out there (though many are myths), but those programs are nothing compared to the ones that serve someone. Government is not like business; you can’t just cut the inefficient shit because it’s not providing profits (even if that was the case, IRS would be the best-staffed agency in America and it’s not, mostly for political reasons). Even the bloated defense budget means the beloved “jobs” by way of the biggest contractors.
So, let me get back to the Internet Hippo notion that better things aren’t possible. Because, I don’t believe that nor do I think it’s too hard or impossible. Rather, what I think is frustrating is this ideas can come without execution. Things need to be done, yes, but a person has to do it; someone needs to answer the phone at IRS. Someone needs to deliver the mail. Someone needs to inspect the meat or the railway or the mine. The promise of the Jetsons future is not here just yet, certainly not for everyone. Someone’s gotta hire a load of people – and that means changing the civil service system to someone more modern than mid-20th-century shit – to actually do the work. Government needs a lot of someones and that’s gonna cost a lot of money and take a lot of time.
GovExec Daily
As mentioned, my two-parter with Jeff Neal is one I really enjoyed, so check that out here and here. I also did my biweekly hit with Courtney Bublé this past week, in which I got very sad about the lack of COVID-19 restrictions in the world. I also talked to Marc Mancher about disaster response and Gordon Abner about workforce stuff. We did a bonus episode over this past weekend, too, about American presidents.
Lulu Update
I am pretty adamant about baking homemade treats for my dog, mostly because I like to bake and it gives me the tiniest bit of satisfaction to use fun cookie cutters (shut up). For Valentine’s Day, we went with little hearts.
She loves those treats.
A Recommendation: Stromboli
As I think I’ve mentioned, I started making homemade pizza since I got a KitchenAid mixer about a year into the pandemic. This became a very inconsistent weekly ritual for me since then, which is not great for my health, but is delicious. That said, last week I started making little stromboli guys as a lessened pizza meal for myself.
I’m not gonna defend stromboli as authentic nor healthy, but they are tasty and, like homemade pizza, are very easy to customize for my own palate.