“The Dog in the Manger” School of Government Improvement and the Need For Bipartisan Work and Structures

This story (thanks to Nick Smith) on USDA reorganization plans being litigated, plus looking into the Clinton-era Reinventing Government efforts which identified many of the same issues and concerns and acted upon them, without apparent litigation, makes me think that the current partisanization of everything has led to a “Dog in the Manger” approach to government improvement. “We don’t want to fix these things, but we don’t want you to either, and we will bark at you if you try.”

Friedman’s Law: No Public Policy, or Government Program is Improved or Clarified By Becoming a Partisan Issue. As I used to say about a project on the Rio Grande “reasonable access for unreasonable people,” reason tends to go out the window once tribal loyalties enter the picture.

I’ve told this story before, but there are new people here, so..  As a training assignment, I worked on Representative Carrie Meek’s staff  (D-17th District Florida, first African American  elected to Congress in Florida since Reconstruction) in the House. Being a small staff, I did science, women’s issues, the biological side of medicine, and the environment.   As the rep to the Democratic Environmental Caucus, I suggested that we work with the R’s on improvements to ESA. The head staff person on the Caucus told me “we don’t want to do that because it’s more important to attack R’s that want to change it.” OK, then.

Isn’t it reasonable that organizations would  figure out key measures, monitor those, and try to improve. Wildfire folks tend to be more structured and upfront about all this.  Like I often say, we get more lessons-learned from the Fire people on an ATV rollover than we got for Covid response, or closer to home, the NWFP or the 2012 Planning Rule.  Perhaps it’s because some can argue that there is nothing wrong, so why improve? But we know that some people think that there is something wrong, so why ignore them (or not even have a process to listen to them?)

Let’s use Forest Service policies as an example.  Some people have seen problems with the mapping of 2001 Roadless, with forest planning implementation, with travel management mapping and implementation, or a $740 million deficit?

Here’s how it seems to go:

1. Everything is fine.

2. Some people think things are not fine, but we can ignore them, or don’t have processes in place to listen to them.

3. The people who think things are not fine have spoken with politicians who agree with them.

4. The politicians are doing something or are asking the organization to change.

5.a. They are the wrong politicians (from the other party) so we can focus on how bad they are and they want to destroy everything. And/or

b. Ok, so there might be a problem, but they are going about fixing it the wrong way, because their intention is really bad and they have bad ideas to boot.

And never have a discussion directly addressing the concerns and potential alternative approaches.

6. When we get back in charge, we continue to ignore the problems.  Hurray!

This can work with 1-6 being worked by either party for different issues, but right now it seems to D’s and their allies focused on not changing organizational structures.

It seem to me that the fact is that folks will always disagree, about what should be decided, what scale it should be decided at, and what the decisions should be. In Spencer Cox’s book, he says that he thinks the best way to get good, long-lasting decisions is through the legislative process, because people with different views have to interact directly with each other.  Of course in a lopsided legislature, they don’t have to. And they might be more interested in performative displays that look good on social media, decrying the badness of the other party, or working on their elections rather than sitting down to work things out.

In my experience, what might  be helpful is to have standing groups with representatives of various interests to review, at regular intervals,  implementation of regulations or processes.  I would say FACA committees, but these tend to be overly regulated and hard to keep going due to all the paperwork.  Plus the current Admin often wants to put its thumb on the scale (or more than a thumb, in some cases).  Most of the groups that get started to work on something are disbanded by the time the flaws start showing, and the agency might not have the energy or political oomph to argue for fixing the problems (and factions within the agencies might not agree on what the problems are).   On the other hand, to be within an organization and know that something isn’t working often runs into what some partners call “antibodies to change.”

I would propose that in the same way that the Colorado legislature selected interests for the State Roadless Taskforce, that the federal legislature could select interests and require an agency to set up a review taskforce to examine implementation at 10 year intervals.  It would include open public listening sessions and documentation, and identify needs for change, both for agencies, partners and Congress. Because courts work off statutes and sometimes case law can develop over time that is not great for anyone.

For those who are interested in improving government implementation..check out Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, this is a Google AI summary..

Pahlka and Greenway at The Niskanen Center developed this thought paper for those who are interested in the broader topic of improving state capacity.

Rebuilding our state capacity — the how of our government — is an arduous task that requires a stomach for learning and fixing the rules and culture of the bureaucracy. But make no mistake: whether or not we do it is not a technocratic choice. It’s a political choice — a leadership choice. Previous administrations may not have actively set out to make dealing with public services a burden, or to cripple our nation’s military readiness with policy clutter amounting to hundreds of copies of War and Peace, or create a veto-cracy that limits our ability to build infrastructure. But neither have they made fixing it a priority. This one can, and should.

Our two parties (and even the factions within them) often speak about state capacity in very different languages and have differing priorities for where that muscle should be deployed. But the vast majority of elected leaders on both sides of the aisle would like the bureaucracy to be capable of achieving the missions it is assigned