Philip Howard is the Chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to simplifying laws so that Americans can use common sense in daily choices. He is the author of "Not Accountable", "The Death of Common Sense", "The Collapse of The Common Good", and "Try Common Sense."
Federal Newswire:
Has common sense died in America?
Philip Howard:
I've written books about this, but basically it's one simple answer. After the 1960s, we tried to create a system that was better than people. We wanted law to guarantee that nothing ever went wrong with human judgment because humans are fallible.
The result is we created a system that was designed to avoid bad judgments, that prevented good judgments. Teachers lost control of the classroom, and managers in the federal workforce lost control of their employees. Doctors started spending half the day filling out forms. People across America go through the day with their noses in rule books instead of figuring out what the right thing to do is.
The problem isn't that everybody uses common sense, the problem is that life is complicated and you've got to give people at least the opportunity to use common sense.
Federal Newswire:
Why do we seem to be unable to change policies to reflect unintended consequences?
Philip Howard:
I think the answer to why we don't change policies is that inertia is very powerful.
There's an ideology behind what's happened that is basically distrust of authority. We were right not to give unbridled discretion to authority, but to create a situation where the teacher doesn't have control of the classroom is really a formula for failure.
As the failures have mounted up over the last few decades, the distrust has become an epidemic, and now America is wallowing in distrust.
There's a whole industry of distrust. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump's appeal is really a dark message of resentment of the things that people can't do anymore. They can't even be themselves in the office.
Federal Newswire:
Can this cut both ways?
Philip Howard:
Oh, sure. Yeah. Defund the police. Radical interpretations of group identity and such.
Federal Newswire:
Are incremental reforms a more effective measure to generate change in government?
Philip Howard:
There is an important role for incremental reform.
But I think that we are at a point where we do need a radical change in the operating machinery of government, not in the policy, not in whether we need to address climate change or whatever, but just in how things work day to day. There are 23 schools in Baltimore this year apparently, where not one student is proficient in math.
So you're never going to fix those schools by saying, well, let's make a little change here or there. You're going to have to completely change the personnel in the school, change how they interact with the students. You're going to have to figure out a way to inspire the students and the parents to get more involved in making the school better.
That's not an incremental change, that's completely turning those schools upside down. A version of that has to happen. It's not the pendulum swinging toward less, it's just making it so that people can take responsibility again.
Federal Newswire:
What do the sweeping changes to improve government look like?
Philip Howard:
There were three assumptions of how things should work that were introduced after the 1960s. One is that we would have clear rules. There are thick rule books that are completely incoherent to people, because the mind can't keep it all straight.
The second was the idea of having procedures, where if you only had enough procedures, you could come up with the right answer. It's fine to have procedures, but you've got to have authority.
You have these environmental reviews–the permitting processes, like for transmission lines– that go on for 10 years. I did a study of this a few years ago called “Two Years, Not Ten Years.” Environmental reviews in most cases now dramatically harm the environment, because they block curing all the bottlenecks.
The third thing that we did was we got this idea that individual rights were not a shield against state coercion, but could be a sword against other people. "Oh, no, you can't tell me that I'm losing my job. That's my job." But what if you're not doing the job and you're not pulling your weight? You have those three things going and you can't fix anything.
I'll give an example of the other way. Recently, an elevated section of I-95 in Philadelphia collapsed. People said it would take more than a year to fix the thing going through the procedures. Well, 13 days later, they reopened it.
What are the kinds of judgments that they made?
Somebody said, well, if you really want to fix an elevated highway quickly, you can't order all the I-beams and all that stuff in time. You have to do it with landfill. You build up the collapsed part and then pave over it.
But there were lots of water and sewer mains, and 10,000 tons of landfill would've crushed them, so you couldn't do that. Somebody then had the idea to use recycled glass. It's one sixth the weight. They didn't go through any studies or anything.
They hired a local contractor they had worked with before on a time material basis, no procurement, just an existing commercial relationship. They found a recycled glass company and again entered the contract without any procurement. Trucks started coming day and night to dump piles of recycled glass.
Then they were getting ready to pave it over, but it started raining and you couldn't pave during wet weather because you couldn't reopen the highway. Somebody had the idea of using the racetrack drying machinery from the Pocono Raceway. Again, no procurement.
During all this, there are all these permits that need to be given. There was an official who just sat there from the state’s Department of Transportation. He didn't follow any of the procedures. He just gave the permit.
Federal Newswire:
That official is there to make sure there isn’t any graft in the permitting and procurement process?
Philip Howard:
Yeah, exactly. So it can get open.
Federal Newswire:
How do delays in infrastructure cause environmental harm?
Philip Howard:
There is nothing that is built that doesn't have some adverse environmental consequences. Any human construction does something to the environment, and so one has to accept the idea of trade-offs. Is nuclear power good? Well, it has lots of problems. You have disposal problems. On the other hand, it's completely carbon free. So are the benefits to that greater? I think so. Many people think so, but maybe the environmentalists don't. So there are all these trade-offs.
Environmentalists talk about renewable energy. Well, renewable energy is in places where the energy isn't needed. They are in sun-baked deserts or they're in the wind heavy regions of the Midwest in Nebraska and Kansas. How do you get the power from renewable energy [areas] to the urban areas where you need it? Well, that requires a transmission line and transmission lines are visible.
Some people think if you live too close to them, it's bad for you. The permitting process for transmission lines makes it so that it is virtually unlawful to permit a transmission line, and that's the only way we're going to get renewable energy.
How is it that the environmental groups are fighting a bill that [U.S. Senator] Joe Manchin proposed to preempt state and local permitting so that you can get one permit and build a transmission line from Kansas to Chicago?
Why are they opposing it? Well, I can think of a couple of reasons, but the main reason they're opposing it is because they don't want to give up their veto. It's just a power thing. So that's a problem in our society.
Federal Newswire:
How much of the gridlock in Washington is rooted in this idea of people not wanting to give up their veto?
Philip Howard:
A lot. How many interest groups are there in Washington? 10,000 or more. Each one of them is staffed with people who keep their jobs as long as nothing changes. They're basically dedicated to the status quo. They say there for change or for improving this or that, but they're basically there to make sure the farm subsidies stay in place, or the environmental groups keep their veto.
The way Congress works is, all you need is a few members of Congress and you can't get rid of something like the 1920 Jones Act, which is completely inexcusable. [It] prevents shipping within the United States except on US flag vessels, which I think…has doubled the cost of transport for oil, gas, and stuff. Everybody knows it's crazy, but you can't get rid of it.
I was talking to the staff of one of the Presidential candidates yesterday, and I said, “well, the only realistic way of getting the budget back in order is a spring-cleaning commission.” You can't do it incrementally because the people who want the Jones Act will give six or eight contributions to six or eight influential members of Congress. They won't be able to do it.
The only way to do it is to have a base closing commission type process where a commission comes in and says, "Okay, here's a new deal that involves a spring-cleaning of 200 programs that everybody knows are obsolete. This will have benefits as well as costs for everybody. So here you are Congress, vote up or down.”
That's the only way it's ever going to happen, because if you try to do it incrementally in backroom deals, every single reform gets stopped.
Federal Newswire:
How do the role of government employee unions play into this?
Philip Howard:
It's really important to deal with the accretion of laws and regulations and such, but it's also important to be able to manage daily operations.
What happened in government in the 1960s–and then it was enshrined in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978–is that we gave collective bargaining power to public employees. The effect of that was to make a problem into a worse problem, which is the problem of public accountability generally.
It's basically impossible to fire someone not doing their job. You just can't do it. 99% of federal employees get a fully-successful rating. Unless you commit a crime or say something politically incorrect, you can't lose your job.
What's the effect of that? The effect of that is not that most federal employees are bad people. Most federal employees are good people. They're in government because they want to serve the public. The effect is it's very hard to have the mutual trust needed for an energetic enterprise when you know that performance doesn't matter.
The Volcker Commissions talked about that. They said it's really important to overhaul the civil service because it's discouraging to everybody when they see people around them not doing the job.
Another effect of it is that politics doesn't matter if the civil service can just wait out the elected official. It's the we-be-wyg phenomenon, "we'll be here when you're gone."
It's really important if you want democracy to work. Democracy is just the process of accountability. You elect people, if they do a lousy job you elect somebody else. It's very important to have accountability down the line.
Madison talked about it during the constitutional debates, the importance of an unbroken chain of accountability. It doesn't mean that people should be fired if they believe in climate change.
You can have a speed bump in there to protect against arbitrary firings, but you can't make somebody prove who has bad judgment or who doesn't cooperate. You just can't do that in a legal hearing. That's not what law's about. It's about judgments.
You've got to restore senior supervisors in the federal government, like the members of the SES, Senior Executive Service and such, you have to restore to them the authority to do their jobs.
Federal Newswire:
What’s your opinion of the idea that agency priorities should change according to the results of elections?
Philip Howard:
The concept of responsibility is meaningless if the person doesn't have the authority that goes along with that.
Federal Newswire:
If an administration cannot make the changes that they've promised, then are elections diminished?
Philip Howard:
Yes, completely. I have a book [coming] out this year called "Not Accountable" where I argue that giving collective bargaining power to public employee unions should be unconstitutional. You've basically put a blockade into the main operating lever of democracy.
You elect people to run the government who don't have the authority to run the government because of these collective bargaining agreements. You elect a mayor, for example, who comes into office in Baltimore. He had no authority to change any personnel in any of those broken schools.
George Floyd was killed by a cop named Derek Chauvin. Derek Chauvin was a weird guy, and probably shouldn't have been on the streets with a deadly weapon. The police chief had no authority to terminate him or even to reassign him under the collective bargaining agreement.
Federal Newswire:
If the electorate isn't willing to make the sweeping changes that need to be made, or they don't elect a mayor or a city council that's willing to do it, what happens then?
Philip Howard:
Well, first of all, if people understood this problem and they made the choice to have a paralytic government where everything fails and costs a lot of money, then the people make that choice.
There is this tendency of democracies to go bankrupt because people get elected by promising more, and by promising never to take anything away. You do have a general problem with democracy that way.
But in America today, you have campaigns where people run for office promising change we can believe in, or drain the swamp or whatever, without ever actually articulating or really even understanding that the operating machinery doesn't actually give anybody the authority to do those things.
That it is illegal to have change you can believe in. It is illegal to give a permit for a transmission line. It is illegal to have an energetic department because you can't get rid of the person who everybody can't stand. It's illegal to fix a bad school. We need to articulate the fact that you need to have an operating system where people have authority before you can blame it on democracy.
Federal Newswire:
Have we lost the ability to forgive people for being wrong or allowing people to admit that they're wrong?
Philip Howard:
Yes, clearly. I think there's partially a leadership problem, but it also feeds into what I was referring to as this culture of distrust. We now have a public culture in which people relish errors. They relish being able to say someone did something wrong. It's not about results. It's about finger pointing and schadenfreude, all that kind of stuff.
We have a public culture that's really aimed at failure, and it's of course self-fulfilling because if you don't trust anybody, you don't let them make a decision, then it's going to fail. The school's never going to get fixed because you don't let anybody try to fix it.
Federal Newswire:
Does this play into the current social media trend of “hot takes” and “owning” someone and being rewarded for it?
Philip Howard:
Yeah, that sounds right. I mean, Donald Trump's brilliant at that. Donald Trump has a feral instinct for the punch back. Somebody does something, he punches right back. He's really fantastic at it.
It doesn't have anything to do with being able to govern or even understanding government. It's just a baiting technique. He's just good at it. He's very good at the rejoinder.
Federal Newswire:
Is it impossible to find common ground on issues if you are baiting someone instead of debating them?
Philip Howard:
Well, yes, that's right. But I don't believe in consensus either. I think that we're really interested in operations. How do you make something work? The way we look at it is that we don't have a system. You look at test scores, at metrics, we're the opposite of that. Our idea is only that you've got to give people the freedom to adapt.
You've got to give freedom to engage in trial and error. You've got to give people the chance to do it in their own way. You want to inspire students, you've got to give teachers the freedom to be inspirational. You can't tell them how to teach.
Federal Newswire:
How do you empower people to act in their own betterment?
Philip Howard:
I'm just finishing a very short book that'll be published in January called “Everyday Freedom.” It argues that we will never get over the epidemic of alienation, much less fix government, until we give [people back] freedom. We have to empower them to take responsibility again, and to get along or not get along with people to do their jobs, or not do their jobs and get fired.
We've got to give everybody every level of responsibility back, the ability to be themselves. I mean, in America today, the national motto shouldn't be…"E Pluribus Unum." It ought to be, "don't be yourself. Don't ever be spontaneous. Don't ever tell a joke. Don't ever do it your way. Just follow it. Just go by the book."
Federal Newswire:
Does government fail because we don't give it enough resources to solve the problems?
Philip Howard:
Not in this country. Government fails because we don't give officials the authority that goes with their responsibility. We don't hold them accountable.
Take schools, I think in New York City, you're spending $37-38,000 per student in the school. The charter schools spend maybe 50-60% of that [and] perform dramatically better. Well, why is that? It's because the people in the public schools don't have the authority to manage them. That's the main management tool.
During the budget deficit ceiling debate, I wrote a column in The Hill saying, “look, everybody knows, all you have to do is look at 10 years of GAO reports, and you can find hundreds of billions of dollars to save every year.” Just look at the GAO reports. This is not rocket science.
They tell you that there are 150 teacher training programs with no evidence that any of them work. They will tell you that there's all this stuff that, like the Jones Act or other things, that make no sense. So we need a spring-cleaning. We don't need more resources. We need a spring-cleaning, and that'll free up a lot of resources
Federal Newswire:
Would some of this be solved by a return to regular order in Congress?
Philip Howard:
I start with Congress. There are a lot of problems with Congress. A return to regular order would be actually quite good. A return to a party system that had party bosses that actually could make some judgments–also a good thing.
But the main failure of government is in its operating machinery that is not manageable, not accountable, and wasteful. The role of Congress should be in part to fix that.
Federal Newswire:
Should we give Congress more authority to veto agency regulations they don’t like?
Philip Howard:
Without presentment to the President, which it requires now. Congress delegated lawmaking to the agencies, and in my view, should be able to take it back if they don't like it.
The founders made a mistake. They made it hard to enact laws on the theory that that would mean that you didn't have too many busy body congresses. But they didn't put in a provision on how to get rid of laws.
I proposed a protocol, it wouldn't be a constitutional amendment, where Congress could agree that any committee could amend a law. Everyone else would agree to vote for that amendment just as a matter of form without any debate, if both the majority and minority leaders of both houses agreed with it.
You've got the minority and majority, and some super majority of the committee voted for it, two thirds or something. Then you would have a practical mechanism to amend laws, there's not one law that isn't broken. There's not one law that doesn't have lots of unforeseen consequences. All of them need to be amended just because life's too complex.
If you can't write a law and have it work the way you want it, why not give back to committees real authority? If you can agree on a bipartisan basis within a committee that something should be amended, everybody else should vote for it. I mean, you could really clean out the stables doing that.
Federal Newswire:
How important is listening in 2023?
Philip Howard:
It's really important, obviously because everyone has a different point of view. Every husband and wife learns that very quickly.
One of the things that Levin writes about, Tim Carney's also written about it, is the disappearance of community institutions, of institutional authority where people in the community get together.
For example, to try to deal with the homeless problem. We've got big government and government officials doing it, and then we've got radicalized individuals on the bottom saying, "Give me my rights." But you don't have people in the middle saying, "How can we solve this problem? What do you think?"
It's those situations where people realize the importance of listening. Because you've got to work it out together in the community.
In Congress, all these disagreements are abstractions–I don't believe in government, or I do believe in government, or whatever. But they're not really having practical discussions.
Governance is a practical art. It's an activity where there are different ways to do things. You try, it doesn't work; try something else. You do have to listen.
Federal Newswire:
Are you familiar with the current attempts to ban the disinfectant ethylene oxide? It’s used for cleaning medical instruments and there is no alternative, so do you think we should halt attempting to ban it until we come up with an alternative?
Philip Howard:
Yes, you ought to slow down. There was a quote that I read somewhere that was attributed to a 19th century historian named Henry Buckle, who was famous in his day. It was something like, "the truth of any matter lies not at its center, but at the edges where it intersects with all other matters."
The ethylene oxide thing is like that. Yes, it's toxic, but it also saves a lot of lives by disinfecting instruments. The truth is in the middle. That goes to your point about listening.
