By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday,
November 23, 2021
A word of warning to conservatives who
have stopped wanting to shrink, reduce, limit, or scale back the federal
government, and who, in recent years, decided want to use the sprawling and
far-reaching power of the federal government to serve their own agenda. . . .
In case you haven’t noticed, the federal
government is often incompetent. Or perhaps I should specify the federal
bureaucracy — the one I
wrote a book about — is a spectacularly inefficient
institution that at best slowly and erratically lumbers towards its goals,
hampered by its own red tape, inertia, waste, overhead costs, complicated
regulations allegedly designed to make everything fair and ethical, slews of incompetent
and hard-to-fire staffers, etcetera.
The federal government ends up achieving
the precise opposite of its goals with surprising frequency. The Environmental
Protection Agency, whose job is to stop or minimize the harm of
pollution, accidentally
released contaminated wastewater into rivers. “Cash for Clunkers” was designed to spur purchases of more cars, and
tried to put greener cars on the roads and help U.S. the struggling U.S. auto
industry; it ended up
selling a lot of Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans, Hyundais, and Kias.
The more the federal government expands its
student loan program, the higher the tuition gets and the more students have
more debt. Financial incentives for better outcomes
by doctors created
incentives for doctors to maximize their treatment of healthy patients and generated no measurable improvement in patient care.
Even federal programs that I like, like
our efforts to create a functioning state in Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban
from coming back and running a bed and breakfast for international terrorist
groups, have a similar record
of counterproductivity. A
program to hire ditch diggers to clear canals and pay them well ended up paying
better than teaching, so the local teachers quit and disrupted the local
schools. Another program built lots of new school buildings across Afghanistan
. . . but didn’t have the resources to staff the new schools, so the Taliban
moved in and turned them into bomb-building facilities.
Even distributing money, the one simple
task that the government has extensive experience with, can get loused up:
Congress appropriated $46.6 billion to help tenants who were behind on their
rent because of the pandemic; after seven months, just 10 percent
had been distributed to renters. A program designed to help the poor pay their phone bills reached
just a quarter of those eligible.
During the pandemic, we’ve learned that
the National Institutes of Health handed out grant money to institutions to
help fight the next pandemic . . . and may well have accidentally helped start
that pandemic. Even more recently, the vaccine mandates probably increased
hesitancy, mistrust, and suspicion.
There’s even an argument that a policy that
cost-conscious conservatives prefer, like a hiring freeze, designed to save
taxpayer money, backfires by
causing a backlog of unfinished work that needs to be addressed by more workers
when the hiring freeze is lifted.
As I wrote
back in April 2020:
. . .
federal bureaucracies are full of perverse incentives that punish those who try
something new and deviate from “the way we’ve always done things.” Any
experiment that doesn’t work out is seen as reason to avoid trying any new
approaches. Many federal offices are hamstrung by antiquated technology — see
the description above of the IRS encouraging companies to fax in their refund
requests. All sorts of rules and regulations that are supposed to make sure all
contracts are fair and involve no favoritism have created a slow-moving process
where ordering any new equipment becomes a major hassle with piles of
paperwork. A process that was designed to make sure no individual person has
too much power, and that each person would be watched over and held accountable
to many others, has grown and morphed into a system where no individual person
has too much authority to get things done, and responsibility is so diffuse
that it’s hard to point to one person at fault when something goes wrong.
And yes,
the federal bureaucracy has more than its share of incompetent people who are
just about impossible to fire.
So when someone like
Rod Dreher declares, “we need to unapologetically embrace the
use of state power”. . . I mean, have you seen state power? The left has
near-complete control of the state, at least at the federal level and at least
for now, and even they’re finding achieving their goals so
much more difficult than they expected:
·
National-security adviser Jake
Sullivan recently
lamented, “The thing that has surprised me the
most is . . . frankly, the kind of incredible human effort that is required to
move even as simple a decision as the allocation of some funding for
development purposes in a single country. The number of steps that are required
to get from a presidential decision to execution on the ground . . . the way
resources have to move, the way instructions have to be communicated, the way
allies need to be engaged and consulted. Until you stare at it square in the
face from the seat I sit in, you don’t fully understand what you’re kind of
dealing with as this massive machine.”
·
The Biden administration is fuming that
they were ready to offer boosters to all Americans, but career
employees at “CDC and the FDA opted instead to
only authorize boosters for seniors, people with high-risk medical conditions
and people at high risk of infection.”
·
California is still waiting
for the federal Department of Transportation to issue regulations for
inspecting underwater pipelines.
And this is a Democratic administration
that has most federal employees agreeing with them!
In what world would the federal employees
at the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and the rest of the
government be speedy, efficient, and effective enactors of a nationalist
conservative policy agenda?
I know, I know, the federal government and
the affiliated bureaucracy will change and get better, once your preferred
candidate is in charge. Your particular reforms have never been tried before,
and are certain to work where previous efforts failed. Got it.
You want to promote family values, or
Christian values, or good citizenship, or responsible fatherhood, or the bonds
of community? God bless you, and good luck. But don’t fool yourself into
thinking that the federal government, with its maddening bureaucracy,
unresponsive reflexes, systemic inefficiency, and sclerotic state, will ever be
an effective ally in your cause.
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