How to Really Reform Government
And wow, does it need an overhaul. Top to bottom, especially the Article II branch. Changing the Constitution isn't required, but following its original intent is. The urgency is growing.
As a young Senate leadership staffer in early 1993, I remember vividly then-Vice President Al Gore walking imperiously into the Republican Leader Bob Dole’s Capitol office. It was just a few weeks into the new Clinton-Gore Administration. Senator Dole and the GOP leadership were eager to find ways to work with the new Democratic Administration on policy ideas they found palatable. I was staff director of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, standing behind Gore in the GOP leader’s conference room and taking mental notes.
It’s the way politics used to work. How quaint.
Gore, whose prior Senate record would be considered today as almost conservative (other than his growing devotion to famously dystopian and inaccurate predictions about climate change), came to Dole’s Capitol office to discuss his agenda for “reinventing government.”
Dole opened the meeting, and Assistant Leader (whip) Alan Simpson (R-WY), Conference Chair Thad Cochran (R-MS), and their leadership colleagues repeated a desire to work with Gore on reforming government, occasionally offering examples and suggestions.
I remember from that meeting a never-ending, sing-songy word salad from Gore that reeked of condescension and a lack of seriousness. It quickly became obvious that “Reinventing Government” was a nice-sounding centrist political slogan and sold a few books, little more, and despite talk of another meeting, it never happened. History teaches us now that what really had in mind was expanding government, starting with “universal health care,” which became known as “HillaryCare.” Those of a certain age will remember that Clinton appointed his wife to head a task force to “reinvent” health care in the United States.
Gratefully, her schemes died a terrible death and helped usher the first GOP majority in the House in 40 years, along with making Bob Dole majority leader just two years later. It also led to what I still consider the best healthcare reform legislation ever written, authored by US Sens. Don Nickles (R-OK) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the Consumer Choice and Health Security Act of 1993. It attracted 25 Senate cosponsors. It wasn’t perfect, but it is still a good idea in policy and theory.
In a nutshell, it would make shopping for health insurance like shopping for auto insurance (“only pay for what you need”), with your employer’s federal tax subsidy to provide health insurance converted into higher income for employees so they could choose a portable plan that best suited their needs. And yes, original versions had a “mandate” that strongly incentivized you to buy at least catastrophic health insurance with a high deductible of about $10,000. In other words, real insurance. Democrats didn’t like the plan because unless everyone paid for a bunch of benefits, they didn’t need, they claimed it would make those procedures more expensive for those who did. Medicare wasn’t touched.
I still have the t-shirt with an imprint of the organizational chart for a new national health care regime, distributed by then-Republican US Senator Arlen Specter (he would later switch parties and lose a Democratic primary before passing away shortly thereafter).
Sadly, Clinton’s scheme returned with a vengeance and became law during the Obama-Biden Administration. All it really accomplished was expanding Medicaid and making health insurance largely unaffordable for those who didn’t qualify for subsidies. Many of its mandates, fortunately, have been repealed. Still, many couples don’t receive the first dollar of Obamacare coverage without forking over more than $30,000 in premiums and deductibles annually (preventative care excepted). That’s stupid.
Health care is still an expensive hot mess and begs for reform.
I’ve written previously about food regulation in America. I spent more than two decades working on food policy and regulation. You would not design our bifurcated, even schizophrenic, food safety system as it is today. Originally built nearly 90 years ago, layers upon layers of new regulations and bureaucracy have been overlaid, an outdated construct that is expensive and sclerotic, teeming with bureaucrats who are masters at avoiding accountability.
My acquaintance, Philip Howard, is leading a movement to reform the government significantly. The septuagenarian attorney has penned several books and is now moving incrementally through the legal system to declare federal government unions unconstitutional. I’m cheering for him. President Franklin Roosevelt famously opposed the creation of government unions.
But genuine and broad-based government reform won’t come from lawsuits. Ultimately, a new President and Congress must be dedicated to truly reinventing government, starting with the Constitution and several clear, visionary political objectives and realities. And courage.
The next President should appoint commissions that oversee each existing federal agency, including Defense, State, Education, Environment, Transportation, Commerce, Interior, Justice, Homeland Security, and the rest. Independent agencies should also be included. They should be given a one-year time frame with ample funding and staffing. “Commission” members would be reform-minded former agency officials with real-world experience and no agenda, personal or otherwise than to do the right thing. No self-serving lobbyists unless they permanently walk away from their profession. I would invite specific House members with expertise or oversight responsibilities, bipartisan. Frankly, the biggest challenge is finding responsible Democrats. The commissions need not be large. In fact, they should be small.
Yes, such people exist. And yes, it will be a political personnel challenge of the first order.
Yet, it is essential. And urgent. The federal government now consumes nearly 25 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while raking in around 20 percent in tax revenue. That is unsustainable. And as government grows ever more powerful and intrusive, the stakes become higher, as interest groups and politically motivated people throw larger sums of money into political campaigns to pay off favored constituencies.
The idea for another commission - reforming our overly regulated federal campaign laws and system. More about that in a future post.
While House Republicans still talk of a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution, the best idea for achieving that was proposed by then-US Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). As a freshman House member in 1989, Kyl’s first bill was a Constitutional amendment requiring total federal spending not to exceed 19 percent of GDP, with an emergency clause requiring a supermajority two-thirds vote of Congress to exceed.
That, too, remains a great idea. Urgent, too, as we have long raced past an unimaginable $31 trillion in public debt, never mind unfunded liabilities. Debt now exceeds GNP, and that’s not going to end well.
It’s possible to “grow” out of this debt crisis, but government regulations and bureaucrats must take their hands off our economy’s neck. You can’t speed up the economy by applying the brakes. As the economy increases, the government must decrease. There is an inverse relationship.
Among the cast of four currently announced GOP presidential candidates - not yet including US Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) - only biotech entrepreneur and hedge fund founder Vivek Ramaswamy comes closest to this agenda or framework. He wants to abolish the Department of Education and reinvent the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He’s running an ‘open source’ candidacy, so perhaps we’ll learn more about his ideas. Most give him no chance of winning, but I won’t count anyone out yet.
Each commission will be charged with three objectives. First, to create a detailed 21st-century vision for the agency, including its mission and organization. Second, to identify regulations that can be changed, abolished, or revised immediately that do not require congressional approval. Then third, identify and recommend changes that require legislative approval.
A strong Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House should lead the process with a free hand and the full support of a new President. That will take some courage. Maybe Mitch Daniels can return to his former role for an encore.
Many people will bristle at the notion of yet another batch of commissions that, historically, produce reports and recommendations that gather dust on bookshelves. Former President Herbert Hoover led famous commissions recommending redesigns of our agricultural and food safety systems in the 1940s and 1950s. Some were actually implemented. The most recent “successful” commission was the one created by President George W. Bush and Congress after September 11, 2001, with mixed results (Patriot Act, anyone?).
But nothing will change unless a solid and motivated team of professional patriots is involved, including Congress. A secondary mission will be to root out, expose, and destroy “woke” policies infecting every agency, dissembling DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) bureaucracies in its wake. Merit will be the touchstone, not Pandora’s box of modern bigotry, grievance, and victimhood.
Nothing will certainly change so long as a weak, enfeebled, and infirm President occupies the Oval Office. We’ve already wasted the past several years with political slogans never to reform the increasingly bankrupt Social Security and Medicare systems. Any candidate who continues to blather such nonsense is undeserving of support, despite whatever positive qualities they may possess.
Malevolent and ill-motivated partisans will try to suggest constitutional changes or seek to hijack the process to push an even larger federal octopus. Such people should be rejected and marginalized (but never censored or “canceled”). That’s not to discount the fine work of the Article V project, which seeks a constitutional convention with several changes in mind, from term limits to a balanced budget amendment. It takes 34 states to launch a convention and 38 states to ratify whatever they propose. Those are high hurdles and signify to me that we have nothing to fear from the process. Any “out of control” convention would never see its changes become law if at least 13 states have anything to say about it.
The time for grievance and score-settling is over. It’s time to start demanding a true “reinventing government” platform from our federal candidates at all levels. We can quibble about the details later. We have a country to save.
You’re such a fantastic writer