President Trump’s outright war on the administrative state has put Democrats in a difficult position, since their core brand is that they are the pro-government party.
Faced with the challenge of blocking a tsunami of bad ideas for government reform, Democrats are naturally tempted to hunker down and defend the status quo. This makes them sound like they are comfortable with the existing system. But the system is a mess, desperately in need of reform.
So Democrats wind up undermining the central proposition they are making to voters, which is that government is capable of solving their problems.
The only way for Democrats to break out of this trap is to take a page from the Trump administration, whose attack plan was laid out well in advance in the form of Project 2025. Where is the liberal equivalent?
What Democrats need is a Project 2029. Such a project should be just as ambitious, just as radical and iconoclastic, as Project 2025, yet grounded in a genuine desire to fix the problems of American governance.
A good place to start would be where government is currently under assault: public administration. It’s not enough just to defend the administrative state — it must be strengthened. Right now, liberals and progressives consistently articulate lofty ideals that could improve the lives of millions of Americans — a comprehensive system of public health insurance or a transition to green energy. Yet they are trying to achieve these outcomes with a state apparatus that takes decades to accomplish even simple administrative tasks, like abolishing the penny. It would be difficult to find a better example of willing an end but rejecting the means necessary to its attainment.
In the world of comparative public administration, the United States is understood to be an extreme outlier. Indeed, American government often seems like a giant social science experiment, designed to figure out how far it is possible to go in denying public officials the ability to use judgment.
Many progressives in America today admire European welfare states, especially of the Scandinavian variety, for their low levels of economic inequality and comprehensive social safety nets. And yet if one were to take a look at the actual powers exercised by state officials in these countries — the powers that allow them to achieve these objectives — most Americans, no matter how liberal, would recoil.
If you are on welfare in Sweden and you encounter a large, unexpected expense, you can apply to your case worker for a supplemental payment. The case worker will then decide whether to give you the money, based on whether the expenditure seems reasonable or not. That’s it. No rules, just judgment.
In America, welfare case workers are limited to ticking boxes on forms. No judgment, just rules. This may seem less capricious, but it can have perverse consequences. Poor Americans often face a high cost of living, because their inability to make some lump-sum payment, such as an apartment security deposit, forces them to live in a hotel and pay more for daily expenses like food.
Because of this inflexibility, American government bureaucracies often make decisions that violate common sense.
Too many of the interactions people have with state officials — with border officials, public schoolteachers, post office workers, I.R.S. agents and so on — leave them angry and frustrated. Most people’s attitudes toward government are determined not by abstract political ideology but rather by these interactions — and frustration with them helps drive support for Republican radicalism.
Anyone who is serious about expanding the role of government in American society should be obsessively concerned with improving the quality of these customer-service interactions. And yet Democrats have too often defended the institutional arrangements that have degraded their quality.
To pick just one example that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency initiative have made salient, most impartial observers grant that there are huge problems with regulation in America. Unfortunately, the political debate has focused on the content and the number of regulations.
This ignores the deeper problem, which arises from the way that regulation is enforced. Public officials in the United States are typically obliged to adopt a highly legalistic and punitive enforcement style, which in turn generates counterproductive adversarialism. U.S. companies routinely hire lawyers to deal with regulatory compliance work that in other countries is handled by engineers or managers.
U.S. regulations that make it through the rule-making process wind up being written at an extremely fine-grained level of detail. Environmental regulations that can fit into a binder in some countries fill an entire filing cabinet in the United States. This is partly because no one trusts the inspectors and the regulated companies to work out their own solutions.
The dissatisfaction with government generated by these interactions has been happily picked up and channeled by Republicans. Yet most populist proposals for reform are terrible.
Anyone who has tried calling the I.R.S. in recent years can tell you that the organization needs to have more agents, not fewer. Firing thousands of I.R.S. agents, as the Trump administration is doing, will produce an outcome demonstrably worse than the status quo.
This is why Democrats need to step up. A positive program for reform should start with public administration. And to do this — again looking to the example of Project 2025, which covered many overlooked but critical parts of the federal government — Democrats might start with the incredibly important but obscure Administrative Procedure Act of 1946. The major pathologies of U.S. government cannot be fixed without a complete overhaul of this legislation. The central objective of the A.P.A. was to create rules for the creation of rules by the administrative state. The intention may have been sensible, but the process has since gotten out of hand. In particular, the notice-and-comment procedure required to enact new rules has become so onerous and time-consuming that it essentially prevents regulatory agencies from learning from their own experience.
By the time agencies have completed the herculean task of getting a rule adopted, the last thing they want to do is go back and reconsider whether it is having its intended effects. (This is known as the problem of “retrospective review,” which presidents keep ordering agencies to fix and yet somehow never gets fixed.) The A.P.A. should be revised to streamline the process and bring American practice into line with that of other democratic states.
The U.S. administrative state is also subject to an intolerable level of judicial interference, which generates widespread pathologies in decision-making. It forces public officials to choose the action that can most easily be defended in court, rather than the action that will be best for the American people.
It will be difficult to remedy this without strengthening and extending the administrative tribunal system. When Congress created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, it also created a tribunal, the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, to resolve disputes between employers and the Safety and Health Administration. This tribunal can serve as a model of how challenges and appeals can be dealt with internally within the administrative state, without involving the judiciary.
Congress could also be much more aggressive in challenging judicial intrusion into administrative matters (especially in light of the Supreme Court’s recent rejection of Chevron deference, which allowed agencies to use their expertise to determine how to carry out laws passed by Congress).
Last, Project 2025 attracted considerable criticism for its proposed expansion of the number of political appointments in the federal civil service, from the roughly 4,000 today to 50,000. And yet why is 4,000 the correct number? In France, a country that also has a politicized appointment system, the incoming president makes only about 500 appointments.
Congress could start by removing the power to appoint “inferior officers” from the president, with the goal of reducing the number of political appointments to the minimum required by the Constitution. This would give the president less control, rather than more, so that people do not come into the office with the expectation of being able to micromanage the U.S. government, as President Trump is attempting to do now. If that sounds undemocratic, the solution should be to make congressional oversight more efficient.
It’s true that these proposals are impossible in the current political context. But from the standpoint of democratic theory and practice, these are not particularly wild.
It is all about willing the means. There are certain outcomes that can be delivered only by the state. If people want these outcomes, they must be prepared to create an administrative apparatus in the public sector capable of achieving them.
The post The Democrats Need a Project 2029. Here’s a Start. appeared first on New York Times.
