Democrats today seem to think that making government work better is somehow inconsistent with a progressive agenda. In fact, however, the Democrats’ activist agenda may not be credible unless it is packaged with a practical vision to make government work better. As they painfully discovered with the failed launch of the Obamacare website, the activist agenda isn’t even possible unless it can deliver.

Trust in the new rules is essential for Americans to brave the risks and to adhere to the guidelines. A new pandemic social contract is needed that reassures Americans they will not be left to fend for themselves if they get sick. Because the overhang of potential risk to individuals and liability to employers could significantly impact the national economy, this new social contract should be made as matter of federal law.

Democracy is supposed to be a mechanism for public accountability, but democracy can’t function if the links in the chain are broken.  We elect governors and mayors, but they have no effective control over police, schools or other public institutions. The organizational flaw here boils down to confusion between liberty and responsibility. Police and other public employees have an affirmative responsibility to serve the public effectively. They must be accountable not by the standards of a criminal trial, but for meeting a much higher standard of public stewardship. It is the job of supervisors to make these judgments.

Government needs to become disciplined again, just as in wartime. It must be adaptable, and encourage private initiative without unnecessary frictions. Dense codes should be replaced with simpler goal-oriented frameworks, as Cuomo has done. Red tape should be replaced with accountability.  Excess baggage should be tossed overboard. We’re in a storm, and can’t get out while wallowing under the heavy weight of legacy practices and special privileges.

We need an immediate intervention to break America free from its bureaucratic addiction. It must be done if the nation is to come back whole in any reasonable time frame. The first step is for Congress to authorize a temporary Recovery Authority with the mandate to expedite private and public initiatives, including the waiver of rules and procedures that impede public goals. States, too, should set up recovery authorities to expedite permitting and waive costly reporting requirements.

I focus in this paper on accountability, which I believe is the lynchpin to overall reform of the civil service system. Giving public officials more responsibility, for example, is essential to attracting energetic and qualified candidates. Affording officials more flexibility also allows them to make common sense tradeoffs when confronting real-world situations, and thereby help relieve the frustrations Americans feel when stymied by bureaucratic rigidities. But few people will support giving officials more responsibility unless they are accountable if they misuse the authority.

Here we are: Americans agree that government is broken, just as Paul Volcker and others see that the civil service system is broken. I think the two are inextricably linked. It is not possible to fix government without remaking public service, and vice-versa. What is missing in both is a framework that honors human responsibility. Making practical choices in government, as in any life activity, requires that people be free to roll up their sleeves and make sense of the situation before them. Similarly, attracting good people to government is impossible unless they can make a difference. No one who is any good wants to be a paper-pusher. The decline of human agency is the common thread of broken government and broken civil service. Not much in life or in government will work sensibly when no human is free to make it work.

PHILIP K. HOWARD is a New York City-based lawyer and writer who is a vocal advocate for government and legal reform. A self-declared “radical centrist,” Howard founded and heads Common Good, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that champions simplifying government. He has given a TED talk, appeared on The Daily Show, served on Trump’s CEO council, and authored several books, the most recent of which is Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019). He recently offered his thoughts on how Washington can—and should—be fixed.

“American government is suffering from a failure of philosophy, not merely bad management,” Howard writes, listing examples of prescriptive legalistic overreach. These include orchards that must comply with 5,000 rules from 17 agencies — one rule even stipulates that farmers check daily for mouse droppings. There are rules that ban firefighters from transporting injured people in their vehicles to hospital, and prevent immigration officials from giving distressed children a hug; planning laws that impose delays of several years on simple bridge projects; there are states that require multiple licences for basic jobs. And so on.

No one seriously doubts the need to modernize America’s infrastructure. The main stumbling block is broad distrust of Washington’s ability to deliver any large public works initiative. Getting past this impasse offers a unique opportunity to reboot the rules, cutting effective costs by over 50 percent.

What’s missing is a governing vision that makes Americans part of the solution. Only then can leaders attract the popular mandate needed to overcome the resistance of Washington. Only then will there be a principled basis for officials and citizens to make practical choices going forward. The best model for modern government is to revive the framework of democratic responsibility designed by the Framers: Replace red tape with human responsibility at all levels of society. This governing vision, though centrist, requires a radical simplification of Washington bureaucracies.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, morality is not merely a matter of personal belief. Morality is the mortar of a healthy society. Man must be moral, Durkheim emphasized, “because he lives in society.” Morality infuses social dealings with mutual trust. People are able to achieve more when they trust others to abide by shared norms of fairness, such as the Golden Rule directive to “do unto others . . .” Truthfulness is essential for trust. Norms of sharing and restraint are essential for stewardship of scarce common resources—including protecting clean air and water, and allocating finite public budgets in schools and government.

In his latest book, “Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left,” Howard makes a case for pushing a giant reset button: in effect, starting over by wiping clean the legal landscape and replacing it with a series of principles that apply a common-law standard to government decisions. Howard, the founder of a nonprofit called Common Good, which aims to simplify government, wants to encourage reasonable action to control pollution, make the workplace safe and guide just about every other policy choice in the interest of the common good. He has been advocating for common sense in law and government for more than 20 years, since his book “The Death of Common Sense” came out in 1994. But looking around today one can’t help thinking that common sense in America is as elusive as a unicorn.

It’s time to bite the bullet: Washington can’t be repaired, it must be replaced. Creating a coherent governing framework is not so daunting. Most bureaucratic detail is irrelevant when people are allowed to take responsibility again.

One of the most intriguing of  the ideas in my old friend Philip K. Howard’s new book – Try Common Sense: Replacing Failed Ideologies of the Left and Right — is to move a lot of federal operations out of Washington to get them away from the entrenched  lobbyist-run corruption there and closer to the people and in some cases to outstanding local expertise. Such moves would liberate more federal employees to take decisions in the public interest.

Modernizing America’s infrastructure is a necessity, not an ideology. Rickety transmission lines lose 6 percent of their electricity, the equivalent of 200 coal-burning power plants. About 2,000 “high-hazard” dams are in deficient condition. Century-old water-mains leak over 2 trillion gallons of fresh water a year. Over 3 billion gallons of gasoline are consumed by vehicles idling in traffic jams. Half of fatal car accidents are caused in part by poor road conditions.

The centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s plan gives an office, the Council on Environmental Quality, within the White House, the authority to coordinate actions and direct how environmental reviews are performed. Much of the plan’s inspiration lies in a report, “Two Years Not Ten Years,” issued in 2015 by Common Good, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group.

Small businesses need their own separate regulatory system. It should be simple. It should be accessible from one place. And it should be focused on meeting regulatory goals rather than larded with details and prescriptions. That argument was made Wednesday by Philip K. Howard, founder of the anti-bureaucracy nonprofit Common Good, at a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Small Business Committee. Howard called the current regulatory framework a “powerful disincentive to entrepreneurship” and blamed compliance costs–in both time and money–for part of the decline in business starts.

“It’s hard to find an environmental review under 1,000 pages, and many are tens of thousands,” said Philip K. Howard, founder and chairman of nonprofit public advocacy organization Common Good and the lead author of a September 2015 report on the subject. “The relevant stuff is obscured in this sea of technical detail. There should just be a 50-page document on the construction impact so people can understand what’s going on and make sure it’s nothing stupid that disrupts neighborhoods.”

Howard called for an overhaul of the infrastructure permitting process, cutting through red tape for faster decisions. “There’s been this accretion of well-meaning laws over the last 50 years with no one in charge of drawing lines, so the process can take a decade or longer to get an infrastructure project,” he said. “The effect of that is that it more than doubles the cost of infrastructure and it’s also dramatically harmful to the environment, ironically, because conducting an environmental review just prolongs bottlenecks.

Yet regulation does cause some visible problems. Infrastructure projects are frequently bogged down in endless environmental reviews and consultations. An example is a project to upgrade the Bayonne Bridge, which spectacularly arches between Staten Island and New Jersey. Elevating the road so that bigger cargo ships could pass underneath required 47 permits from 19 different government entities, according to Philip Howard, a legal writer. Regulators demanded a historical survey of every building within two miles of the bridge, even though the project affected none of them. It took from 2009 to mid-2013, when building at last began, to satisfy all the regulatory requirements.

Any significant new infrastructure-spending package would have to clear Congress. And executive orders alone won’t do much to change a well-entrenched four-decade-old regulatory process, said Philip Howard, chairman of Common Good, a think tank favoring looser federal regulation. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

America needs to remake government for the 21st century. The only path forward is to return to constitutional first principles and, by Executive Order, create a civil service system that restores the authority of the President and Federal supervisors to manage public employees. Restoring accountability up the chain of responsibility is no silver bullet, but it will allow public executives to rebuild an energetic and responsive public culture. Instead of being bogged down in employee entitlements, government can once again work for the American people.

Two new rail tunnels need to be built under the Hudson River to alleviate a critical rail bottleneck and permit overhaul of century-old tunnels. The purpose of this report is to outline the economic and environmental costs of different permitting timetables, and to propose approval mechanisms that will save taxpayers billions and avoid significant environmental harm.

Public discourse is a cacophony because the words don’t matter. There’s no decision-maker to persuade or to hold you accountable. The disappearance of authority was no accident. After the 1960s, we reorganized government to avoid fallible human judgment by replacing human authority with thick rulebooks. That’s why government is a tangle of red tape where no one can do much of anything. Critical infrastructure projects languish on drawing boards because no official has authority to give a permit. Schools are chaotic because teachers must prove in a due process hearing that Johnny threw the punch. In government without human authority, irresponsible actions have few consequences, and irresponsible words have no consequences. Yell, hiss, lie… whatever.

On this particular day in March, Howard has invited some entrepreneurs from the Inc. 5000--our annual ranking of America's fastest-growing private companies--to his midtown Manhattan office to share their experiences coping with regulation. Leventhal is especially vocal. His company spends a lot of money buying grapes from Sonoma and Napa, California, and he wants to trumpet that fact. But, as he explains, the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau requires vintners that obtain grapes from "noncontiguous" states and include that information on their labels "to limit sales of wine produced with those grapes to the state in which that wine is produced"--in his case, New York. This rule exists, suggests Howard, to protect vested interests. But, he adds, "it looks like [rules governing the wine industry] exist only because someone made them up that way 80 years ago."

It’s tres chic these days to lament Washington partisanship along with the ensuing gridlock and congressional inertia. But such hand-wringing ignores the nation’s robust bureaucratic apparatus and the energetic regulatory state it administers. In fact, writes Philip K. Howard in an April 2 commentary for The Wall Street Journal, “The buildup of federal law since World War II has been massive – about 15 fold.” And that, he posits, shackles American competitiveness, undermines infrastructure development and stifles entrepreneurialism. “Bad laws trap daily decisions in legal concrete and are largely responsible for the U.S. government’s clunky ineptitude.”

Crucially, Howard contends, there’s a vacuum of political authority at the top. In our balkanized bureaucracies, no agency or official has the power to settle disagreements among agencies, telescope the regulatory gauntlet or otherwise make the ultimate decision to move projects forward.

In his latest piece for The Atlantic Magazine, chairman of the reform coalition Common GoodPhilip K. Howard writes about the need for a negotiated bargain between Congressional Democrats and Republicans to reform and pay for needed infrastructure repair. Howard, who has written persuasively and often about the need for common sense regulatory and judicial reform in books such as “The Rule of Nobody” and “The Death of Common Sense”, discussed the problem of dogmatic fidelity to bureaucratic process and a total lack of decision-making authority among the decision-makers with CapX American editor Abby W. Schachter. 

As policy analyst Philip K. Howard noted earlier this year in a landmark report, Western democracies such as Germany and Canada generally grant permits—including environmental reviews—for major infrastructure projects in two years or less. They accomplish this by establishing clear lines of authority and consolidated decision-making, in sharp contrast to the fragmented U.S. system wherein an aggrieved group can thwart decisions for years.

“Nothing today is politically feasible. Nothing,” writes Philip K. Howard in The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government. While his book veers into occasional hyperbole, its overall premise is sound: The proliferation of laws and regulations that attempt to spell out precisely what public officials must do in every conceivable situation makes it increasingly difficult for them to get anything done and coincidentally weakens their moral authority.

“But listen to Philip K. Howard, and it might not seem like such a stretch. He’s a New York City-based advocate for legal reform who has appeared on ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’ and has authored several books, including ‘The Collapse of the Common Good,’ that detail how litigation fears affect our lives. “‘Somehow or another in the last couple of decades, the land of the free has become a legal minefield,’ Howard says in a TED Talk available online. ‘It’s sort of changed our lives in ways that are sort of imperceptible, and yet when you pull back you see it all the time.’ Howard uses playgrounds as an example. All it takes, he says, is a few people to sue over, say, seesaws before they disappear entirely, because no municipality will want to risk even the threat of a lawsuit. “‘And that’s what has happened,’ Howard says. ‘There are no more seesaws, jungle gyms, merry-go-rounds or climbing ropes — nothing that would interest a kid over the age of 4.’”

Modernizing infrastructure requires money and permits. Congress needs to create a long-term funding plan and radically reduce the red tape that drives up costs and ensnarls projects in their infancy.

“It’s a multi-headed federal bureaucracy that we have,” Howard said. “The problem with their bill is the CPO doesn’t have any authority. He can’t lean on one unreasonable agency if it’s holding up a project. There needs to be a dialectic here. If any one of 19 different agencies involved (in the Bayonne Bridge project in New Jersey) decides it’s going to dig in its heels in, there is no alternative but to give in to what they want. That feeds the paralysis. There needs to be a presumptive authority somewhere. There needs to be someone who can cut through that. If that authority is too high-handed that won’t work, either. You want an incentive for everyone to be reasonable and agree to make decisions within a reasonable timeline.”

This would be a good argument to have in 2016. It is a fundamental challenge to what the Democrats have allowed themselves to become: the party of government workers rather than a defender of the working-, middle-class majority. Bush has already drawn fire for his record as an education reformer, with his support for charter schools and educational standards. But his argument goes beyond that to a more fundamental critique of government. He has praised the work of Philip K. Howard, whose book, The Rule of Nobody, is a road map for de-lawyering and rethinking the regulatory system.

[Mayor] Landrieu’s expressed goals match a growing national awareness, as explained by best-selling author and efficiency-reform advocate Philip K. Howard, that organizations operate more effectively when they combine flexibility with accountability rather than relying on strict, voluminous rules.

A very interesting and thought-provoking essay by Philip K. Howard over at the Cato Institute, on the need for a radically simplified legal system.  

The Veterans Affairs scandal of falsified waiting lists is the latest of a never-ending stream of government ineptitude. Every season brings a new headline of failures: the botched roll-out of Obamacare involved 55 uncoordinated IT vendors; a White House report in February found that barely 3 percent of the $800 billion stimulus plan went to rebuild transportation infrastructure; and a March Washington Post report describes how federal pensions are processed by hand in a deep cave in Pennsylvania.

Welcome to governing in 2014, when complex written rules are taking precedence over common sense in trying to solve complex health problems. In his new book, “The Rule of Nobody,” writer Philip K. Howard explains it this way: “Rules have replaced leadership in America. Bureaucracy, regulation and outmoded law tie our hands and confine policy choices. Nobody asks, ‘What’s the right thing to do here?’ Instead, they wonder ‘What does the rule book say?’ “

How far have we distorted the Constitution that the Founders gave us, and how much does it matter? A phalanx of recent books warns that we have undermined our fundamental law so recklessly that Americans should worry that government of the people, by the people, and for the people really could perish from the earth. The tomes—Adam Freedman’s engaging The Naked Constitution, Mark R. Levin’s impassioned The Liberty Amendments, Richard A. Epstein’s masterful The Classical Liberal Constitution, and Philip K. Howard’s eloquent and levelheaded The Rule of Nobody (in order of publication)—look at the question from different angles and offer different fixes to it, but all agree that Americans need to take action right now.

Law is supposed to be the foundation of freedom. In a crowded, anonymous world, I believe we need more government oversight to make people feel free and to enhance society.

Lenore Skenazy discusses the absurdly minute rules, described in The Rule of Nobody, that prevent Kansas  nursing home workers from doing their jobs effectively.

Mr Howard’s new book…is a plea for America to embrace the same sort of broad, principles-based regulation, allowing officials and judges more leeway to use their discretion, common sense and compassion when enforcing the law.

It’s time to stop taking Washington seriously. How likely is it that Congress will deal with unsustainable deficits, climate change, decrepit infrastructure, unaffordable health care, muddled immigration policy, obsolete laws, unmanageable civil service, rigged electoral districts . . . ? The list of failures of our democratic government is getting long. Responsible reform seems hopeless.

Among Philip K. Howard’s several books, a favorite title of mine is “Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America.” If only! On they go, writing numbingly complex codes of conduct and regulations that delight control freaks and frustrate just about everyone else.

A good resource for those who want the more accurate picture is Philip K. Howard’s The Rule of Nobody, which takes aim at the reasons government has, on important issues, ground to a halt. Howard opens with the story of the Bayonne Bridge, which spans the channel that connects New York Harbor to the port of Newark, the largest on the East Coast.

In February 2011, during a winter storm, a tree fell into a creek in Franklin Township, New Jersey, and caused flooding. The town was about to send a tractor in to pull the tree out when someone, probably the town lawyer, helpfully pointed out that it was a “class C-1 creek” and required formal approvals before any natural condition was altered. The flooding continued while town officials spent 12 days and $12,000 to get a permit to do what was obvious: pull the tree out of the creek.

Nick Gillespie of The Daily Beast says The Rule of Nobody "helps to explain why government at all levels not only is on autopilot but on a flight path that can only end in disaster."

No one would design the government we have now — a rusty pile of accumulated entitlements, endless forms and approvals, overlapping programs, and legal rights that allow any disgruntled person to throw a monkey wrench into almost any public decision.

Earlier this year, the Colorado Department of Human Services proposed new rules for day-care centers. Government oversight of day care seems like a good idea—you wouldn’t want children cooped up in an airless basement—but this proposal went far beyond basic health and safety. We need to replace today’s micromanagement with results-based regulation— simpler rules tied to the outcomes they produce. Harry Campbell The new rules would dictate exactly how to do just about everything: how many block sets (“at least two (2) … with a minimum of ten (10) blocks per set”), where the children can play with the blocks (on “a flat building surface” that is “not in the main traffic area”) and when caregivers must wash their hands (before “eating food,” “after wiping a child’s nose,” etc.)…..

How government became a deviant subculture is a story of good intentions gone awry. We tried to avoid government abuse by replacing individual responsibility with detailed rules and objective legal proceedings. Never again would officials play favorites or indulge personal prejudices. Government would be an efficient assembly line. What we achieved instead was what philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the rule of Nobody.” Instead of an automated assembly line, government became a bureaucratic jungle, with all the pathologies of a culture without responsibility or accountability: savage politics disconnected from actual accomplishment; hyper-inefficiency; and a universal sense of powerlessness, causing a downward spiral of selfishness and cynicism. “Nothing is impossible,” one public employee observed, “until it is sent to a committee.”….

A healthy democracy must make fresh choices. This requires not mindless deregulation but continual adjustment of laws. Congress could take on this responsibility if it followed a simple proposal: Every law should automatically expire after 10 or 15 years.

The rising cost of America’s health care system – already 18 percent of GDP – is driving the country toward the fiscal brink, and nowhere is the need for a new paradigm to control costs more evident than in the area of medical liability. Doctors’ justified distrust of medical justice (which has an error rate of 25 percent) leads them to prescribe and perform treatments for no other reason than to prevent lawsuits. This “defensive medicine” is estimated to cost anywhere from $45 billion to more than $200 billion a year. Fortunately, a growing bipartisan consensus is pointing the way to a solution. There is widespread public support for the creation of special health courts. Moreover, despite the highly polarized nature of American politics today, there is consistent support across political parties. A nationwide poll, conducted in April by the Clarus Research Group for Common Good, the nonpartisan organization I chair, revealed that 66 percent of voters support the idea of creating health courts to decide medical claims. Only 25 percent said that those claims should be decided as they are now, and there was virtually no difference between Democrats and Republicans on the issue: 68 percent of Republicans, 67 percent of Democrats, and 61 percent of independents support health courts.

A few weeks ago 13-year-old Matthew Migliaccio was sued for an errant throw that hit a spectator at a Little League game in Manchester Township, New Jersey. The incident occurred in May 2010, when as an 11-year-old catcher — warming up a pitcher in the designated bullpen area of the field — Migliaccio overthrew his target and opened the door to legal liability. In America, there’s no such thing as an accident without a lawsuit — even apparently if the victim chose freely to sit five feet from a child throwing projectiles. This incident is just the kind of example that fuels the public perception that the legal system in America is available for any ordinary life risk gone awry, even if it means forcing a 13-year-old to hire a lawyer….

It’s hard to find anyone who defends the structure of American health care. Every incentive is misaligned. Patients have little incentive to be prudent in their use of services, or to pay the costs of their own unhealthy lifestyle. Under the fee-for-service model, doctors and hospitals get paid more the more they do. Fear of random lawsuits causes them to practice “defensive medicine,” and chills open interaction with patients and other professionals. Insurance companies make more money by denying claims. These misaligned incentives, most experts believe, are largely responsible for the notorious inefficiency of American health care — costing more than $8,000 per person, or twice what most other countries spend. The total tab — $2.6 trillion in 2010, or 18 percent of GDP — is substantially responsible for America’s trillion-dollar deficits. The federal government pays roughly a third of the total national health care bill, mostly through Medicare (health care for the elderly) and Medicaid (health care for the poor). It also spends hundreds of billions — $177 billion in 2011 — in tax expenditures for employer-provided health insurance……

The regulatory state exists because of the practical necessity for a traffic cop to oversee common resources and enforce minimum norms of safety and fairness. This is a dynamic role, requiring government to be an active umpire in a crowded world, adapting to new challenges while keeping its own house in order. But America’s massive, convoluted, rigid legal structure makes it almost impossible for government to do this job sensibly and within budget. Laws are piled upon laws, making adaptation essentially illegal. Congress doesn’t clean out the stables in part because of a constitutional flaw — our founders didn’t anticipate that it would be much harder to repeal a law than passing it in the first place. Bureaucracies don’t clean out regulations for the additional reason that the agencies become inbred, and are run by people who do things this way because that’s how it’s always been done……

President Obama’s job speech last Thursday made a bold statement about getting rid of unnecessary regulation: “We should have no more regulation than the health, safety and security of the American people require.  Every rule should meet that common-sense test.” But what does that mean?  Just a couple of weeks ago the Administration announced federal agencies’ plans to prune unnecessary regulation—promising savings of about $2 billion per year, or about one-tenth of one percent of the nation’s annual regulatory cost.  Whatever one thinks about the particular proposals, it is unlikely to stimulate the economy.  In the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty trivial….