Selected Media Coverage

John Ketcham, Governing

In recent weeks, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has moved to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development, while President Trump prepared an executive order to wind down the U.S. Department of Education. It’s the latest attempt to make government more efficient by eliminating things that it does. Merely shuttering departments, however, won’t get to the heart of the problem DOGE seeks to correct: The American public sector, at any level of government, can’t get things done in a time-effective and efficient manner.

A new Manhattan Institute report provides an antidote to this public malaise in the context of infrastructure. Its author, Philip K. Howard, offers a new governing vision that authorizes officials to weigh tradeoffs and make decisions for the public’s benefit.

Francis Fukuyama, The Wall Street Journal

Federal agencies need more discretion, not less. Many of the rules they follow are not statutory, and one useful function that DOGE could perform is to identify and eliminate the most outdated and inefficient of them. As Philip Howard, the author of many books on simplifying government and founder of the nonpartisan group Common Good, has pointed out over the years, bureaucrats need more freedom to use their own good judgment regarding the implementation of policy, rather than being forced to follow rules.

Mitch Daniels, The Washington Post

Philip K. Howard has been teaching us this for years. His book “Everyday Freedom” is his latest plaintive appeal that we address our“crisis of human disempowerment.” He calls for “boundaries safeguarding against unreasonable acts”; “broad principles, not detailed rules”; and “clear lines of authority to interpret and enforce these legal principles.” If we want — and we should — more productive government in the genuine public interest, that’s the way to get it.

Quin Hillyer, Washington Examiner

They also should give a prominent spot on their team to the lawyer and longtime government-reform advocate Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and numerous other books outlining a new vision for how government agencies should operate. Nobody has thought longer and harder about how to instill a culture of responsiveness and responsibility to government and civil society.

Joe Klein, Sanity Clause

Everyone should read, or re-read, Michael Lewis’s splendid and infuriating book The Fifth Risk, which told the story of the violence done by the first Trump Administration to the government’s necessary experts in places you don’t think of, like the weather service. If there’s anything I’m really fearful about in Trump II—and there are a lot of things—it’s that the regulatory guardrails will be removed by Trump’s circle of oligarchs. But we should also recognize that the regulatory apparatus, and the civil service system, are badly in need of reform. Instead of Elon Musk, Trump’s Efficiency campaign should be led by Philip K. Howard, who has written a slew of books on the subject. You can start with The Death of Common Sense and move on from there.

Bret Stephens, The New York Times

A fourth thing: Establish an Office of Common Sense Reform, working directly from the White House, with a statutory limit of no more than 30 employees to prevent it from becoming yet another permanent and oversize bureaucracy. Appoint either Philip K. Howard, author of “The Death of Common Sense,” or Cass Sunstein, who worked on regulatory reform for Obama, as its first director. Give it the mandate to cut through all the permitting requirements, duplicative regulations and other bureaucratic haggles that keep even modest infrastructure projects from ever being completed on time or on budget.

David Patrick Columbia, New York Social Diary

Last Wednesday’s event was the annual fund-raising dinner where they present their annual Ambassador of the Upper East Side Award. This year’s awardee was Philip K. Howard, a best-selling author and lawyer acknowledged for his long-standing civic commitment which expanded beyond his early years as an officer and Chair of the Municipal Art Society to his role as one of America’s leading thinkers on governing frameworks.

Quin Hillyer, Washington Examiner

Much of the direction for the reorganization and streamlining of bureaucracy should spring from the insights of Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and subsequent books that argue for less rule-bound, more accountable systems for administrative agencies. And almost all public-sector unions should be phased out of existence.

Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze, The Atlantic

Compare those feats to more recent ones. In 2022, an op-ed in The Washington Post observed that it had taken Georgia almost $1 billion and 21 years—14 of which were spent overcoming “regulatory hurdles”—to deepen a channel in the Savannah River for container ships. No great engineering challenge was involved; the five-foot deepening project “essentially … required moving muck.” Raising the roadway on a New Jersey bridge took five years, 20,000 pages of paperwork, and 47 permits from 19 agencies—even though the project used existing foundations. The Post reported that in recent years, Congress has required more than 4,000 annual reports from 466 federal agencies and nonprofits. According to the lawyer and author Philip K. Howard, one report on the printing operations of the Social Security Administration took 95 employees more than four months to complete. Among other things, it dutifully informed Congress of the age and serial number of a forklift.

Francis Fukuyama, Frankly Fukuyama (YouTube Series)

Francis Fukuyama talks with Philip about Everyday Freedom, and how the law has weakened the authority of government in ways that make us less free.

John Ketcham, City Journal

Everyday Freedom calls on individuals, families, and communities to exercise newfound authority in the pursuit of flourishing lives. By the last page, the book acts as a mirror, staring back at readers with a challenging question: Are we ready to live up to the responsibilities of such freedom?

Frank Barry, Bloomberg

Much of the answer lies in Everyday Freedom, a powerful and succinct new book by Philip Howard. As liberals ushered in a wave of fundamental changes to individual freedom and equality beginning in the 1960s — one of the great achievements in human history — they rightly sought to constrain the power of government to impinge on individual rights.

Michael J. Mazarr, War on the Rocks

The results will surely generate howls of protest and embody some risk. But with the right people involved and enough analytical rigor, there is a good chance of getting at least most of the answers right. The goal should be the sort of liberation from bureaucratic rule and routine described in broader terms by Philip K. Howard — to free people to a much greater degree to apply their common sense, case-specific judgment, and creativity. The need for such an agenda to shock the U.S. defense establishment out of its bureaucratic coma is now so obvious that taking risks with bold change is not only acceptable — it is urgently necessary.

Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg

Philip Howard is a US lawyer who published a book on The Death of Common Sense in 1995 and has been writing about the subject ever since. His new book, Everyday Freedom, is due out next week. Howard thinks that the root of the problem is “trained helplessness.” People usually know how to fix things — teachers know how to keep order in the classroom, police chiefs know who the bad apples are, local officials know that they need to build new infrastructure. But they are all prevented from using their best judgments because they are trapped in systems that are more concerned with avoiding mistakes (and penalizing people who make mistakes) than on getting things done.

Will Marshall, The Hill

In his latest, “Everyday Freedom,” Howard cites the buildup since the 1960s of laws and rules that were intended to ensure procedural fairness, but in practice have chipped away at officials’ authority to do their jobs.

Modern law, he says, has created “an elaborate precautionary system aimed at precluding human error.” Public officials have learned it’s safer to hide behind highly prescriptive laws and regulations than to risk using their judgment, moral intuition and common sense to solve public problems.

Mary Williams Walsh, News Items

System failure is going on all around us—the 911 operator who puts you on hold; the outsourced federal “processing centers” that are months behind on essential tasks; the public-school officials who do nothing when told a six-year-old has a loaded handgun in his backpack; the mandatory D.E.I. training that says you can’t say “pregnant women” anymore—now you have to say “pregnant people.” We’ve all seen versions of it. We get steamed up about it. We go online and commiserate about it. But most of us don’t think about it in analytical terms. That’s what Howard does.

Editorial, Las Vegas Review-Journal

The path forward is not political brinkmanship, but to remove politics and punt the solution to a nonpartisan committee, subject only to an up-or-down vote by Congress,” Philip K. Howard, author of the “Death of Common Sense,” wrote last month for The Hill. “Just as independent ‘base-closing commissions’ decide the politically-difficult choices of which military bases to close, so too an external ‘Fiscal Commission’ could present broader proposals that will have benefits as well as costs for most stakeholders.

Kimberley A. Strassel, The Wall Street Journal

Expect to see far more and detailed proposals from the GOP field, given how much material there now is to draw from. As the administrative state has run amok, serious policy thinkers have drilled for solutions. Authors like Philip K. Howard (“Not Accountable”) and former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt (“You Report to Me”) offer books outlining strong reforms; conservative think tanks are sitting on reams of paper; red-state reforms highlight successes and pitfalls. Name a problem in the federal government, and there’s already an innovative plan for solving it.

Dominic Pino, National Review

Dominic Pino: Let’s start with a lay of the land on public-sector unions. Where are they allowed and what areas of government are they most prevalent in?

Philip Howard: Public-sector unions were only authorized in the late 1960s, generally, and they’re allowed, with variations on what they can do, in the federal government and in 38 states.

Dominic Pino, National Review

In the March 20 issue of National Review, Philip Howard wrote a piece adapted from his book, Not Accountable, about how public-sector unions cause basic governance problems. … “Accountability is basically nonexistent in American government today,” Howard began that piece. “Blatant misconduct rarely leads to speedy dismissal; instead it is just the starting point for negotiation,” he said.

Quin Hillyer, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Philip K. Howard, the famed, centrist public-reform advocate and author of "The Death of Common Sense," explains all this in his book published this year called "Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions." He explains that by their very nature, public employee unions enjoy “extortive power.” Unlike in free enterprise, where “factories can be moved elsewhere when labor demands are unreasonable,” public unions experience “little downside risk with excessive collective-bargaining demands” because “government can’t go out of business.” The unions do not face “any other organized opposing force” such as business executives worried about profits.

Donald Kettl, Government Executive

In the new book NOT Accountable released in January 2023—and NOT in the title is in fact capitalized—best-selling author Philip Howard makes a powerful case against the power of public employee unions. Through a large number of examples, mostly related to state and local public unions, he launches a robust assault on unions and the constitutional issues they pose. “Accountability is basically nonexistent in American government,” he writes. “Performance doesn’t matter.” The reason, he says, is simple. “Police unions, teachers unions and other public sector unions have built a fortress against supervisory decisions.”

David Lewis Schaefer, The Washington Free Beacon

In his newest tome, Not Accountable, Howard traces the lack of government accountability to what he concludes to be its underlying source: the rise of public employee unions. Whereas his earlier studies described "a flawed governing philosophy" that overemphasized procedural rights at the expense of the public good, "applied by people acting in good faith," this one "is a story of raw power and democratic disloyalty."

John Ketcham, The Wall Street Journal

In “Not Accountable,” Philip Howard shows in vivid detail how such practices have made government at all levels unmanageable, inefficient and opposed to the common good. He argues that, in fact, public unions—that is, unions whose members work for the government—are forbidden by the Constitution. The argument, he notes, would have been familiar to President Franklin Roosevelt and George Meany, the longtime president of the AFL-CIO, both of whom championed private-sector labor but believed that public workers—teachers, fire fighters, policemen, civil-service employees—had no right to bargain collectively with the government.

Jonathan Alter, Old Goats

I asked Philip K. Howard — whom I first met in the 1980s — to ruminate about his provocative views on public policy. Phil is a New York lawyer, author and original thinker whose new book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, is making waves. We talk here about how to make government work better in the face of entrenched interest groups, especially teachers unions and other government employee unions.

Brendan Clarey, Chalkboard Review

“There is a kind of irony here which is that in the private sector, management is not allowed to unionize,” Howard said. “That’s a prohibition of the National Labor Relations Act because it’s thought to be a conflict of interest if you have unionized managers negotiating with unionized workers. They both have an interest in the power of the union, so the people who own the company would be harmed by that collusion.”

Kyle Peterson and Mene Ukueberuwa, The Wall Street Journal

Kyle Peterson: Mene, you mentioned the number of public employees, and I also wanted to ask you about your recent interview in the newspaper with Philip Howard. He's the author of a new book called Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. He was also recently on a Potomac Watch podcast episode. If listeners want to find your print interview, the headline on it is Public Unions Versus the People. But I bring this up because recently we've gotten a news story, a great example of I think Howard's thesis that union paralysis is part of what is making America's cities ungovernable. I would point to this dispute about schedules with the New York City Transit Union, and I wonder if you could spin that story out for listeners.

A.W. Maldonado, South Florida Sun Sentinel

In “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions,” Philip Howard writes, “No one elected unions to co-run American government. No democratic principle gave legislators and other officials the right to surrender government powers to unions. No ethical value allows public employees, having taken an oath to protect the public, to organize politically to harm the public. Democracy under union restraints can’t work as the framers intended.”

Mene Ukueberuwa, The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Howard, a lawyer and writer, first noticed how unions stymie governance during his public service in New York as a member of a neighborhood zoning board and chairman of the Municipal Art Society. “I kept wondering why my friends who had responsible jobs in government couldn’t do what they thought was right,” he recalls. That might be speeding up a land-use review for a construction project or approving repairs on a school building.

Caroline Banaszak, The Ripon Forum

Nearly 30 years later, with the GOP once again back in control of the House, Howard is out with another book that should not only once again be at the top of every Republican reading list, but should be on the reading list of any American who wants a more effective government and supports eliminating the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving that goal.