Democrats should be the party of go
But actually, not just slogan-y
LFG. If you’ve ever given to a Democratic candidate, the moment Joe Biden stepped out of the race, your inbox was full of LFG. The Obama Alumni Association didn’t even acronym it. They went for the full monty.
This is great. The Harris-Walz campaign should effing go. The convention had amazing go energy.
But remember 2009? While everyone’s talking about Okalama, it might be a good time to remember the massive record scratch that first term Obama team felt when they moved from the campaign, where they could move fast and build things, to the White House, where they couldn’t. Hamilton hadn’t been written yet, but Lin-Manuel Miranda would later write: “Winning was easy, young man. Governing’s harder.” And Ezra Klein would later write a story about healthcare.gov called “How the iPod President Crashed: Obama’s Broken Technology Promise.” That failure was not fundamentally about the adoption of technology in government; it was the result of many decades of mandates and constraints that have been imposed on agencies without addressing the kludgeocracy those ever-growing mountains of mandates and constraints create. What looked like Luddism was really atherosclerosis, and government is still dangerously sclerotic. Yeah, governing’s harder. Obama's go energy hit a whole swampful of stop energy.
A Harris administration would not have the same rude awakening, since much of the team would be returning to the White House, and presumably has plenty of experience with the stop energy of federal government. One narrative about Harris is that she has been the victim of a lot of risk aversion in her role as VP, and Biden stepping down has released an enormous amount of pent up LFG energy not just out in the electorate, but also in her inner circles. But if she wins, that go energy will have trouble making it to the Oval Office. To keep it, they’ll need to rein in countervailing forces of status quoism not just in the bureaucracy, but also in the Democratic party. They’re going to have to claim and reframe Dem values broadly to be truly consistent with LFG.
A case in point, which I’ve touched on here before, is the Dems’ track record getting things built in this country. The Biden administration is understandably proud of its role in getting the Inflation Reduction Act passed. This is a law written to hit the gas (forgive the inapt metaphor) on building green infrastructure. But there are some big problems for the Dems in implementing the IRA. It takes five years to connect new clean energy projects to the grid, and that time isn’t declining. Projects of all sorts need review under NEPA, and that takes about three years, and is also not necessarily declining. Politico reported that less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion provided by IRA, CHIPS, and IIJA for direct investments on climate, energy and infrastructure had been spent nearly two years after Biden signed the last of the statutes.
The public servants responsible for awarding that money would like more of it to be out the door already. But as one staffer told me, “Congress tells us to do something by a deadline. The compliance offices stop us from doing it.” They start to hire a team, but the Office of Personnel Management tells them they’ve used the wrong authorities, or used them incorrectly, and they need to start over. They need to collect information from grant applicants, but the Paperwork Reduction Act review process takes an average of nine months. They need to hire a firm to build an online application, but it will take far longer to get to a contract than it will for the firm to build the form.
All of this has the effect of pressing the brake pedal at the same time we’re hitting the gas. Not the judicious, regulating effect of a seasoned driver slowing down to avoid a crash and then continuing on its way, but the painful wrenching of a car being driven with the emergency brake pulled all the way up, and grinding its gears to boot. It destroys the engine, and the car’s not really getting anywhere. The stop function is necessary, of course – cars need brakes and governments need safeguards – but over time those safeguards have grown way out of proportion to the task at hand, and it’s often Dems who’ve championed them. That’s part of why what money is being spent from those big bills is going mostly to red states. Red states just don’t have as many processes and procedures that must take place before something can be built.
Dems are starting to name the problem. At the convention, Barack Obama touted Harris’s plan to build something else we’re in dire need of: housing. “She knows, for example, that if we want to make it easier for more young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country." Yes, this is excellent. Subsidies don’t work when there’s no supply. This regulatory and process cleanup has a chance to materially change outcomes — if we actually do it. This is going to be hard, especially for a progressive mindset that tends to imagine and describe all the ways that a project might violate one of many progressive values and then commits to zero transgressions of those values. A kind of trade-off denial creates vetocracies in communities that look a lot like the ones you see inside bureaucracies. Thus we spend our collective resources on paperwork and process, not construction.
Process is valued in progressivism because it is deeply tied to equity. I noticed this tendency in the civic tech community when a few progressive tech folks who’d come into government started defending civil service hiring rules. If you came in as a political appointee, you skipped your chance to experience the civil service system from the candidate perspective, but then when you had to hire for career civil servants jobs through regular channels, you learned how effectively the process screens out every qualified candidate, leaving you with “certs” full of people whose only evident skills were copying and pasting the job description directly into their resumes. It was maddening. But the boogeyman of time was the tech industry and its lack of diversity. Startups hiring on the basis of “culture fit” spelled opportunity for a) people who looked and talked like the founders and b) who didn’t have to go home at 5:30 to a child, a parent, or any other obligation. Most of us reasonably felt that there could be some middle ground between a process so rigid it left no room for judgment and no process or guardrails at all. But I was surprised at how ideologically a few of my colleagues responded. Since the tech industry was bad, this highly rigid system must be good. I don’t want to exaggerate their stances; no one actually thought the system worked well. But there was a fetishization of process as a sort of talisman against bias that doesn’t hold up very well empirically, and, again, seems to indulge in significant trade-off denial. I hold many progressive values dear, but I don’t buy that tradeoff denial and process fetishization serve to uphold those values. The way to house people is to build housing, and the way to have an effective government is to hire qualified people. The outcome has to matter more than the process.
I watched bits and pieces of the convention last week. The joy was palpable, even from a thousand miles away, and there was even joy in the acknowledgement of the incredibly hard work ahead for the campaign. My goal in saying these things is not to bring anyone down from that high. Quite the opposite —- I want Democrats to stay focused on positive visions of the country that we need to build, literally, and, should Harris win the White House, let those visions propel her administration through the unsexy work of cleaning up all that clutter that slows us down and keeps us stuck.
I want us to worry less about perfect consensus or the perception of perfect safety and more about getting the job done. I want Democrats to embrace the lessons that Jerusalem Demsas and Misha Chellam and Ezra Klein and others have been teaching us about a liberalism that builds. I want Harris and her team to assume office with a little less respect for the status quo and a lot more openness to new ideas. If they can LFG their way to an electoral victory, I want them to LFG our country to a very different government than the one we have today. By all means, let joy power that change.
As a scientist in the federal government, I felt this deeply. There is so much cognitive dissonance in mission-driven government work. To meet the go energy of Congress and political appointees, you have to get good at identifying loopholes, alternatives, and workarounds, which defeats the purpose of having policies at all. There is also a tendency to decide by consensus, so any objection will stop progress. This is increasingly coming in the form of violating values, i.e. program set up to address value issue X may have a negative impact on value Y. I want those concerns to be voiced. We need to consider whether they can be mitigated and the scale of risk. But we must have leaders willing to make the call of whether a tradeoff is worth it. In my experience, those leaders are few and far between.
I actually think if you compare to somewhere like Google or Facebook they have even *more* hiring process than government groups. The process is just all aimed at hiring skilled people and firing underperformers.
Every software engineer will get interviewed by phone once or twice, probably five or so in person interviews. The interviewers go through interview training and must pass practice interviews. Your interview feedback is reviewed by director level folks for quality. The feedback from interviewers is tracked and if any interviewer is too easy or too hard they get reviewed. The whole process is calibrated to go for something like a 5% accept rate. Acceptable and unacceptable interview questions are tracked.
And then firing people has its own huge process. Managers who fire at a suspiciously low rate are reviewed by directors, directors whose organizations fire at a suspiciously low rate are reviewed by vps. As a manager you get reviewed a couple times a year to defend why you haven’t fired your lowest performers.
So there really is tons of process. Then you look at the government process, and there is also an enormous amount of process, but how much of it is designed to hire people who are good at the job?