Stop telling constituents they're wrong

But start making sure your policies don't fall prey to the cascade of rigidity

There is a little dust-up about Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s claim that childcare workers in her state aren’t allowed to peel bananas or oranges to serve to the kids in their care. Do the regulations prohibit this? Don’t they? The whole spat is missing the point.

MGP made a little video for Democratic Wins Media, in which she says a constituent who worked at a daycare told her about the banana-peeling restriction, so she decided to look into it. “Licensing officials and regulators told me, No, no, she just doesn't understand the rules. She must have misinterpreted the law. Her manager is lying to her. But I kept pushing and eventually confirmed that, yeah, she was right. They would have needed to install like, six more sinks before they could legally serve fresh fruit.” First of all, huge kudos to MGP (and her staff, presumably) for actually looking into it, and not just giving up when officials told her she was wrong.

This has raised the ire of Nathan J Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs. He posted, “attacking” her as “a centrist Democrat who pushes conservative narratives on regulation” and claiming that her office could not provide evidence that such a regulation exists. Lower down in the thread, someone posts the actual reg, and of course it doesn’t say no banana peeling. It says that you have to have a particularly robust kitchen set up if you’re going to do food prep, a set up that presumably the daycare MGP’s constituent works at can’t afford (thus the “six sinks” comment, which might be a slight exaggeration, or might not.) Someone shoots back that those regs don’t apply to home care, and so her claim is still wrong (though she never says it was a home-based daycare) and the debate goes on forever.

I side with MGP. Read the regs and you can absolutely see how complying with them to allow for banana peeling could become prohibitively costly. But the debate of whether they are pro-fruit or anti-fruit misses the point. If daycares end up serving bags of chips instead of bananas, that’s the impact they’ve had. The fact that you could, in theory, blame all sorts of folks for misinterpreting the regs, or applying them too strictly, doesn’t matter. This happens all the time in government, where policy makers and policy enforcers insist that the negative effects of the words they write don’t matter because that’s not how they intended them.

I’m sorry, but they do matter. In fact, the impact – separate from the intent – is all that really matters. And when leaders of all stripes get this wrong, they are doing exactly what MGP accuses them of doing: 

As a small business owner, I've seen this disconnect before, a disconnect between what laws make for good reading on paper and what laws would make for good policy in the real world. And I think a key part of this disconnect, illustrated by the pushback I got when I started asking about the sinks, is this ingrained disregard for working people by policy makers in DC. They did not take input from someone working in a daycare seriously, and that's wrong.

I’m dismayed to see voices on the left continuing to be so defensive about this. Robinson wrote a whole article about it, further attacking MGP. It starts: “Democrats may be tempted to shore up working-class support by telling exaggerated stories about big bad bureaucrats. Instead, they should portray government as the vehicle for achieving our collective aspirations.” 

Look, I believe in my heart of hearts that government can be a vehicle for achieving our collective aspirations, and that it can be a powerful force for good. But what Robinson is telling Democrats to do is to tell their constituents that they’re wrong. They’re wrong when they complain about their experience with government regulation, they’re wrong when they say the economy isn’t working for them, they’re wrong when they say that promised benefits never materialized, or that the process of applying for them was so insulting and disrespectful that they just gave up. They are not wrong. Robinson is wrong. If more Dems listen to Robinson than to MGP, the Democratic party has no future. 

MGP’s solution is also right, mostly. “We can only make policy that really helps people when we listen to folks working here in our communities and ensure they have a seat at the table when we craft and implement legislation.” Yes, give them a seat at the table when bills are being crafted, but also, please, use user research and usability testing to get these bills right. Remember Henry Ford’s line “if you asked them what they wanted, they’d have said better horses.” Sometimes even constituents ask for things that sound good on paper but are more complicated in the real world. What they want is the ability to peel the banana. It’s the job of our government to give them that in practice, not just on paper. MGP’s solution is a bill that would “create a positive right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables and daycare.” What if the best way to do that isn’t adding a new right, but subtracting from or editing the regulation that caused the confusion in the first place? What if now the day care licensors and inspectors are more confused, because the new law and the old regs seem to conflict? 

It’s rare for bill drafters, even those who include the voices of users, to account for the “cascade of rigidity” that law will be subject to as it is operationalized. Every step that law takes down the enormous hierarchy of bureaucracy, the incentives for the public servants who operationalize it is to take a more literal, less flexible interpretation. By the time the daycare worker interacts with it, the effect of the law is often at odds with lawmakers’ intent. MGP and others have to care as much about the implementation of the bill as they do about writing it. Including the voices of daycare workers is a great start, but it’s only a start. 

Still, go MGP. May the rest of Congress follow.