The public wants I-95-ness

State capacity sounds like a nerdy concept, but people feel it, or the lack of it.

Yes, I’m starting a substack with no explanation or introduction. We’ll get to all that later. For now, a post.

Ezra Klein's recent provocation to Joe Biden to step out of the race if his numbers don't improve makes one think. Democrats haven't spent much time considering who would be best to replace him because there hasn't seemed to be any opportunity. But what if that were on the table? What characteristics should the public be looking for?

Electability, everyone will say. Yes, of course, but what makes someone competitive against presumed nominee Donald Trump? Pollsters will have their answers, but I will dare to propose one element I suspect they will not discuss. I don't have a good noun for it, but I do have the perfect example of it. So for lack of a better term I'll call it I-95-ness.

Yes, I'm referring to the incident last year when a section of I-95 collapsed in Pennsylvania. Expectations about a timeline to fix it were pretty low given our national track record at building just about anything. But Governor Josh Shapiro used emergency powers to suspend a whole host of rules and regulations and get the highway reopened in under two weeks. He could have celebrated the victory by saying "I alone have fixed it." It would have been dismissive of the thousands of public servants and contractors who scrambled like mad to make it happen, but it would have been a great dig at Trump. 

Lord knows there are many reasons people vote for Donald Trump, and I am not going to pretend I know all of them or even which ones are more important. But I know that the public is incredibly frustrated. They're frustrated when they get an IRS notice they don't understand but can't get through to the call center. They're frustrated that the unemployment check they were due during the pandemic never arrived. They're frustrated that their communities can't build new housing. In San Francisco, (an outlier, to be fair) it takes 523 days for a developer to get a housing project approved and another 603 days to issue a building permit¹. That kind of glacial speed pisses off upper and middle class families who can't remodel their homes without a full time project manager and a lot of patience, but it's also created one of the country's worst housing crises and contributed to skyrocketing homelessness. 

I'm frustrated too. But I see a bit more behind the scenes than most people, so I'm additionally frustrated with all the factors that make it so hard for government to deliver the outcomes and services people need. I’m frustrated that we bog dedicated mission-driven public servants down with fussy legal technicalities that force them to spend time on everything but the mission. I'm frustrated about our government's procedure fetish, our willingness to let policies accumulate over decades without ever cleaning them up, and a culture of better safe than sorry. I don’t know if those are the things Donald Trump means when he says “I alone can fix it,” but I do think it's what lots of people hear.

Though it hasn't exactly catapulted him in the polls, Joe Biden deserves enormous credit for the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Act. Democratic strategists have offered a half dozen partial explanations why these accomplishments haven’t upped his favorability, but what I don't hear them saying is what I said in my book: "Elites understand policy. The rest of us understand delivery." Those three amazing legislative achievements are policy. The American public is still waiting on the delivery. 

If there were a Domino's Pizza tracker for delivering on those promises, it wouldn't be entirely confidence building. The IRA, for example, is meant to reduce emissions by 40% by 2030. EV sales are going relatively according to plan, but generation of zero-carbon energy is not where we need it to be – we are well below the bottom of the projected range². Then there's transmission. We need a three- to four-fold increase of transmission capacity within the next thirty years, but the decade ending in 2020 saw an overall decrease in transmission investment, which hasn't sufficiently turned around yet. What's more, new energy generation projects are waiting longer and longer to connect to the grid: it took an average of two years in 2008, three years in 2015, and five years now. That number needs to be going in the opposite direction, and fast. Paging Governor Shapiro?

Of course, the general public is not tracking IRA implementation like policy nerds do. But they do know when roads, bridges, subways, schools, and hospitals get built (or don’t). They know when something takes longer than it should, even accounting for reasonable safeguards, whether it's fixing a pothole or getting a SNAP payment. They know I-95-ness when they see it. It’s an attribute both that voters will be looking for and one that prospective (theoretical) candidates should be striving to cultivate. If Biden were to step aside in April or May, as Ezra keeps saying may be necessary, contenders have a little more than a month to make their own I-95 moment. 

An I-95 moment shouldn’t have to invoke emergency powers, but I would love to see more politicians recognize and name the crisis we are in, and act accordingly. I would love, but don’t remotely expect, for someone to say out loud that we are in a crisis of state capacity, and that that crisis underpins all the others. Public servants know it. Here’s what one of them had to say in response to a grumpy op-ed I wrote last year: 

There are 23 million public servants, and a lot of them feel like Harry: we are murdering the mission. (They also vote, by the way.)

They don’t all feel like Harry, of course. After the fact, no one seems to debate much whether Shapiro was correct to invoke emergency powers to fix the freeway, but I would bet a whole lot of money that there were a lot of voices of grave concern from a lot of different stakeholders about that choice as it was being made. I can only begin to guess at the categories of rules that were swept away – funding, procurement and contracting, environmental review, workforce protections and diversity, oversight – and the number of processes and procedures that disappeared with those rules would have been staggering. The point is that each of these categories has its own fiercely protective constituency. The environmental ones, for example, seem obvious, but if you’ve ever worked in a bureaucracy you know the burning passion with which procurement officers will defend processes that seem like meaningless paperwork to the outsider.

I have come to respect that passion, because I see how deeply those who have it believe that they are serving the public. That’s the job they were hired to do, and they will do it better and more thoroughly and diligently than anyone else. It’s not their job to pull back and weigh the value of these processes against the costs of delays and inaction and to restructure the bureaucracy accordingly. That’s the job of leadership. And too few of our leaders are doing that job. 

Using Governor Shapiro as an example here is a bit arbitrary. I don’t know enough about him as a leader to put him forth as the guy who deserves support if, for instance, Joe Biden cleared the field for a new nominee. But it’s interesting to me that he’s one of only a handful of governors who’s also created a digital service team in his state, modeled after the USDS. So, by the way, have Phil Murphy in New Jersey, Jared Polis in Colorado, and Wes Moore in Maryland. New York has one, but arguably it predates the current governor. Each of these teams has as its mandate to operate very differently from the traditional departments of technology that exist in those states, and to “meet user needs, not government needs.” (Not a direct quote of course, but that’s the spirit.) In each case, these governors have recruited leaders with plenty of “I-95-ness.”

I wouldn’t back a leader just on the basis of their willingness to stand up or continue a digital service team in their state. There are other legitimate approaches to transformation, and digital service teams are only as good as the results they can show. (New Jersey’s chops are pretty apparent, if you ask me.) But that act shows a recognition that what we’re doing now isn’t working, and a willingness to try something new. It’s a good sign at least. 

The question I started with here is what characteristics will the public be looking for in a potential Democratic nominee, should that circumstance come to pass, and I think the ability to cut through red tape and get tangible, relevant things done quickly is far more important than the virtue signaling Democrats too often engage in. But if the question were what characteristic I wish the public would look for, I have a different answer. Doing things like invoking emergency powers is necessary but not sustainable. I wish the public were looking for soil-tenders.

What do I mean by this? We are used to thinking of democracy as a garden in which we plant seeds in the form of policies. When an advocate or a legislator gets a bill passed, they expect their seed will grow into a plant or tree that will provide fruit or flowers or shade for the public. But our seeds are not growing. Congress says to give more money to workers affected by the pandemic, but then agencies can’t get the money to the people who need it. California passes seven laws to encourage in-law units, but it’s still nearly impossible to build them. This is a gap in state capacity. 

If we think of our leaders as seed planters, that’s the problem. Any gardener knows that planting seeds is a small fraction of the work. Most of gardening is about tending the soil, ensuring the plants have water, sun, nutrients, the right pH – and, critically, about weeding. A functional garden is as much about taking out the plants that no longer serve us as it is about putting new ones in, just as functional government requires removing the laws and regulations that no longer serve us. And about knowing what your garden can support – you can’t grow everything every year. But leaders run on the basis of the bills they got passed — the seeds they were able to plant — and never on weeding out the old policies, mandates, and constraints they or their predecessors have been piling on the administrative state for decades. No one runs on the weeds they pulled, in part because they haven’t pulled any, leaving our gardens so choked that the new seeds can’t grow. Leaders don’t think it’s their job to manage the health and well-being of the workforce — to tend the soil that enables the plants to even sprout. Instead, they expect to keep extracting more and more growth from a garden that’s gotten little of the care it needs. We should not be surprised that our seeds aren't growing. 

I-95-ness is what a lot of Americans think we need, and Democrats are going to need to demonstrate more of it. I think it’s a critical attribute against Trump in particular. But invoking emergency powers is like candy, not vegetables. It tastes great, but it’s a recipe for disaster as a daily diet. Let’s call the state of our bureaucracy what it is: it is in a crisis. Things have to change. But after the freeway is open again, the rules that made the emergency powers necessary are still there. Each of them has a reason for existence, each of them provides some value or safeguard, but in total they are strangling our country. Taming the kludgeocracy thoughtfully is the critical companion to I-95-ness. It may not help much against “I alone can fix it” Trump, but it’s the real work of our next President, whoever that person may be.

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1. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/state-report-slams-san-francisco-glacial-expensive-housing-permitting-process/

2. https://www.cleaninvestmentmonitor.org/reports/clean-electricity-and-transport-2023