Why Nothing Works

Even amongst the chaos of the moment, the left must grapple with the challenge Marc Dunkelman describes in his important new book. In fact, because of it.

As a friend of mine said recently, “it’s a tough time to have conversations like this in public.” He was referring to my recent opinion piece in the New York Times, which exhorted Democrats to go on the offense on government reform, yes, even as DOGE is radically redefining government efficiency with largely indiscriminate layoffs. I thought about his rebuke, which was said with kindness, and how to respond. I return, ultimately, to what I said just after the election. “Our country is in peril, and we bear some of the responsibility. We [Democrats] need to be curious about why we failed. That will bring conflict. Bring it.”

The bring it part now has an off tone. So many people are reeling. But there has to be a way to maintain the curiosity and healthy conflict we need to develop a positive, alternative vision for the country. I won’t do it perfectly, and possibly not even well, but I’m going to try my best, because I think it’s the right thing to do.

Into this heightened emotional environment comes Marc Dunkelman’s important new book Why Nothing Works. It’s a lecture at the left, from the left, at a time when much of the left isn’t in the mood to be lectured. Dunkelman doesn’t mean (nor do I) that all the problems of our country have come from the left, by any means, but understanding how we’ve shot ourselves in the foot is critical to building that new positive vision we need. And building is the key word here. We must be able to build, not just visions, but actual things we need.

The first part of the book chronicles the history of Progressives’ swings between two instincts: Hamiltonianism, which favors centralized authority and expert-led bureaucracy, and Jeffersonianism, which champions individual freedom and decentralization. The second half covers more recent decades, and creates a compelling case that extreme Jeffersonianism — too much surface area for objection and not enough ability to make decisions and move forward — is no longer working for us and it’s high time we swing back to the center.

The stories in the book are maddening. Want more clean energy? Massachusetts did, which is why it proposed a $950 million project to import clean power from Canada to Massachusetts. The New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) Transmission Line was supposed to cut 3.5 million metric tons of greenhouse emissions, create 1,700 jobs, lower energy rates not just for Massachusetts but also Maine, through which the transmission line would run, and so much more. Sounds like a winner, but grab your popcorn and watch the parade of interest groups do their thing. You get mashups like traditional environmentalists wanting to keep the Maine woods pristine allied with the fossil fuel industry wanting to preserve their ability to sell power from older, dirtier, less efficient power plants at higher rates. It’s a ten year roller coaster ride of back and forth, happening and then blocked, endless agency reviews — at least 38 at one point — and a trial in April 2023 that generated two million documents. The full story of this one — though there are others in the book — is here in Politico as an excerpt.

Dunkelman is clearly in favor of reforms that would reduce the vetocracy we’ve created, but his point in writing the book is less about advocacy for any given bill or proposal and more about challenging progressives to shed ingrained ways of thinking. I’ve seen these ways of thinking in action over the past four years, and I’ve struggled to shift them myself. I’ve heard over and over again a belief in the power of giving everyone a voice — if we are just careful enough about talking to all the right groups and hearing their concerns, we will resolve conflicts more fairly and equitably and build better projects. When I’ve asked about speed — since climate change doesn’t care about our permitting processes and continues at its own pace — I’ve been told, Yes, we want faster, but we also want better. Better, they tell me, comes from a lot of upfront work to include all stakeholders – and that takes time. But, I’m told, it pays off in the end.

Does it, though? In Why Nothing Works, I learned about NegReg, a regulatory tool created to streamline the traditional notice-and-rulemaking process. Dunkelman explains:

Neg Reg created a formal structure where regulators and those they regulated sat down together and collaborated in crafting mutually agreeable regulations. Then, once the two sides agreed, their negotiated rule could be put through the ordinary pace of notice and comment, but with the presumption that everyone would wave through what was a consensus-driven bargain.

Used only sporadically during the 1980s, NegReg was authorized for more general use in the early 1990s and, with very little public notice, woven into the jurisprudence created by the Administrative Procedure Act in 1996. Many insiders were thrilled, believing that the new process was well suited to reduce the adversarial tenor of environmental regulation in particular. If EPA bureaucrats were brought to appreciate an industry's concerns earlier in the process, and if factory executives could be made aware of how their facilities spoiled nature before being subject to onerous demands, perhaps the two would be able to come to some mutual accommodation.

In one instance, NegReg was deployed to rework the regulatory regime applied to the thousands of iron and steel facilities scattered throughout the nation's rust belt. Federal regulators and industry executives, among others, were asked to hammer out some mutually agreeable framework. But despite meeting more than a hundred times over four years, the negotiators were able to consummate only a handful of marginal improvements: a proposal to create a website listing best practices; a promise to organize a workshop on the disposal of the "pickle liquor" produced when cleaning steel; and a small tweak to furnace pressure standards. And that was typical of NegReg more generally: in case after case, venue after venue, the process left negotiators at loggerheads on major topics of disagreement.

NegReg didn’t work but you wouldn’t have known that listening to the left in recent years. When House Dems introduced a permitting reform bill last year, they included $3B to go to nonprofits for “increasing their capacity” to participate in the environmental-review process, and it required the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to pay the expenses of parties that want to intervene in regulatory proceedings but cannot afford to. As Chris Ehlmendorf wrote,” In effect, the bill would subsidize objections to the projects that it means to accelerate.” I honor the intention here, but it is deeply misguided. At least in our current system, this is just trying to drive with the brake on the whole time. You don’t get anywhere.

I am exactly the kind of person who would have said something like NegReg would work. I would have believed it because I wanted to believe it. We just need to understand each other better! But if parties have truly conflicting interests, greater understanding can just mean more weapons to use against each other. We have a system of government in part to decide at the end of the day which interests are going to prevail and under what circumstances. When it comes to something like clean energy, there’s an obvious public interest, but since transmission lines have to go through somewhere, someone is going to lose out in service of the public good. We’re so afraid that the powerless will lose out — because they usually do — that we decide to believe that no one has to.

This is going to open up a whole can of worms that I can’t adequately address in this post, but we also decide that we can’t just decide. Robert Moses moved his freeways to accommodate robber barons and hopelessly screwed poor farmers and immigrant communities. That is how power tends to work. So if people with power can’t be trusted, we will put our trust in process – the more the better. But then you hit the point where “you could have Robert Moses come back from the dead and he wouldn’t be able to do shit," as clean energy executive Michael Skelly is quoted as saying. Maybe it’s the “more the better” part and the natural growth of process over time that are the problem, and if it were possible to swing the pendulum back to the middle without the cycle of overcorrection, that should be our answer. But the current moment isn’t inspiring confidence. There still seems to be reasonable support for sledgehammering the administrative state, even with all that’s happened over the last five weeks. If a correction to the middle is coming, it’s a little hard to see it right now, though it would certainly be welcome, and I hope states run hard and fast at this. Maybe trying to stop the pendulum at its midpoint is a pipe dream. Maybe what we need is to break out of the two-dimensional space that the swing itself occupies, and imagine decision-making frameworks that don’t rest on the assumption that the way to equitable outcomes in the public interest is the right process, but don’t revert to the graft and self-dealing of the 19th century. Ideas like outcomes-oriented legislation get precious little attention at a time when they should be far more developed. And we need to reinvent public input. But, again, this is a topic for another post.

Yes, we’ll need profound changes in things like the structures that allow for public participation. But I think Dunkelman is right that it has to start with the left challenging its own conventional wisdom. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write in their upcoming book, “What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation.” I’d add a change in bureaucratic culture, even knowing how hard that can be. And it’s particularly hard right now. But Dunkelman makes the stakes clear. The most concerning story in the book isn’t about building clean energy, housing, or transportation. It’s about New York City’s long struggle to fix Wollman Rink, the beloved ice skating venue in Central Park. After years of bureaucratic delays, expensive failures, and a lot of finger pointing, a developer came along who promised he could fix it — and did. That developer was Donald Trump.