It turns out progressives aren’t actually to blame for a decline in government capacity. It’s actually downstream from budget cuts and hemorrhaging staffing levels under neoliberal presidents.
Hey Matt!
We have to admit, your recent Substack column, “Shackling the state,” piqued our interest. And you made a few good points; it is certainly true that there are needless restrictions placed on public sector programs that make them unduly difficult to undertake. For instance, when Republicans required the Postal Service to preemptively create a fund for the next 75 years of post-retirement healthcare expenses for employees. That said, there are a couple of really big issues we just wanted to point out.
To start, the generalization that having a wide array of objectives is de facto harmful is simply wrong. You say that “that people — especially progressives — need to acknowledge that a capable, powerful public sector also means a public sector that sometimes does projects that might be bad.” But that doesn’t mean that we should try to impose some limits on how much harm can be done. You go on to say that “The only way to guarantee that the Cross Bronx Expressway never recurs is to never build anything,” which may be true in a philosophical sense, but it is deeply noncomparative. We should have rules that maybe federal money shouldn’t be used to shell sacred Hawaiian lands, even if it increases the marginal cost of military drills.
Additionally, you claim “many on the left talk as if the country has been in a generation-long era of fiscal austerity, which is just not true.” On that front, you are flatly wrong. Since 1980, many government agencies have lost capacity. Smaller budgets and declining staff sizes have left these agencies struggling to do more with less. These often unionized workers have been targeted by not only Republicans but Ur-New Dems like Al “Reinventing Government” Gore, while the loudest opponents of such austerity and privatization were (unsurprisingly) progressives.
To be more specific, here’s some of RDP’s work on the agencies with pressing capacity concerns:
- Staffing needs at the FDA are significantly behind 2018 levels in key areas. This delays drug approvals and hinders the agency’s enforcement.
- It’s currently hurricane season, yet FEMA is several thousand employees short of its targets.
- Want to undo the damage of the Trump administration? That requires rebuilding the EPA after his devastating cuts.
- The DOJ Antitrust Division and FTC have been crucial to Biden’s economic agenda, including helping expose a massive oil price fixing scandal. But they’re facing budget cuts.
- Part of the reason for Boeing’s poor quality is the understaffed FAA’s overreliance on the FAA designee program in recent years.
- For all the talk about housing, it seems strange Matt never seems to discuss the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has been decimated since the early 90’s.
- Remember during the covid when there were massive supply chain issues? We were writing about the need for increased staffing at the obscure agency that helps handle that.
- OSHA has seen massive declines in staffing levels relative to the workers they protect since the 1990’s.
- Want to help rebuild government capacity and increase government efficiency? It all comes down to improving the government’s HR department. We’ve written about that as well.
So, Matt, despite your assertions to the contrary, government dysfunction is, in fact, largely about the money–pennywise cuts to civil servants, pound foolish results. (Indeed, as we’ve written, many new hires across the government—not just at the IRS—are likely to bring in more revenue than they cost.)
Despite their ambits and responsibilities increasing massively, many federal agencies are operating with staff and budgets that were allowed to shrink in real terms for many years. If you want to fix the government, you have to start by hiring enough people to do the work.