The Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), and Partnership for Public Service collaborated on a full day of presentations and small group discussions around improving federal government performance in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.
Description of the video:
The clue, it seems to me, ofhow government should be organized is seeing whenever in every example where government does something really good. Operation warp speed—one year. You know, billions allocated risks taken, money invested in production facilities even before there were vaccines. People making these choices—just like the people in charge of armament during World War II— made these choices all day long, allocatinghuge amounts of public money to get it done now. Governor Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, rebuilding the fall of I-95 in 12 days instead of 12 months. He and the transportation commissioner, they just sat there and waived rules and made choices; sole source contracts, bets on what would work, how do you fill up it, they thought well, we'll do it with glass it's less heavy, make a contract with the recycled glass people, get it done in 12. Then it rains and they can't open in 12 days, and somebody has the idea of, well, the Pocono Speedway has these really high, you know, high-volume dryers, call them up,and so sure you can use it for free.So they get the Pocono Speedway thing, and they open up in 12 days. 1956, the Interstate Highway Act, 29 pages long, 10 years later 21,000 miles [have] been built. Today it takes almost that long to get a permit from one stretch of road. The Civil Works Administration 1933 created by Executive Order in November. In four months Harry Hopkins had distributed enough money to hire 4 million unemployed Americans around the country, and when auditors went out—he was sitting there, Harry Hopkins [was] sitting there in the White House, he called people to his office, the next week in November he said "give me your proposals." They submitted proposals for their sewage lines, fixing roads, fixing bridges, all that sort of stuff. One day he approved 156 projects, the next day he approved 109 projects, that'show he did the business. So my proposal, which I'm going to try to summarize for you now, is to move from an operating system based on legal compliance to a human responsibility model where there's probably room for rules depending on the area, like speed limits and such, but basically this is a far simpler framework of goals, guiding principles, and lines of authority. Officials have the job of achieving results within the constraints of those of those rules; how much environmental review is needed in this case, do we have enough now, are the benefits of the transmission line worth the harm of building it through a pristine forest? These are judgments. They can't be proved by law— having a lot of process doesn't do— we, having some process is important, I like NEPA, it's great, but NEPA was supposed to be a few dozen pages finished within months not years, that's what the RAL committee said, now it's, of course, endless. Our protection in a world of human responsibility is not lots of laws and procedures, which result in, I argue in my books, bad government not good government, it's not all those ex-ante controls of the lawyer we call them. Protection is giving other officials the authority to not just to hold people accountable, but if they're important, to approve it. Have a contract, let's create the procurement version of a base closing commission where big contracts have to be approved. Every public dollar involves a more moral choice, every single one. You can't spend money without taking it from somewhere else, and out of someone else, some other public good that might be done. Those judgments have to be made by real people. Today's compliance model makes officials behave like badly programmed robots. James Madison, when talking about constitutional structure, said that its essential characteristic was to put the highest level of responsibility possible on governing officials. Highest level possible is what he said, and my message is simpler, which is we've got to give people the authority to do their jobs, officials. And that requires a new vision and people coming together behind the new vision.— from the paper Evidence-Based Solutions for Improving Federal Government Performance: Perspectives, Solutions and Evidence, by James L. Perry, Distinguished Professor Emeritus; Leslie Lenkowsky, Professor Emeritus; and James-Christian Blockwood, President and CEO, National Academy of Public Administration, Washington, D.C.
Every public dollar involves a more moral choice, every single one.
—Philip K. Howard, chair, Common Good, and a leader of government and legal reform in America
