As you know, Donald Trump won remarkably few policy victories in the first six months of his presidency. The courts have blocked his Muslim ban. Obamacare repeal and replace is on life support in the Senate. Tax reform seems a distant prospect. Funding for a border wall remains hypothetical.

One item on his agenda, however, is moving right along: cutting the size of the federal workforce. You don’t hear as much about this one, in part because Trump himself doesn’t talk much about it. But it’s clearly a priority—one the administration has billed as a way for Trump to make good on his promise to “drain the swamp.” His “Contract with the American Voter,” released a couple of weeks before last November’s election, began with “Six measures to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC.” Item number two was a hiring freeze “to reduce the federal workforce through attrition.”

Trump instituted the hiring freeze in one of his first acts as president. In March, his administration put out a budget outline that called for a $54 billion increase in defense-related spending offset by major reductions at other agencies—a budget that, if enacted, could result in a net cut of as much as 9 percent of the federal workforce, according to estimates by the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, Mark Zandi. In April, Trump lifted the hiring freeze, but his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, circulated a memo—titled “Comprehensive Plan for Reforming the Federal Government and Reducing the Federal Civilian Workforce”—asking every government agency to develop a plan by September to cut staff in line with Trump’s budget objectives.

Of course, Congress, not the White House, decides the budget, and some leading Republicans have signaled their discomfort with how far Trump’s proposed cuts would go. Still, GOP lawmakers are likely to sign on to cuts that are plenty deep. Indeed, decimating the civil service is one of the rare policy areas where Steve Bannon and Paul Ryan see pretty much eye to eye. Last year, Republican majorities in the House and Senate agreed on a nonbinding budget blueprint that would cut the nondefense workforce by 10 percent and direct agencies to hire just one employee for every three vacancies. (Barack Obama promised to veto any such spending bills.) The Senate can mandate workforce cuts through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.

Even without Congress, Trump has a lot of power to force administrative agencies, which are under his control, to shed staff. Congress decides how much money agencies can spend on personnel, but the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) generally gets to tell them how to spend it. In response to the April memo, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin announced that his agency would leave more than 4,000 vacant jobs unfilled, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is reportedly planning to cut 2,300 jobs, or 9 percent of his whole staff, through attrition and buyouts.

The Trump/GOP effort to shrink the civil service plays on a narrative the American people have been hearing for decades: the federal workforce is bloated. As Mulvaney’s guidance put it, there are “too many Federal employees stuck in a system that is not working for the American people.” Press secretary Sean Spicer, announcing Trump’s executive order in January, explained that the hiring freeze “counters the dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.”

The only problem with this narrative is that it is the exact opposite of the truth. As a share of the U.S. workforce, the federal civil service is actually smaller than at any time since before World War II. In absolute terms, it has been about the same size for half a century. In 1966, there were about 2.1 million executive branch civil servants (not including Postal Service employees). Since then, the country’s population has increased from 196 million to 323 million. The annual gross domestic product, along with annual government spending, more than quadrupled. And the workforce? In 2016, there were still only 2.1 million federal employees.

There’s no rule that says the number of civil servants has to rise in lockstep with the population or the economy. Many federal jobs in the 1960s were clerical positions that computers have made obsolete. But still. In 1966, there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Department of Homeland Security, no Federal Emergency Management Agency. Medicare and Medicaid had been signed into law just a year earlier. It’s hard to believe that the same number of people we had in 1966 can run such a radically larger government enterprise.

And, in fact, they don’t.

While the number of federal employees has basically flatlined for a half century, the government has ballooned if you include another group in your tally: private contractors. As the size and scope of federal programs grew, but the number of civil servants stayed fixed, that labor had to get done by someone. Congress’s answer has increasingly been to contract with the private sector. So when Trump and the Republicans say they’re going to shrink government by cutting federal workers, do a mental autocorrect. What they’re really saying is, we’re going to be shoveling a lot more money out the door to federal contractors.

This means that the federal government is about to get considerably costlier and more dysfunctional. Despite the claims made about the efficiency of the private sector, hiring for-profit contractors costs taxpayers a lot more money than paying civil servants does—to the tune of hundreds of billions per year. Meanwhile, an understaffed government is one that screws up more often as shorthanded agencies struggle to manage programs, monitor all the contractors, and prevent Hurricane Katrina–type disasters. And the addiction to contractors at the expense of adding federal employees means that these agencies are staffed overwhelmingly by people at or nearing retirement age, with no young talent coming up through the ranks behind them.

Ever since Ronald Reagan said “government is the problem,” Republicans have been happy to outsource—even though it wastes money—because it lets them look tough on “big government” without actually cutting the programs their constituents like. Democrats, meanwhile, have gone along with growing this shadow government as a way to make sure federal programs are administered without opening themselves up to attacks that they are growing the bureaucracy.

In other words, Trump didn’t create this problem. But if he follows through on his threats, he may push it to a breaking point.

No one knows exactly how many contractors the federal government uses at any one time—more on that later—but Paul Light, a public service professor at New York University and the leading expert on what he calls “the true size of government,” puts the number at around 3.7 million as of 2015, down from a much larger total at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. (That’s in addition to 1.6 million grant-funded nonprofit employees.)

This phenomenon has received some attention in the context of the wars. George W. Bush—followed by Barack Obama—needed more bodies to serve overseas than the military could provide. Rather than reinstate the draft (politically impossible) or entice more volunteers with higher pay (politically risky), the government turned to private contractors. That helped hide the true size of the war effort. News reports on the number of troops left in those countries don’t include the enormous contractor force. As of 2016, per Foreign Policy, there were about three contractors (28,626) for every uniformed soldier (9,800) in Afghanistan. When contractors are killed—and they are, more often than U.S. troops—they aren’t included in the official casualty numbers.

Very few Americans realize that this exact trend—using contractors to hide the true size and cost of a government mission—is not even close to being limited to the military. It’s ubiquitous. There has been a de facto political cap on federal workers since the 1970s, and every administration since at least Jimmy Carter’s has used contractors to get around it. Bill Clinton, who announced that “the era of big government is over,” harvested the end of the Cold War to cut 400,000 federal jobs, mostly in defense. But big government was only over if you ignored the contracting workforce, which kept rising by the hundreds of thousands. The Bush administration took things to another level, as contracting morphed from a way to sneakily expand government to an ideological goal in itself.

The Department of Defense (DOD) employs around 740,000 full-time civilians—and an estimated 700,000 contractors. In 2010, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials told Congress they had more contractors (about 200,000) than direct employees (188,000). At the United States Agency for International Development, the ratio of contractors to employees is nine to one.

Government contracts broadly fit into two categories: goods—like fighter jets and office furniture and copy machines—and services. A service contractor is, in essence, someone brought in to do the kind of work that could be done by a federal employee, from cybersecurity to mopping the floors at a VA hospital. Walk into any federal agency office, and you’ll see service contractors and civil servants sitting side by side, doing the same work, indistinguishable other than the employer listed on their badges.

NYU’s Paul Light estimates that there are between 600,000 and 800,000 service contractors; the government spends more on them than it does on the salaries of the entire civil service, which has three times the number of people. Contracting accounted for 40 percent of all discretionary spending in 2015, and service contracts accounted for 60 percent of that (even more at nondefense agencies). And it’s rising. Even the Defense Department spends twice as much on contracts for services as it spends on aircraft, ships, and land vehicles. According to a 2015 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, spending on contractors nearly doubled from 2000 to 2012, and the subset “that grew the most in dollar terms was contracts for professional, administrative, and management services”—that is, service contracts.

“If you really want to cut government, you’ve got to cut government programs,” said Don Kettl, a political scientist at the University of Maryland and a prominent expert on government. “If you focus on cutting government bureaucrats, you can weaken the programs, but you’ll increase your reliance on contractors and worsen the ongoing cycle that we’re trying to escape from.”

The equation is simple: if feds go down, contractors go up. Trump has actually proposed spending more money—but not necessarily hiring more employees, other than a small number of immigration enforcement officials—at the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, two of the biggest, most outsourced government agencies. Contractors are licking their chops.

So what? Are contractors really so terrible?

No. Other than the occasional Erik Prince, the notorious founder of Blackwater, contractors are just people. Many do essential tasks that the government is ill-suited for—like cutting-edge research or product design—or blue-collar work that doesn’t need to be done by a full-time federal employee. The problem isn’t that contractors are bad. One glass of wine is good for you. But if contractors were wine, we’d be at two bottles a day.

One consequence of this binge is cost. One of the most stubborn fantasies about contracting out government work is that it will somehow save money. In fact, it generally costs the government more to hire a service contractor than to hire a federal employee to do the same work. So when politicians promise to cut costs by getting rid of civil servants, they’re only telling half the story. Most likely, those civil servants will be replaced by more expensive contractors.

When the government pays contractors, it’s not just paying their salaries; it’s paying their employers’ overhead and profit margins. A contractor who works for the financial services and consulting company Deloitte, say, and makes $50 an hour, might bill the government at $350 an hour, with Deloitte pocketing that $300 difference. So why do some people, particularly conservatives, argue that hiring contractors instead of employees saves money?

One reason is the belief that competition will force the private sector to cut costs. But contracting isn’t nearly as competitive as advertised. Last year, the DOD spent nearly half its $296 billion contracting budget on projects that had only one bidder. Another belief is that contracts are only temporary: Hire civil servants, and you may be stuck paying them for thirty years. Hire contractors, on the other hand, and you can get rid of them once the project is complete. The trouble is that this doesn’t happen much in practice either. How could it? Contractors are responsible for the ongoing, day-to-day functions of government agencies. As one high-ranking official in the Department of Energy—one of the most contractor-dependent agencies in government—said, “If we execute the program we’re on, it’s going to be as busy or busier than it is now for about ten or fifteen years. So the idea that we’re hiring support-service contractors for six months and then the work is going to subside—it’s not going to subside.”

A younger contractor who recently finished a stint in cybersecurity at an agency within the DHS put it more colorfully. “It’s like watching a drug addict, man,” he said of the feds whose work he supported. “They’re so dependent on other services that, left to their own devices, they would just crumble to the ground.” He offered another analogy: “You get a liver transplant, the liver’s from somebody else. For the rest of your life, you have to take drugs that prevent an adverse reaction from taking place. Contractors are those drugs.”

Okay, so contractors aren’t really so competitive or temporary. But doesn’t the government save money by not paying the excessive salaries and benefits of federal employees? A 2010 Heritage Foundation report with the subtitle “How Americans Are Overtaxed to Overpay the Civil Service” concluded that feds earned 30 percent to 40 percent more in total compensation (wages plus benefits) than people doing the exact same job in the private sector. On that basis, the report recommended increasing the government’s use of contractors.

But the Heritage report had a crucial flaw: it didn’t compare what civil servants make with what the government actually pays private contractors. A restaurant pays less for ingredients than a home cook, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheaper to dine out. Even if a federal bureaucrat makes more money than a private-sector counterpart, that says next to nothing about what it would cost the government to pay a private firm to supply that contract employee.

A 2011 study by the Project on Government Oversight tackled this question. The researchers looked at thirty-five categories of workers where it was possible to compare the average cost of a fed—salary plus benefits—with the cost of a similarly qualified contractor. Using data from the Department of Labor, they found that, benefits included, the average federal employee makes about 20 percent more than a comparable worker—not a contractor, just any old person—in the private sector. But here’s the crucial part: in thirty-three of the thirty-five categories, according to the report, hiring a contractor costs the government nearly twice as much as an employee. (One category was tied, and one was cheaper to contract out: groundskeepers.) In some cases, it’s much more: hiring a contractor to do “claims assistance and examining” costs nearly five times as much as hiring a federal employee. My personal favorite: it costs 2.29 times as much to hire a contractor to do the work of a . . . “contract specialist.” That’s right: the federal government hires private contractors to help hire private contractors, and according to the best available analysis, it pays them more than double what it pays its own employees to do it. (A surreal Government Accountability Office report on the Army’s Contracting Center of Excellence—let the name sink in—found that in 2007, “contractors—who work side by side and perform the same functions as their government counterparts—comprised 42 percent of CCE’s contract specialists,” cost the Army 27 percent more per person, and were inappropriately blurring the lines between civil servant and private-sector employee.)

Do you remember Snackwell cookies? Snackwell was a line of low-fat junk food marketed by Nabisco as a healthier option, back when we still thought the key to losing weight was to eat less fat. Of course, the cookies had even more sugar to compensate. Eating them only made people fatter, since, as we now know, replacing calories from fat with calories from carbohydrates will make you gain weight, not lose it.

Replacing civil servants with contractors to save money is like replacing fat with sugar to lose weight. Outsourcing is the Snackwell cookie of federal government.

Capping the federal workforce wastes money in other ways. Back in 1982, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that hiring freezes didn’t succeed in substantially reducing the head count, but they did end up costing the government more money. Freezes and furloughs sound like sensible belt-tightening tactics, but the business of government has to keep going. So a freeze creates backlogs of work that then end up costing more to try to catch up on.

A big part of the government’s job is keeping track of its money, and it needs staff to do that. The Internal Revenue Service is the most egregious example. Since 2010 its funding has been cut by more than 17 percent, and staff by 13,000, including nearly a quarter of enforcement staff. Meanwhile, according to the most recent data, the United States has a $450 billion annual tax gap. The Treasury Department has estimated that every $1 invested in more staff to go after those unpaid taxes would yield $6 in revenue.

So will members of Congress, constantly railing about the need to rein in the deficit, take advantage of this almost magical way to bring in more money without raising taxes? Of course not. Instead, pursuant to legislation passed in 2015, the IRS is about to hire private debt collectors to go after delinquent taxpayers. This has been tried twice before, in 1996 and 2006, and it was a disaster both times. Private debt collectors, it turns out, are a lot less efficient at recovering unpaid taxes than IRS agents. The 2006 experiment ended up costing millions more than the contractors managed to collect—and after the contract ended, IRS agents brought in 62 percent more from the same pool of outstanding payments than the private collectors had.

It’s really hard to overstate how stupid this is. More IRS employees would save the government money, but Congress refuses to hire them, supposedly because it’s worried about money. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who has been repeatedly attacked by conservative members of Congress, said this at a congressional hearing in April: “We will do everything we can to make sure this program is effective. Because if it works, that would be fine. If it doesn’t work, I don’t want anyone saying, well, we actually sandbagged it some way or the other.”

Translation: This will be a fiasco, but don’t blame me.

Donald Trump claimed a victory when, after he complained about the price of the F-35 fighter jet, the Defense Department announced that it had agreed on a lower price with the manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, saving the government $728 million. In fact, the price drop had been in the works for years. Meanwhile, the F-35 is a $400 billion boondoggle. When there aren’t enough experienced civil servants supervising contracts, the predictable results are cost overruns, missed deadlines, and even fraud. The acquisition workforce, which is essential for managing these contracts, was cut nearly in half from 1989 to 1999. If Trump really cared about defense contractor costs, he would ask Congress to create more of those jobs. In his book Bring Back the Bureaucrats, the political scientist John DiIulio points out that “between 2010 and 2013, when the DOD not only added about 3,500 personnel to its acquisition workforce but also trained them better than usual for the job, the agency’s on-time contract compliance assessments increased by nearly a third.”

The GAO regularly puts out a list of “high risk” agencies. The GAO’s comptroller general, Gene Dodaro, told the National Academy of Public Administration last year that the office has never removed an agency with more contractors than employees from the list. In a new book, Valuing Bureaucracy, Paul Verkuil writes that Dodaro told him “that the reason these agencies have never left the list is largely due to inadequate contractor management.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services employs around 6,000 employees and at least 14,000 contractors. That in-house staff grew by more than a thousand during the Obama administration, but is still laughably tiny compared to its docket. The employees are ultimately responsible for overseeing around $1.1 trillion in federal spending annually—a quarter of the federal budget and about $183 million per employee. The CMS is a perennial inclusion on the GAO’s annual list of “high risk” agencies; with such low staffing, it’s hard to watch out for fraudulent or erroneous Medicare and Medicaid payments.

It isn’t just about money; understaffing and outsourcing lead predictably to government screw-ups. The HealthCare.gov fiasco, for example, occurred on the CMS’s watch. According to NYU’s Paul Light, it “was highly dependent on a poorly coordinated collection of 55 outside vendors [and] delegated to an understaffed, underfunded agency.” A report by the Health and Human Services inspector general attributed the botched website rollout to several factors, including “failing to properly manage its key website development contract.”

In 1996, the Office of Personnel Management turned its background-checking arm, U.S. Information Services, into a private contractor. When hackers stole personal information about millions of people from the OPM in 2014, they did it by hacking the USIS network. The company later paid the Justice Department $30 million to settle an unrelated lawsuit for collecting payment on thousands of background investigations it never performed. The contractor hired to replace USIS, KeyPoint, was promptly hacked as well.

It’s contractors all the way down. USIS, a contractor, handled the security clearance for Edward Snowden, a subcontractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor, working at the National Security Agency. Earlier this year, another Booz intelligence analyst was indicted for stealing classified material. In a March Washington Post op-ed, author Tim Shorrock wrote that “contractors have been responsible for at least five major security lapses in four years.” But nothing happens to the companies, in part because the cybersecurity industry is dominated by just five corporations.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the contractor workforce is that no one knows exactly how big it is. A 2015 Congressional Budget Office report on the contractor workforce lamented, “Regrettably, CBO is unaware of any comprehensive information about the size of the federal government’s contracted workforce.” Agencies simply don’t have to keep track of the number of contractors they employ. People who try to figure it out, like Paul Light, have to extrapolate from the amount of money agencies spend on contracts and the average salaries of the people who do the jobs being contracted for. As Light put it, “It’s not great data. It’s not even good data. It’s okay data.”

Talk about a swamp. Contracting is a huge, politically powerful industry. Federal law prohibits firms that contract with the government from making campaign contributions—but that law doesn’t apply to corporate political action committees or to corporate officers or shareholders. As a result, it only really affects individual contractors or sole proprietors, who make up an infinitesimal slice of the pie. A 2011 study found that, on average, companies that gave more in campaign contributions subsequently received more contracts. Meanwhile, most regulations on contracting come from the OMB, which doesn’t draw much media attention; many OMB officials leave government to work for contractors.

All this shadiness benefits players on both sides. It’s good for the contractors, because as long as they are a way for Congress to spend money with less accountability, the contracts will keep coming in. Some government officials, meanwhile, like it this way because service contracts are a handy slush fund. Since annual budget allocations are based on what an agency spent in the previous year, everyone in government has a perverse incentive to spend as much as possible. Heading into Q4 and still have a lot of unspent cash? You can’t go above your official personnel allotment, but you can spend some of those leftovers on contractors.

DOD regulations, for instance, specifically exempt service contracts from the reporting requirements in its annual five-year spending projections. And while Congress has required the DOD to report on contracts from the previous year, a 2016 GAO report noted that in its 2014 statement the department simply flouted the law, excluding “up to $100 billion—almost two-thirds—of its estimated spending on contracted services . . . on which it was statutorily required to report.”

You may be wondering where the boundaries are drawn around the work that contractors are allowed to do. The good news is that the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) places two restrictions on swapping in contractors for government employees. The first is the ban on so-called “personal service contracts,” which are defined as contracts that make someone from the private sector a de facto government employee. The second is the prohibition on contractors doing any work that qualifies as “inherently governmental.”

The bad news is that these regulations are a joke. Though technically legally binding, they essentially rely on self-
enforcement. They’re like the “Alarm Will Sound” signs on the emergency doors in the New York City subway. Push the bar—it doesn’t go off.

According to a 2011 GAO report, an internal Army review of commands and headquarters organizations “identified approximately 2,357 contractor FTEs performing inherently governmental functions . . . and 1,877 contractor FTEs providing unauthorized personal services.” (FTE stands for “full-time equivalent,” essentially government jargon for employee.)

No one seems to know exactly what “inherently governmental” means, but contractors clearly do many things that look like exercises of state power. In Iraq and Afghanistan—and other, unofficial war zones all over the world—contractors carry guns, shoot to kill, and interrogate detainees. Domestically, private prison guards exert coercive force over federal prisoners. When the inherently governmental distinction is observed, it’s often in a formalistic way that leads to absurdities and inefficiencies. CIA contractors can pilot drones over Pakistan, but a government employee has to pull the trigger. One civil servant who works in cybersecurity at Homeland Security told me about a contractor who is paid handsomely to work the weekend shift at a 24/7 operations center. Usually nothing happens on weekends. But even if something did, the contractor wouldn’t be able to do anything without going to a federal employee for permission—making his position effectively useless. “He’s getting paid $120,000 literally to just sit there and do nothing,” the civil servant said.

This isn’t new; it’s just likely to get worse if Trump gets the cuts he’s asking for. A 1991 GAO report found that “agency officials stated that the major reasons they use contractors to administer some functions that may be governmental in nature are the lack of authorized federal positions or employees and the lack of experienced federal employees to do the work.” That was before the Clinton administration and Congress cut around 400,000 federal jobs over the next decade.

This mingling of civil servants and the private sector has long prompted hand-wringing about the conceptual implications of outsourcing sovereign powers to for-profit enterprises. But there are also more practical concerns. Jon Michaels, a law professor at UCLA, argues that the contractor workforce gives the executive branch opportunities for “workarounds.” For instance, federal laws inhibit the DHS’s ability to mine Americans’ personal data. But those laws generally don’t cover contractors. So the DHS can hire private data brokers, who can then sell the information back to the government. “DHS thus gets the benefit of more sweeping, intrusive searches than would otherwise be permitted of government officials,” Michaels writes.

Another troubling possibility is using contractors to bypass the career civil servants who might balk at carrying out an administration’s policies. In April, Politico reported that associates of Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and a staunch climate change denier, were urging him to hire private lawyers to draft regulations rolling back Obama-era climate protections. The plan would be a blatant and unprecedented end run around career civil servants. One example of inherently governmental functions under the FAR, by the way, is “determination of agency policy, such as determining the content and application of regulations.”

Here’s another problem that Trump’s plan to cut government jobs will make even worse: the federal workforce is too old.

According to a 2016 GAO report, “In 2014, people 39 years old and younger represented 44.8 percent of the U.S. employed civilian labor force and [only] 29.6 percent of the total civilian federal government workforce.” The problem, the report found, has worsened recently, and caps on federal hiring are a direct cause. “From fiscal years 2008 to 2014, the total number of new federal employees hired decreased by 33 percent, from approximately 164,000 to 110,000 employees per fiscal year. Employees 25 years old and younger have experienced the largest decrease with 58 percent fewer hired in 2014 than in 2008.”

The GAO estimates that 600,000 civil servants—nearly one in three—will be eligible to retire by 2019. Of the IRS’s roughly 80,000 employees, more than half are over fifty, and only about 2,400 are under thirty. According to the Partnership for Public Service, there are nearly five times as many IT professionals over the age of sixty as under the age of thirty across the whole government.

If those 600,000 people all retired in two years, the government would instantly cease to be able to function. Observers have worried for years about this sort of mass exodus of older employees. So far, it hasn’t materialized. What has happened instead is that each attempt to shrink the workforce has just made it older.

There are a few tools available to politicians who want to shrink government. One is attrition: stop hiring, and let the workforce decline naturally as people leave and aren’t replaced. This is very likely the approach the current Congress will take. But trying to shrink government through attrition depends on people leaving in droves, and for the most part, older federal employees haven’t been. Instead, the government ages. It’s simple: if new positions aren’t added, the existing workforce gets older year after year.

Layoffs may be even worse. When an agency wants to lay off employees, it has to take into account length of service before performance rating. This means that younger employees are more likely to get targeted. Even when a certain job held by an older employee is eliminated, that employee gets to “bump” someone lower in the hierarchy and switch into that position. The upshot is that the standard methods for cutting government almost inevitably increase the age problem. In many cases, these older employees are the most experienced and knowledgeable people in government. That’s why the possibility that they will begin retiring en masse is terrifying. By refusing to let the size of the workforce keep pace with the growth of the country, Congress has choked off the flow of younger generations who should be coming through the pipeline.

When these older employees do retire, they too often take their knowledge with them. The lack of middle-tier employees creates holes in expertise. One executive at a major defense contractor told me he notices this all the time when dealing with Defense Department procurement officers. Certain age cohorts just seem to be missing—the casualties of various hiring freezes over the years. Either the officers are old and highly experienced or they’re brand new and clueless. The result—and this is from a contractor’s perspective—is that the government too often writes contracts that are wasteful or doomed or both.

If you’re still not concerned, consider the Social Security Administration. The backlog for appeals over disability benefits is already 1.1 million cases deep (not a typo), thanks largely to understaffing. The typical wait is nearly a year and a half. According to a GAO report, the SSA “could lose nearly 22,500 employees, or nearly one-third of its workforce,” by 2020. Due to recent hiring freezes, the agency hasn’t been able to fill in positions left vacant by retirees. Other agencies, including the VA, face similar appeals backlogs. The GAO report warns that “without a sufficient number of skilled employees, backlogs and wait times could significantly increase and improper payments could grow.”

The idea of getting rid of employees to fix government fits into the time-honored Republican strategy of identifying a real problem, then proposing the exact opposite of the proper solution.

Any serious effort to make the federal government work better needs to start by putting to rest the myth that the bureaucracy is too big. There may well be jobs or departments that don’t need to be there. But if the government itself were too big, it wouldn’t hire legions of contractors to do work that could be done by federal employees. John DiIulio, the author of Bring Back the Bureaucrats, argues for hiring a million more civil servants by 2035.

But repopulating the federal workforce and kicking the contractor habit will require confronting the forces that make hiring contractors instead of feds so attractive in the first place. The most powerful is the politics of small government. But there are also structural incentives to outsourcing that must be wrangled with. We’ve already seen one: secrecy. A baby step toward weaning government off outsourcing would be bringing the data on the contracting workforce to light. DiIulio suggests requiring a “separate act of Congress for each and every sole source deal above a certain dollar value (try $25 million, for starters), and let the public see what ‘the contracting process’ hides.”

The other incentives to contract out come from the shortcomings of federal personnel management. The first is one you’ve probably heard: it’s too hard to fire federal employees. According to a 2013 report by the Partnership for Public Service (PPS), the crux of the problem is the overlapping avenues available for employees to contest firing decisions. Between arbitration, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and more, appeals can take more than a year. The result is that firings are rare, and federal jobs are too often de facto lifetime employment. Managers wary of hiring someone they then can’t get rid of are drawn to contractors instead.

The answer isn’t to scrap the civil service protections, as many Republicans have long dreamed of doing and federal employees’ unions dread. Due process protections are crucial to protect career civil servants from partisan purges and whistleblower retaliation. And in any case, the problem is not that federal employees have too many rights; it’s that exercising those rights takes too long. The PPS report recommends a simple solution: combining the various review processes into a one-stop shop where all grievances can be considered at once. That would speed up the process and ensure that agencies that staff up can do so without being effectively stuck with everyone they bring in. Another fix that could play well politically is to hire all new federal employees to renewable fixed terms of, say, five or seven years. Most young people today don’t want or expect to work at one place for life anyway.

Surprisingly, in interviews with dozens of people in government, academia, and the contracting workforce, what came up even more than the difficulty of firing federal employees was how hard it is to hire them. That was far and away the most common reason people gave for why an agency would choose to bring in a contractor instead of an employee.

The standard federal hiring process is a nightmare, in part because it is a relic of the pre-internet age. When a department wants to hire someone, it has to post the opening publicly. Today that means posting to USAJobs.com, the portal for nearly every civil service job in every agency across the country. By law, anyone is allowed to apply. It’s very common to receive hundreds of applications for a single entry-level position. Then the human resources department—which is itself usually under-resourced—is required to review every application and sort the applicants into groups based on their qualifications. That takes time. Despite some Obama administration efforts at streamlining, it routinely takes six months or more to hire a new employee.

Then comes the really sticky situation. By law, the federal government must give preference to veterans, especially disabled veterans. It’s a well-intentioned way to reward the people who served in the military, but managers at federal agencies, some of whom are themselves disabled veterans, told me it has drawbacks. When combined with the USAJobs.com system, there is very often a large pool of people tied for “best qualified” applicants based on their basic information. Suppose a department needs to hire three IT specialists. It gets 100 applications, of which twenty fit into “best qualified.” Of those, the three clearly best candidates aren’t veterans, but there are five vets in the pool of twenty. The hiring officer is legally required to choose from the veterans. That means the preference often prevents agencies from hiring the best talent.

But there’s a workaround to all this stuff: hire a service contractor. That appeals not just to managers who need to get their tasks done, but also to political leaders at agencies. After all, if you know you may only have four years to leave your mark, can you really afford to wait a year to hire staff? And if you want the best person for the job, would you really want to risk not hiring the ideal candidate?

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the real pain in the ass: security clearances. Even once an applicant receives a job offer, who knows how long it will take to get the necessary clearance; it could be another year. One reason is that—surprise!—there aren’t enough federal employees overseeing the process. So private contractors hire people who already have clearances, then hire them back out at exorbitant rates to agencies that are desperate for manpower and don’t want to wait more than a year to get it.

Fixing the hiring process is a necessary step toward weaning the government off its addiction to contractors. Proof that it’s possible lies in the fact that certain agencies and job categories are exempt from many hiring rules. The Securities Exchange Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, are exempted from the standard hiring process and authorized to pay higher salaries in order to compete with the private sector for top legal talent. There is no magic bullet to fix everything about the application process, but the problem is not insurmountable.

The key is finding the political will. As a measure of the power of the political aversion to fixing the federal workforce, consider the 2010 Federal Hiring Improvement Act, which among other reforms would have required agencies to limit hiring times to eighty days. “The bill failed to pass the House,” as the Washington Post editorial page put it, “thanks to lawmakers leery of affiliating themselves with ‘federal hiring’ legislation at a time when government spending is unpopular.”

Given that, it may seem quixotic to argue for an expansion of the federal workforce. After all, presidents and Congresses from both parties have embraced, or at least tolerated, the “government is too big” narrative for half a century. President Obama made some progress on dialing back the pro-contracting drift of the Bush years, but overall didn’t make much of a dent—and he certainly never came out in favor of expanding the civil service. We got to our current position because the GOP is committed to trying to cut the (nondefense) civil service and the Democrats don’t feel any pressure to resist.

Meanwhile, despite the straightforward conservative appeal of saving money by insourcing more government work, Republicans know that bashing civil servants can be very effective politics. Katherine Cramer, in her study of rural Wisconsin voters, The Politics of Resentment, documents an antipathy toward public employees that is hard for someone from D.C. or Los Angeles to fathom. To these voters, public employees are the enemy. They don’t work as hard as rural people, yet they make more money and have better benefits—paid for by taxes. It isn’t that these people believe in small government in some abstract way; they do want government to help them. They just don’t trust it to deliver, so they’d rather at least stick it to the employees who, in their view, are getting rich undeservedly. That’s why Trump’s insistence that he can drain the swamp by firing federal employees has a strange genius to it. To liberals and traditional conservatives, the idea is self-evidently absurd: the president is staffing his government with Wall Street bankers, giving plum jobs to his family members, and spending public money at his own resort properties. But broad segments of the country see lazy, overpaid public employees as the epitome of government corruption.

Even if it’s naive to expect any members of the modern Republican Party to rally behind anything besides more and more cuts, progressives will be making a huge mistake if they continue to go along with the status quo. There is a real and deep sense that government isn’t working. But the right has taken control of the narrative around why it isn’t working. The left needs to take it back.

SIDEBAR: Contractor CEOs Shouldn’t Make Ten Times More Than the POTUS

The problem of a government that is both under-resourced and overly expensive should be obviously bipartisan—and, in saner times, perhaps it would be. But it’s especially acute for Democrats, who today are, strangely, the only party that thinks government is a good thing. If they ever manage to regain power, they will be taking over a government that, after decades of starvation, is teetering on the verge of a catastrophic breakdown: overstretched, too dependent on contractors, lacking young talent, and facing a potential crisis of mass retirement. The more the beast starves, the louder the cries to starve it some more. To make good on any of their policies that rely on government intervention and administration—that is, most of them—future liberal leaders will need to find a way to replenish the federal ranks. In an era in which voter behavior is characterized by deep mistrust of government, it’s malpractice to not have a robust platform of government reform.

The key is to transcend the false choice of big government versus small government. The real choice is between a transparent and relatively competent big government of civil servants and a dysfunctional shadow big government of private contractors. Don’t defend bureaucrats—that’s a snoozer. Attack the contractors. It’s a powerful industry that will put up a fight against anything that threatens its bottom line. But at some point it has to be confronted.

Hell, who knows; maybe Trump will help us snap out of it. Perhaps draconian cuts—and the breakdowns and scandals that will almost inevitably result at hollowed-out agencies—will be just the thing to trigger a moment of reckoning. An enterprising populist candidate could do worse than to point out to the American people who really wins and loses when the functions of government are sold to the lowest bidder.

The post Trump’s Plan to Make Government Slower, Costlier, and More Dysfunctional appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt was a bitter opponent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which he sued repeatedly while in office. Now, as President Donald Trump’s pick to run this very agency, Pruitt has leaped at his chance to sabotage it from within.

Days after his confirmation as EPA administrator, Pruitt told the Wall Street Journal that the agency might lack authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions—something the EPA has been doing for most of the last decade. Soon thereafter, he halted pending rules requiring oil and gas producers to disclose their methane emissions, ordered a “review” of the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan, and declared an end to the “regulatory assault” on industry.

Pruitt’s efforts to hobble the EPA are in line with Trump’s broader vendetta against “job-killing regulation,” a signature initiative of both Trump’s campaign and presidency. “Excessive regulation is killing jobs, driving companies out of our country like never before,” said Trump in February.

But that’s not how the entrepreneurs at NBD Nano-technologies see it.

The Boston-area start-up (“NBD Nano,” as it calls itself) arguably got its first big break as a result of exactly the rules Pruitt is working so hard to undo. After the EPA announced, in 2009, its intention to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, including the emissions of coal-fired power plants, power companies started scrambling for ways to burn less coal.

One strategy companies began exploring is how to make the steam turbines that generate electricity more efficient. Much of what a power plant does is heat water into steam, and a major source of inefficiency is the time it takes to condense steam back into water before it’s reheated.

Enter NBD Nano.

In 2013, the company won a small grant from the National Science Foundation to see if its products—oil- and waterproof industrial coatings—could help power plants convert steam into water more quickly. The company found that using its materials to coat the thousands of copper tubes that line a power plant’s “condenser box,” where steam is captured and cooled, dramatically speeds up condensation by encouraging water droplets to form more quickly and at higher temperatures. That means power plants can use less fuel to reheat the water into steam.

After the company won a second grant in 2015 to help commercialize its technology, it began piloting its coatings at a power plant run by the Tennessee Valley Authority. So far, results have been good. “We’re now in the process of rolling it out globally to power plants around the world,” said Timothy Evans, NBD Nano’s vice president of sales.

Regulation, says company cofounder and president Deckard Sorensen, is the catalyst that prompted bigger companies to seek him out. “Large companies don’t necessarily have the capability to develop innovations in-house,” said Sorensen, who launched NBD Nano while still an undergraduate at Boston College. “So they look for entrepreneurs [to help them] align with regulations. It facilitates these larger companies being willing to work with small companies at an earlier stage.”

Now with twelve employees, NBD Nano’s early win has allowed it to set its sights on broader horizons. One of its products, a glass coating called RepelShell, could soon be standard on your car’s windshield and windows. Sorensen says the company is also working to produce smudge-proof touchscreens for smartphones and tablets (this writer will be first in line), and mud-proof soccer shoes are already in the works.

NBD Nano’s story is not a fluke. Federal regulation—especially when crafted with sensitivity to market needs—is the visible hand behind many new products, technologies, and industries benefiting both consumers and the U.S. economy.

Thinking about swapping your clunker for a Tesla? Electric cars would not be as readily available as they are today without the tougher federal fuel economy standards that helped spur their development. Tesla is now America’s second most valuable car company, after GM, with a market value of $48 billion—testament to the potential investors see in this sector.

The same goes for the solar panels you might be contemplating for your roof. In 2007, as part of broader energy legislation, Congress passed a federal “renewable fuels standard” requiring renewables to replace a certain amount of traditional fossil fuel. The regulation has been a boon for solar and wind, as well as for nascent technologies such as bio-fuels, which could someday supplant coal, gas, and oil with fuels made from algae and garbage. In the solar energy sector, for example, the Solar Foundation estimates that 260,000 Americans held solar-related jobs in 2016, an increase of 25 percent over 2015.

Even the pieces of legislation most despised by the current GOP-controlled Congress—such as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—have sparked a wave of innovation and entrepreneurship. For example, you may have noticed a surge of new offerings in your smartphone’s app store for money management tools, like Betterment, an automated investment app that charges lower fees than traditional mutual funds, or Digit, a savings app that automatically transfers small amounts of money into your savings account, depending on your spending patterns. One reason apps like these are increasingly available is because the big banks no longer have a monopoly on your bank account information—a provision in Dodd-Frank gives you the right to control that data, including the right to grant third-party companies like Betterment and Digit permission to access it. It’s the reason why the fast-growing financial technology (“fin-tech”) sector is now fighting to save Dodd-Frank. 

The ACA, meanwhile, has helped launched such new firms as Zenefits, a San Francisco–based health insurance broker for small employers that grew to 900 employees in the two years following the passage of the law. The surge of new consumers created by the ACA, along with the law’s new mandates, helped create at least ninety new health-related companies, according to a 2015 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), including firms that deliver telehealth services to patients and help doctors provide better care to people with chronic diseases, in addition to companies like Zenefits. According to the PwC report, venture funding for digital health start-ups also hit an all-time high in 2014, north of $4 billion.

All of these stories run counter to the dominant political narrative of regulation as a deadweight on the economy. This belief is gospel on the corporate-controlled free market right, and even liberals defending regulation seldom do so in terms of its broader positive economic impacts. With the sole exception of clean energy, where liberals have readily touted the link between regulation and jobs, you will look in vain for a progressive politician who more generally defends regulation as an instrument of innovation and economic growth. Rather, the prevailing frame is that of regulators as guardians of public safety and health. The same is true of the liberal advocacy community. “Public health, safety, pocketbook and environmental protections are being wiped out as payback to the GOP’s corporate donors,” warns the website of Rules at Risk, an umbrella campaign by progressive groups. This is true enough. But nowhere on the website does the group make a full-throated argument for how regulations benefit the economy as a whole. By ceding the economic argument, liberals have effectively allowed the debate on regulation to be framed as one of jobs versus safety, growth versus health. Voters are left believing that they have to choose between the two—a false choice that also gives the advantage to the GOP as the better champion of jobs and economic growth.

With Republicans now in control of both Congress and the executive branch (not to mention a renewed conservative majority on the Supreme Court), a reactionary assault on regulation that’s been contemplated for years could come to pass as early as this year. In fact, this hammer blow—part of what White House strategist Steve Bannon calls the “deconstruction of the administrative state”—is more likely to happen than the other high-profile priorities, such as tax reform or ACA repeal, that garner far more media attention.

While Trump has brandished a series of anti-regulation executive orders—such as a requirement that agencies get rid of two old regulations for every new rule issued—the real action is in Congress, which has moved aggressively to enact an agenda that could paralyze federal agencies and bring all regulatory work to a halt. And with Democrats defending twenty-five Senate seats next year, including ten in states won by Trump, the temptation for vulnerable senators to support these measures will be fierce. In North Dakota, for example, embattled Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp is among the three current cosponsors of the Regulatory Accountability Act, one of the principal proposals being advocated by congressional anti-regulationists.

Anti-regulation conservatives sell their agenda with the promise that it will help business and spur growth. What they—and many liberals—fail to acknowledge is that regulation, far from being a drag on economic growth and competitiveness, often provides the infrastructure necessary for growth and innovation to occur. It eliminates the uncertainty that can stifle investment, sets minimum standards for the smooth running of markets, and husbands the birth of new industries by setting goals that demand innovation to achieve. Gumming up the regulatory works and slowing or even stopping the rule-making process, on the other hand, raises risk and stifles innovation by erasing the market signals that industries need. Trump and his allies promise that their deregulatory agenda will lead to a boom in job creation. The real effect will likely be the opposite.

The current view of regulation as a drag on the economy and an affront to personal freedom is a relatively recent phenomenon. The historic view—one that dates to the earliest days of the republic—is that law and regulation are inextricably linked with the health of markets and the preservation of individual liberty.

“Regulation is not a liberal idea invented in the 1960s to interfere with our free market economy,” wrote Joseph William Singer, Bussey Professor of Law at Harvard University, in the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review in 2011. “It is what enabled the free market to emerge in the first place.”

A case in point, Singer said, is the evolution of American property law, which puts the rights of individual property owners at its center. According to Singer, we take for granted the right to buy or sell our homes—or to paint them purple if we want to—and we also expect not to be discriminated against because of our race or religion and to be entitled to a remedy if we’re the victims of fraud.

All of these rights, Singer wrote, are wholly creatures of regulation, beginning with the abolition of feudalism in America’s earliest days. Feudalism enjoyed a brief toehold in colonial America when the kings of England appointed “lords proprietor” to their colonies in the New World. New Jersey, for example, was given over in the 1660s to two men, Sir George Carteret and John Berkeley, who sent a governor to tell the colonists that they owed their new lords fealty and rent. Under the feudal tradition, this meant that the colonists were now tenants who couldn’t sell their land without permission or even leave it, since they were vassals to their liege. The settlers understandably balked, and they resisted for more than a century before they finally won freedom for themselves, not long before the American Revolution. Free of the shackles of feudalism, any American could own land—and did. The American real estate market was born.

As one result, a family home and the land it sits on are the biggest assets most households have today, according to the Federal Reserve, and a principal source of Americans’ wealth. At the end of 2016, according to Zillow, the total value of U.S. housing stock hit an all-time high of $29.6 trillion. All told, the National Association of Home Builders has reported, housing contributes between 15 percent and 18 percent to the nation’s total economic output, not including the value of a host of ancillary industries such as furniture manufacturing, retail sales of home furnishings, and HGTV.

And none of this might exist had the early settlers of New Jersey bent the knee to Lords Carteret and Berkeley.

The story of America’s economy is, in fact, the story of successive regulatory advances—like the rejection of feudalism—that have governed the markets and helped them grow. Throughout America’s history, regulation not only has shaped the foundation of our modern economy, but has also advanced the values we’ve come to believe are vital to the functioning of “free” markets—an insight that earlier policymakers fully recognized.

For instance, another way regulation has historically helped support open markets is by promoting competition—such as through the framework of antitrust enforcement created by the trustbusters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

After the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, Congress passed two more major pieces of legislation in 1914 that would form the core of the government’s authority to break up monopolies—the Clayton Act, which bans anticompetitive practices such as discriminatory pricing, and legislation to create the Federal Trade Commission. Further refinements to this framework included the Packers and Stockyards Act, passed in 1921 after an FTC report exposed the gruesome practices of the monopolistic “Big Five” companies in the meat-packing industry; and the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, which, among other things, prohibits sellers from charging buyers different prices for the same goods.

The defenders of these efforts—chief among them President Woodrow Wilson—framed these regulatory efforts as pro-competition and pro-business as well as pro-consumer. Government, argued Wilson, was on the side of business in its effort to end monopolistic predation.

The decades that followed were the heyday of federal antitrust enforcement. And not coincidentally, the American economy saw a flourishing of entrepreneurial activity and economic growth that’s been unmatched since.

Regulations have also advanced better, fairer, and safer markets by promoting the free flow of accurate information to the people participating in them. Knowing a product’s ingredients, as the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 demands, helps consumers choose the right products and prevents fraud. And by reducing the harms caused by poor information, regulation strengthens a market by building public faith in its integrity.

Full and fair disclosure was, for example, the guiding principle behind the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which aimed to rebuild the nation’s financial markets, shattered after the brutal crash of 1929. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued in 1933, the mandate of the regulation was to provide investors with reputable, solid information about the stocks they were going to buy, thereby bringing more people into the market:

[T]he Federal Government cannot and should not take any action which might be construed as approving or guaranteeing that newly issued securities are sound in the sense that their value will be maintained or that the properties which they represent will earn profit. . . . [Rather, the law should] insist that every issue of new securities to be sold in interstate commerce shall be accompanied by full publicity and information, and that no essentially important element attending the issue shall be concealed from the buying public. . .
It should give impetus to honest dealing in securities and thereby bring back public confidence.

The result has been the creation of the largest and most prosperous market for publicly traded companies in the world. According to the World Bank, the total market capitalization of U.S.-based public companies in 2016 was $27.4 trillion.

In addition, regulations have historically worked to support markets by ensuring the safety of the products and services offered to consumers. The most obvious example is the work of the Food and Drug Administration, which from its inception in 1906 has sought to ensure the purity and safety of the food on your table as well as the safety and efficacy of medications. In addition to battling the misbranding and mislabeling of consumer products, such as patent medicines with wildly misleading claims and foods containing unknown additives, the agency has issued labeling standards, set standards for product quality and safety, established an approval process for new medications, and gone after bad actors defrauding consumers.

Less well known is the role of federal regulation in creating the commercial airline industry. During the early twentieth century, commercial carriers had a terrible track record for safety, with a fatality rate as high as one for every 13,500 miles. “People say, ‘Hey, aviation was a free-for-all, and it worked out fine’—but no, it didn’t,” said Nidhi Kalra, codirector of the RAND Center for Decision Making Under Uncertainty.

While commercial planes were crashing with unnerving frequency, the federal government was running a federal air mail service that was sixty times as safe, with strict standards for pilots, aircraft, and flights. Ultimately, said Kalra, the commercial air industry asked to be regulated in the same way.

“The commercial airlines said, ‘We need help, because if we’re not safe, we have no customers,’ ” Kalra said. “They saw the federal government as doing something right and saw it needed help to create a market and to improve performance.” Today, air is the safest way to travel. According to the International Air Transport Association, there were 268 total air fatalities in 2016—among 40.4 million flights. The seats might be cramped and the service awful (thanks to deregulation, by the way), but you will get to your destination safely.

Given regulation’s integral role in shaping the American economy, it’s hard to understand where the current anti-regulatory fervor comes from. For his part, Harvard’s Joseph Singer argues that it makes no sense at all. “Libertarians are a lot more in favor of regulation than they think they are,” he said. “If you’re a libertarian who wants a vigorous private property system [and] a vigorous free market, you’re someone who wants rules. You want property rights and contract rights. You actually need a lot of law to have a free market private property system.”

In fact, Singer has written, markets are what law and regulation create, and can’t exist independently of them: “The free market is . . . a regulatory structure that requires detailed laws to set the rules of the game.” Under this reasoning, the insistence of anti-regulatory advocates that regulation is a somehow external and alien force being imposed on a pre-existing “free” market is completely illogical. Regulation is the economy and is inseparable from it.

This might explain why economists can’t seem to prove a central claim of anti-regulationists: that regulation’s supposed job-killing effects are bad for growth. “There’s virtually no evidence that regulation hurts the economy,” says Mark Cohen, the Justin Potter Professor of American Competitive Enterprise at the Vanderbilt University Law School.

For example, George Washington University economist Tara Sinclair found that in spite of a big increase in the amount of federal spending on enforcing regulation (the so-called “regulator’s budget”)—from roughly $533 million in 1960 to more than $53 billion in 2012—there was “no provable evidence” that regulation had any effect on the aggregate number of American jobs or the nation’s total economic output. And in Does Regulation Kill Jobs?, an exhaustive review of the academic literature, scholars Cary Coglianese and Adam Finkel of the University of Pennsylvania and Christopher Carrigan of George Washington University concluded that “the existing empirical research suggests that regulation does relatively little to reduce or increase overall jobs in the United States.”

There are a few reasons for these findings. First, regulations are not created equal, despite anti-regulationists’ efforts to tar all regulation with the same broad brush. There are, without doubt, badly drafted regulations that impose unreasonable burdens on the businesses they affect, especially small businesses with fewer staff. But there are plenty of well-crafted regulations that encourage innovation and take industry’s needs into account, as with the rules that led to NBD Nano’s products and electric cars.

Second, while no one denies that regulation can have acute localized impacts in one sector, it can simultaneously create opportunities in others. If payday lenders are regulated out of existence, for example, the workers in those storefronts are out of jobs. Yet the latent demand for short-term credit could prompt the creation of new companies that offer other, non-predatory products. That is, in fact, what has happened since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed new rules in June 2016 restricting the practices of payday lenders. At the same time that the industry complained that the proposed regulation was its death knell, a host of new firms—such as the California-based True-Connect, which helps employers offer low-cost short-term loans to their workers—have emerged to serve this market.

Third, said Vanderbilt’s Cohen, the “costs” imposed on one business by regulation often spell opportunity for someone else. The spending that some companies might incur because of regulation generates economic activity elsewhere—these are not dollars that vanish from the economy. “The minute you require a scrubber on a coal-fired power plant, somebody has to build that scrubber, somebody has to supply the material to build that scrubber and maintain it,” Cohen said. “Those are jobs.”

In an economy as resilient as ours, said George Washington University’s Sinclair, all of these impacts offset each other. “Our economy is very robust,” she said.

Nevertheless, regulation’s reputation as a job killer persists. Why?

The answer is a convergence of economic, political, and ideological forces, beginning in the 1970s, that has only gotten stronger since.

Even before this period, there was an undercurrent of concern that agency bureaucrats weren’t sufficiently accountable to democratic control—despite the fact that agencies craft their rules at the direction of a democratically elected Congress. Initially, these worries were dealt with by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a 1946 law that established a formal process for rule making, including public notice and comment periods for pending rules and a standard for judicial review.

These processes seemed sufficient until the 1970s, when several things happened at once. First was a dramatic growth in the federal government’s footprint, including a raft of new agencies (many created by President Richard Nixon) responding to concerns of environmental degradation, the flimsiness of consumer products (e.g., the exploding Ford Pinto), and other social welfare concerns. The EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration were both established in 1970, for example, followed by such agencies as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1971 and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972. Corporate America freaked out.

Also around this time, the economy began to be plagued by “stagflation”—high inflation coupled with sluggish growth—which would become the obsession of policymakers for the decade. By 1974, the inflation rate had reached 11 percent, while unemployment climbed to 8.5 percent in 1975. As politicians desperately cast about for a magic bullet to cure the economy, Washington was ripe for the anti-regulationist thinking advocated by an increasingly influential cadre of libertarians. As Cary Coglianese and his colleagues pointed out in Does Regulation Kill Jobs?, “[t]argeting regulation as the source of either economic distress or salvation can certainly be a politically expedient gesture, even if not grounded in evidence.”

In no time, the scapegoating of regulation gelled into a powerful political movement with a clear agenda and a robust infrastructure in Washington. This included its own magazine, Regulation, launched in 1977 by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and a stable of heavyweight champions to further the cause, including then-future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and economist William Niskanen, who would become the chief architect of President Ronald Reagan’s economic agenda.

At the same time, liberals also began accepting the idea that regulation is antithetical to growth. And, in fact, some of the biggest deregulatory victories of the decade were the work of a Democrat: President Jimmy Carter. In 1978, Carter signed legislation deregulating the airline industry, a move aided by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and his top aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee, now Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Two years later, Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which largely deregulated the trucking industry. Among the influences on Democrats in this period were books such as Small Is Beautiful, a neo-Malthusian treatise published in 1973 by British economist E. F. Schumacher, whose critique of “excessive consumption” inspired a prominent swath of the left to adopt a strong ethic of conservation hostile to growth as a priority. Secondly, as W. Carl Biven recounts in Jimmy Carter’s Economy: Policy in an Age of Limits, Carter fell sway to an emerging school of thought, advocated first by economists at the University of Chicago and then embraced more broadly, that regulators were all too often “captured” by the industries they were charged to oversee and no longer serving the public interest. After a series of theoretical papers by the Chicago economists, Biven writes, a slew of other economists contributed analytical and empirical studies to back up this view. The Ford Foundation even funded a major body of work on this topic at the Brookings Institution.

Finally, in 1980, Carter signed the Paperwork Reduction Act, which authorized the creation of what would become the most powerful regulatory body in Washington, with veto power over all but the independent regulatory agencies—the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

By this time, anti-regulationists had already settled on what would become the prevailing line of attack that continues to this day—the cumulative cost of regulatory compliance on incumbent businesses. Scores of studies, by the AEI, Cato, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Mercatus Center, among others, purported to document regulation’s stifling economic impacts. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, began tracking the total number of pages in the Federal Register—the official record for proposed and final regulations—in an annual report called “Ten Thousand Commandments.” Another series of studies, produced by George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, introduced the concept of the “regulator’s budget”—the share of the federal budget attributed to agency spending on promulgating and enforcing regulation.

This focus on costs would become the all-consuming concern of Reagan and his new regulatory watchdog, OIRA. Reagan—who put “job-killing regulations” into the GOP lexicon—made “regulatory relief” a pillar of his economic agenda and stuffed his administration with anti-regulationists. Among them was James C. Miller III, who spent four years at the AEI before being tapped by Reagan to lead his anti-regulation portfolio as OIRA’s first administrator. In that role, he laid out a philosophy for regulation that has persisted through successive administrations—one that is the polar opposite of the regulatory activism of the early twentieth century.

Miller and Reagan’s OIRA upended the then-prevailing assumption, codified by the APA, that agencies are acting within their rights unless deemed to be “arbitrary and capricious.” Instead, Miller replaced this idea with the presumption that the default for agencies should be not to act, unless they can prove their actions to be justified. As Miller wrote in a 2011 retrospective of his OIRA experience:

Do not regulate unless you have the requisite information; 

Choose the least costly means of achieving any given regulatory objective (or its corollary);

Choose the greatest regulatory benefit for any given regulatory cost); and 

Choose the intensity of regulation that maximizes the difference between benefits and costs—that is, where marginal benefits equal marginal costs. 

In any event, do not regulate unless you can clearly show that the benefits exceed the costs.

Since Miller’s decree, the process of rule making has gotten slower with each successive administration. Many of the regulations required by the ACA and Dodd-Frank, for example, were still incomplete at the end of the Obama administration, despite the fact that it’s now been seven years since the passage of both laws.

In 2013, according to an analysis by the Regulatory Studies Center, it took OIRA an average of 135 days to review a proposed rule, compared to just thirty days in 1994. Moreover, according to a 2016 analysis by Public Citizen, it now takes nearly five years on average for agencies to complete an “economically significant” rule—one that could have an economic impact of $100 million or more—if it also requires a period of public notice and comment and an analysis of how it might affect small businesses (a so-called “regulatory flexibility analysis”).

For some agencies, the delays are even longer. The same report found, for example, that it now takes OSHA as long as fifteen years to finalize a major rule, compared to less than one year prior to 1996. So profound have these delays been, in fact, that OSHA has only finalized five “economically significant” rules since 1996.

Having already crippled the regulatory process in Washington, Republicans in Congress now propose to kill it altogether. For instance, one proposal picking up momentum is the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act, which not only features one of the most tortured acronyms in legislative history but also gives Congress unparalleled authority over agency rule making. Under this bill, Congress would have seventy days to take an up-or-down vote on every regulation where compliance costs are estimated to exceed $100 million. Regulations not approved within that window would be presumed disapproved, which puts the burden on the proponents of any new rule to push for a vote and whip the required votes. A second effort, the Regulatory Accountability Act, would add a plethora of new hurdles to the already cumbersome rule-making process, including additional public hearings and a requirement that agencies expand their procedures for proving that new rules are based on the “best evidence” and the “least cost”—terms that are also undefined in the bill.

The proponents of these measures would say that slowing, or even halting, the flow of regulation would be a net good for businesses, by sparing the economy of the burdens these regulations would otherwise impose.

But the better, more accurate, view would be to consider the costs of failing to regulate and the opportunities our economy would forego.

One such missed opportunity is the innovation that regulation can prompt, such as the new technologies created by companies like NBD Nano that are leading not just to cleaner energy but also to all sorts of ancillary benefits for consumers.

More than twenty years ago, economists Michael Porter of Harvard University and Claas van der Linde of the University of St. Gallen theorized that the right kind of regulation can spur innovation and even generate net benefits for industry—a thesis that’s since come to be known as the “Porter Hypothesis.” For example, regulations can help companies gather the data they need to improve, and set targets that put pressure on companies to innovate and impose uniform standards across sectors, thereby requiring everyone to invest and preventing free-riders.

Dozens of studies have aimed to prove or debunk the Porter Hypothesis, and so far, the research leans in its favor. In their meta-study of the research testing the hypothesis, Vanderbilt University’s Mark Cohen and colleagues cite studies finding a correlation between tighter pollution rules and higher expenditures by companies on research and development. Another study, by George Washington University’s Sinclair and Laura Schultz of the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, finds that traditional oil and coal states—such as Alaska, Kentucky, and North Dakota—are among the top creators of clean energy jobs. In fact, according to Sinclair and Schultz’s research, Alaska ranks second only to Vermont in the share of green jobs.

One example of how the Porter Hypothesis works in the real world is the development of energy-efficient light bulbs, which are now replacing traditional incandescent bulbs. The bulbs you now buy at Home Depot are a direct result of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, passed during the George W. Bush administration. Among other things, EISA set standards for more efficient bulbs, mandating that they had to become 25 percent more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs by 2012.

The new law set the target for industry to reach but wasn’t prescriptive in telling industry how to reach it. In fact, it was exactly the type of well-designed regulatory mandate that Porter and van der Linde describe in their paper as optimal for encouraging innovation. In the case of the light bulb industry, the new standards set off a flurry of experimentation that’s been a boon for consumers. Consumers now have an array of choices, including compact fluorescents, halogen bulbs, and the increasingly standard LED bulbs, which use about 80 percent less energy than traditional incandescent lights, according to Consumer Reports, and can last between 20,000 and 50,000 hours—or up to forty-six years at three hours per day.

The full range of innovation a regulation can trigger is likely vastly under-measured and underappreciated. The costs of proposed regulation are relatively easy to quantify—such as the number of estimated hours that it takes to complete a disclosure form or the price of installing a scrubber. Moreover, these costs are typically borne by incumbent industries, which often have the lobbyists, PR firms, and boutique econometric firms at their disposal to make a convincing case about a regulation’s burdens.

But many of regulation’s benefits are inherently speculative at the time a rule is under consideration and tough to measure. And the chief beneficiaries might be companies and industries that do not yet even exist—they have no seat at the table when a new rule is being contemplated and can’t speak to its upside potential.

While standard techniques for cost-benefit analysis can calculate the savings in health care costs from a proposed regulation or the value of lives saved, it’s doubtful that any economist could have predicted in advance the full impact of a company like NBD Nano. There, regulations first aimed at making power plants more efficient resulted in the commercialization of a new technology with a broad range of applications outside clean energy, including auto manufacturing, sporting goods, and smartphones. NBD Nano’s products could even end up saving lives—for example, if their waterproof coatings help car windshields shed rain, thereby improving visibility for drivers. Yet the value of those lives and the jobs created by spin-off applications will never be “credited” to the original regulation that helped launch the company in the first place. Indeed, says Vanderbilt’s Mark Cohen, most existing studies that look at the impacts of regulation typically don’t look beyond the specific industry sector targeted.

At Greentown Labs, a Boston-area clean technology incubator that is also the nation’s largest, many of the roughly 120 companies the incubator has helped or is helping to launch owe their existence or growth to regulation. This includes NBD Nano, which got its start there.

“People are always saying that regulations kill small businesses, but I can tell you, from sitting around the table with the businesses that we support, no one is coming to me and saying, ‘I’m blocked because of a regulation,’ ” said Emily Reichert, the CEO of Greentown Labs. “Regulations are what is setting the market they are pursuing. They serve as market indicators for directions we should go.”

Among the examples Reichert cites are Loci Controls, a company that builds automated systems to collect methane emissions from landfills, and MultiSensor Scientific, which developed infrared sensors to detect methane leaks from oil and gas pipelines. Both companies were launched in response to the EPA’s efforts (also now in jeopardy) to regulate methane.

“Our companies don’t tend to be blocked, stifled, or stymied by regulations,” said Reichert. “They tend to be buoyed and inspired to create the solutions that will respond to the regulations once they’re in place.” But without that regulatory guidance, innovators could lose the impetus they need for the next breakthrough.

Another enormous potential economic cost of the failure to regulate is the uncertainty it would create. Certainty is especially important for new and emerging industries, where policy can help set the standards necessary to create a market. Companies want to know where and in what to invest so they don’t sink millions or billions of dollars into research and development, new facilities, or equipment that might run afoul of government policies later. They also want to know that what they’re planning to do is legal.

High levels of policy uncertainty also make businesses more reluctant to invest or hire, say economists Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven Davis, “[b]ecause it is costly to make a hiring or investment mistake.” And it gives other countries the opportunity to leap ahead.

This is exactly what happened with the commercial drone industry, where years-long delays in federal regulation allowed a host of other nations, including China, Britain, France, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand, to get a jump on the United States. In the beginning, it was American companies, like California-based Airware, that pioneered commercial drone technology. But as delays in regulatory guidance began to pile up, American firms like Google and Amazon started piloting their drone delivery technologies abroad, to the benefit of consumers in those places. Today, the world leader in smaller commercial drones is DJI, a company based in Shenzhen, China. The Federal Aviation Administration finally issued drone regulations in August 2016, but American companies will now have to work that much harder to compete in an industry that should have been theirs from the start.

The same scenario now threatens to play out in the fast-growing world of driverless vehicles, where once again other countries are working quickly to set up flexible rules aimed at quickly standardizing and deploying this technology. The Netherlands, for example, has been exceptionally aggressive in promoting driverless trucks. In 2016, a consortium led by the Dutch government sponsored the first-ever cross-border convoy of semi-autonomous trucks across Europe. By abdicating its duty to regulate, the U.S. government creates a huge risk that some other country will set the standard for—and get the jobs from—this transformative technology.

Among the biggest basic questions federal regulators haven’t yet grappled with is simply defining what’s “safe.” Should driverless cars be required to have steering wheels so that human drivers can still take control? What about rearview mirrors? What kind of testing should companies be required to do before a driverless car is allowed on the road?

In the absence of federal regulations, states and cities are rushing in to regulate—but with conflicting results. Despite “model” guidance issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in September 2016, when Barack Obama was still in office, states and cities are still going their own way.

California’s recently proposed rules for the testing of driverless cars, for example, require a “communications link” between the vehicle and a “remote operator” in case something goes wrong—a requirement that other states don’t impose. So far, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, thirteen states have passed legislation to regulate driverless vehicles, while bills are pending in at least thirty-three others. It’s as if some states are mandating Betamax, while others want VHS.

That’s why some companies, such as Lyft, are now urging Congress to intervene. At a February 2017 subcommittee hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Lyft’s vice president for government relations, Joseph Okpaku, testified that the “worst possible scenario for the growth of autonomous vehicles is an inconsistent and conflicting patchwork of state, local, municipal, and county laws that will hamper efforts to bring [this] technology to market.”

Lost opportunities—in innovations, jobs, and technologies not yet dreamed of—are not the only potential costs of the federal regulatory inaction that the Trump Congress wants to see. The result could also be economic catastrophe.

Harvard’s Joseph Singer, for example, argues that the lack of appropriate regulation likely helped trigger the financial crisis in 2007 that led to the Great Recession. Writing in the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, Singer pointed out that “[i]t was only after the substantial deregulation of the banking sector that the subprime market emerged.”

In the absence of the right rules, lenders, mortgage brokers, rating agencies, and all the other players in the subprime crisis engaged in what essentially amounted to the theft of property from home buyers, with disastrous collateral consequences for the economy at large. Lenders issued mortgages on punishing terms to people who couldn’t afford them, or sold higher-cost mortgages than people were entitled to, and the inevitable foreclosures that ultimately brought the financial system to its knees also resulted in a devastating loss of wealth that households still have not rebuilt. The total bill for the Great Recession—the trillions of dollars in wealth lost, the values of the wages not earned when workers lost their jobs, the decade of slow growth that’s resulted—is something that certainly doesn’t appear in any cost-benefit analysis that the government or a conservative think tank analyst might do.

Although a repeat of the financial crisis isn’t necessarily in the offing, there are plenty of potential risks that the federal government is currently ignoring, such as our nation’s cybersecurity, which the events leading up to the 2016 election show is subpar at best; the emerging world of artificial intelligence, which could upend our interactions with technology; the possibility of a global pandemic, which our federal government is woefully underequipped to manage; and perhaps other systemic risks to our financial system that no one is currently contemplating. While it’s impossible for federal regulators to prepare for every possible scenario, taking regulators off the watch altogether is the surest way to guarantee that an unanticipated disaster will have the worst possible effects.

The persistence of anti-regulatory fervor is yet another example—all too common these days—of ideology trumping data and even logic. But it also means that the defenders of regulation should embrace the task of challenging the conventional wisdom about regulation’s “job-killing” impacts.

As the history of our republic well shows, it’s because of regulation that we have the vigorous, resilient, and innovative markets that we do, and the snake oil of deregulation is the last thing our economy needs as we face a host of new challenges in an increasingly uncertain world.

Without doubt, what Trump has planned for the regulatory state is a huge threat to public health and safety. Workplace protections could vanish; consumers could face abuses; our air, our water, and our food will be dirtier and less safe.

As importantly, the economy will suffer, too.

The post Deconstricting the Administrative State appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Booz Allen Hamilton is a private company with 22,600 employees and more than $5 billion in annual revenue. The government of the United States is, obviously, not a private company; it has 2.1 million employees and more than $3 trillion in annual revenue. The CEO of Booz Allen, Horacio Rozanski, makes $3.5 million a year. The CEO of the U.S. government—we call him the president—makes $400,000.

At first glance, there is nothing unusual about this. The rule in America has long been that private-sector firms are free to pay their leaders more than what taxpayers would countenance for government officials.

But here’s the thing: in 2016, Booz Allen got 97 percent of its revenue from the taxpayer, in the form of federal contracts.

Now, perhaps the work Booz Allen does for the government is so rare and valuable that it’s worth awarding it contracts generous enough for its CEO to take home nine times the salary of the leader of the free world. Booz Allen, however, does not produce, say, predator drones, or supercomputers, or other products the government depends on but could never supply on its own.

Instead, the 5,100-plus contracts Booz Allen has with the federal government are for “professional services”—for instance, helping procurement specialists at government agencies decide which new software platforms to buy, and then providing training and technical support for those systems. Much of this is work that the government could, in theory, hire civil servants to do. Indeed, walk into any federal agency and you’re likely to find civil servants and contractors from Booz Allen—or Deloitte, or SAIC, or dozens of other professional services consultancies—working side by side, often doing jobs that are interchangeable or nearly so.

The main difference is that, factoring all expenses—salaries, benefits, and so forth—the contract employee costs the federal government on average nearly twice what the civil servant does, according to a study by the Project on Government Oversight. It’s that difference that allows Booz Allen to pay its executives millions per year.

Why would federal agencies throw money at contractors for work that could be done in-house? Partly it’s a matter of flexibility. Thanks to ungainly civil service regulations, it regularly takes as long as a year to hire (or fire) a government employee. But as Gilad Edelman explains, the main reason is a decades-old unofficial cap imposed by Congress on the number of federal workers.

The 2.1 million civil servants the federal government employs today is the same number (not counting the Postal Service) that it employed in 1966—even though annual GDP and government spending since then have both more than quadrupled. Given the de facto hiring cap, the only way for agencies to meet the obligations demanded of them by congressional statutes is to farm out more and more of the work to private contractors. And so the contracting force continues to grow, along with the cost to taxpayers, with no noticeable improvement in government performance. Indeed, the opposite may be true. Contractors, because of their contingent relationship to the agencies, typically have less emotional investment in the mission of those agencies. It’s probably no coincidence that Edward Snowden was a Booz Allen contractor—or that he was screened for his security clearance by another contractor, USIS.

The obvious solution is for Congress to allow agencies to bring more work in-house by expanding the federal employee head count, reforming civil service rules, and perhaps offering higher pay to employees with special skills who can’t be lured into government service at current pay scales. But there’s no political imperative to do any of that. For Republicans, capping—or, as they are now gearing up to do, cutting—the number of civil servants is a way to send a message to their base that they are serious about reducing government, even if the reality is a government that, when you count the contractors, is just as big and even more costly. For Democrats, accepting an ever-growing contractor workforce is a price they have been willing to pay to keep government going—and politically safer than advocating for more civil servants.

Given this depressing political dynamic, a frontal assault on the problem is unlikely. What’s needed is what the military calls a flanking maneuver: hitting the enemy from another side where it’s weaker. Advocates of better government should call for a simple reform: any company that receives most of its revenue from the federal government and wants to keep getting that money can no longer pay its CEO more than the government pays the president of the United States. Most Americans would probably find this rule sensible. In fact, it’s the kind of idea a political candidate could run on. Like other contractor mandates, it could be enacted by executive order—no need to go through Congress. Contractors could be exempted only if they provided products or services the government truly cannot provide in-house.

With such a rule in place, contractors would be left with a few options, all of which would benefit taxpayers. They could simply comply with the rule and drop their CEO’s salary to $400,000. That would inevitably lead them to lower the salaries of employees lower on the totem pole, saving taxpayers a significant amount of money. Or, contractors could lobby Congress to raise the salaries of the president. That would allow for higher salaries for other government employees (the president’s salary being the ceiling), which would go a long way toward restoring the competitiveness of a career in government. Or, contractors could entirely exit the market. Government agencies, especially in the Pentagon and intelligence community, would face the prospect of a crippling loss of critical workers. These days Congress works only amid crises, and this would be one neither Democrats nor Republicans would want to see last long. The only way out would be to finally allow agencies to hire the number of people who should be working for them anyway.

The post Contractor CEOs Shouldn’t Make Ten Times More Than the POTUS appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This spring, Democrats desperate for signs of a possible political comeback took heart when a young political novice, Jon Ossoff, came within two points of winning a special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District. Ossoff raised a record-breaking $8.3 million in three months and will face Republican Karen Handel in a runoff election on June 20. The seat, once famously occupied by Newt Gingrich, had recently been vacated by Tom Price, Donald Trump’s new secretary of health and human services. Though Price won reelection easily last fall, with 62 percent of the vote, Hillary Clinton ran surprisingly strongly, losing to Trump by only 1.5 percentage points—a vastly better showing than Barack Obama, who in 2012 was trounced by twenty-three points.

In the Washington Post, Paul Kane explained that the Democratic Party was targeting the seat as part of an “emerging strategy of focusing on dozens of GOP seats in diverse, well-educated suburbs across the country in advance of next year’s elections.” The race for Price’s old seat, added the Post’s Greg Sargent, “is being widely examined as a bellwether for 2018, because it’s a lot like many other GOP-held districts that Democrats will target—ones in which Trump won by a very slim margin or lost, and ones that are heavily populated with college-educated white and suburban voters.” NBC News reported that Georgia’s Sixth was one of ninety-seven districts the Democrats had identified in which Trump prevailed with 55 percent or less of the vote.

This strategy is rational if your primary focus is to pick up seats in the House of Representatives in 2018. Districts where Trump did the worst are the obvious low-hanging fruit. Those tend to be places like Georgia’s Sixth: metro areas with growing numbers of the “rising electorate” of college-educated professionals, single women, Millennials, immigrants, and other minorities who formed the core of the Obama coalition.

The strategy is highly questionable, however, if the goal is to win more broadly—say, the presidency in 2020. After all, the Democrats approached the disastrous 2016 election precisely on the theory that presidential contests are less about persuasion than about turning out your base, and that the most efficient way to turn out your base is to focus on where most of your supporters live. By crafting messages targeted to suburban professionals (and with a heavy assist from Donald Trump’s alienating campaign), the strategy worked well—in those areas. But the overall result was catastrophic. Trump won by much higher percentages than previous GOP presidential candidates in exurban and rural districts—enough (with a little help from the Russians and James Comey) to put him in the White House.

The debate within the Democratic Party about how best to win back power—reach out to rural white working-class voters, or work harder on appealing to educated professionals and other members of the rising electorate—does not align with the perceived divide between the Clinton and Bernie Sanders wings. True, Sanders’s candidacy was partly based on the premise that a populist economic message could sell well in the Rust Belt industrial towns and declining rural areas that have been gravitating to the right. But even within Clinton’s camp, many people—most notably her own husband—thought her campaign was making a terrible mistake by not fighting for those voters.

Since November, the confusion has only deepened. On the one hand, Democrats know that they are getting killed in the hinterlands and the heartland, and that this spells trouble not just at the national level but in the states as well. On the other hand, they are appalled by voters who supported Trump in spite of—or was it because of?—his evident racism, misogyny, personal corruption, and general contempt for accepted facts. And they worry that trying to win these folks over is more than just doomed; it could alienate the Democratic base by diluting key values that define modern progressivism: racial equality, women’s rights, gay rights, and commitment to addressing climate change.

Democrats are increasingly realizing that to resolve this paradox they need what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calls “a strong, bold economic message,” one that strikes a chord with rural white voters without alienating the base. Several Democrats seen as future leaders of the party, such as Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Ohio Representative Tim Ryan, have even floated specific policy plans they think would do the trick. Unfortunately, their ideas—a higher minimum wage, paid family leave, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, universal high-speed broadband—are pretty much the same ones Hillary Clinton ran on without success.

There is a much more powerful economic agenda hiding in plain sight. Americans from all walks of life are beginning to wake up to the way our economy, and indeed our way of life, has come under the control of an ever-smaller handful of ever-larger business monopolies. The bloody face of David Dao getting dragged off a United Airlines flight made many Americans question why, for instance, we let the airline market get cornered by four companies that can abuse us with impunity.

People in rural and small-town America know the dangers of industry consolidation better than anyone, having seen it strip away the livelihoods of independent farmers and local banks and merchants long before most city slickers even realized that corporate concentration was an issue.

All this points to a simple conclusion: Democrats should make fighting monopolies the central organizing principle of their economic agenda. This approach holds the promise of bringing together groups that seem inherently at odds: nativists and cosmopolitans, fundamentalists and secularists, urbanites and rural dwellers.

The strongest reason to think this could work is, quite simply, that it has worked before. A century ago, agrarian populists and big-city progressives united around a common opposition to monopoly, forming a movement that dominated American politics for decades and helped deliver a broadly shared prosperity. Because the economic landscape today is strikingly similar to what it was a hundred years ago, there’s every reason to believe that the conditions are right for a similar alliance to arise again.

Thanks to the design of the Electoral College and the Senate, political power in America has always been influenced almost as much by the geographical reach of the political parties as by their ability to attract the most raw votes. And over the past two decades, the left has suffered a very unfavorable geographic realignment.

One good way to see this is to look at the changes in county-level voting behavior in presidential elections. It wasn’t so long ago that a roughly equal number of counties supported the two main presidential contenders. In 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton nearly matched the performance of Republican George H. W. Bush, winning 1,519 counties to Bush’s 1,582. (Even then, the Republicans held an advantage; Bush won his counties with only 37 percent of the national popular vote.) The county totals were almost identical when Clinton defeated Bob Dole four years later.

That would turn out to be a high-water mark for the Democrats. Even while narrowly winning the popular vote in 2000, Al Gore carried only 659 counties to George W. Bush’s 2,397. John Kerry did even worse in the close 2004 election. But the worst performance since Walter Mondale’s 1984 shellacking came in 2016, when Hillary Clinton topped Donald Trump in only 489 of America’s 3,141 counties.

Overall, Donald Trump carried 220 counties that had voted for Obama in 2012, while Hillary took only seventeen that had gone for Mitt Romney. Even more significantly, Trump got a larger share of the vote than Romney in 2,728 counties. Clinton outperformed Obama in only 383.

Of course, you can’t gauge the health of a political party purely by counting the number of counties won. As Fordham University political scientist Costas Panagopoulos pointed out to Politifact in December, “Loving County, Texas, has a population of 82, while California’s Los Angeles County has over 9.8 million.” But by other indicators, the left’s growing geographic isolation has had dreadful electoral consequences, of which Donald Trump is only the most visible example. For instance, at the beginning of 1998, Republicans controlled both chambers in seventeen state legislatures and the Democrats controlled both in twenty; twelve were split. (Nebraska has an officially nonpartisan unicameral legislature.) Today, Republicans control thirty-two legislatures, Democrats control fourteen, and only three are split. In American politics, geography matters, and Democrats are close to falling off the map.

Part of the problem is that, as Democratic voters sort themselves more and more into dense urban and suburban districts, they become sitting ducks for Republican gerrymanders that dilute their ability to elect representatives to state legislatures. And it’s a problem that compounds on itself. State legislatures have the biggest role in drawing federal congressional districts; lower-level politicians form the farm team for candidates for higher state and federal offices; and the federal government is getting increasingly into the habit of off-sourcing policymaking decisions to state governments, as with the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. It’s hard to exaggerate how devastating it is for the left to be shut out of power on the state level.

Based on the polling data, Hillary Clinton had a seemingly comfortable lead in Pennsylvania heading into election night. As the results began to come in, she appeared to be meeting her targets. While her margin of victory in Philadelphia was 17,062 votes smaller than Obama’s four years earlier, she more than made up for it by netting 17,489 more votes in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County. In the all-important Philly suburbs, Clinton improved on Obama’s 2012 margin by around 65,000 more votes. With those results from Democratic strongholds, Clinton seemed well on her way to an easy victory.

At Clinton headquarters, the first sign that something was amiss came shortly before the polls closed in Pennsylvania. At around 7:45 p.m., Steve Schale, a Clinton operative from Florida, called with the news that Trump was going to win that state. Clinton was doing well and hitting targets in blue areas, but Trump’s margins in Republican areas were astronomical. “You’re going to come up short,” Schale told them. Losing Florida was disappointing, but not catastrophic. The same couldn’t be said for Pennsylvania.

Observers had noted that Trump appeared to be running stronger than Romney had in rural and exurban parts of the state, but almost no one (and certainly not the pollsters) realized by how much. Clinton would underperform Obama by at least ten points in twenty-three of Pennsylvania’s sixty-eight counties. (For the purposes of this article, I’m discussing vote percentages in terms of the total two-party vote—the number of votes for either the Democratic or Republican candidate—to avoid getting the distorting effects of third parties.) When all the votes were counted (and recounted), she would lose the state by a razor-thin 44,292 votes.

One way to illustrate what happened is to look at two adjacent southwestern counties that border West Virginia.

In 2008, Obama essentially tied John McCain in Greene County, losing by just sixty votes. In 2012, Obama lost to Romney by 2,576 votes. But 2016 was a disaster: Clinton won a mere 29 percent of the Greene County vote, costing her 6,367 net votes. Trump picked up 14 percent of his statewide margin from a county that produced fewer than 16,000 total two-party presidential votes.

Just to the north, in more populous Washington County, the erosion was both less extreme and more consequential. Obama lost Washington County by 4,571 votes in 2008 and by 12,885 in 2012. In 2016, Clinton lost by 25,064, which was more than half of the statewide margin. These two lightly populated and heavily white working-class counties alone accounted for 71 percent of Trump’s margin of victory.

The rural tidal wave more than wiped out Clinton’s advantage in places like Chester County, in the Philly suburbs. Mitt Romney had carried the affluent and traditionally Republican county by 539 votes. Trump’s style, policies, and record of sexual assault weren’t expected to play with Romney Republicans, and they didn’t: Clinton won Chester by 25,568 votes. But that was essentially single-handedly neutralized by Washington County, which has a population less than half the size of Chester’s. Clinton won the big counties, but she lost the small counties so badly it didn’t matter. The state, along with the country, had realigned, but the realignment wasn’t an even trade.

Initially, there was a lot of confusion about what had happened. It was anticipated that black turnout might not match recent levels, and that proved to be true. Another theory was that Trump’s huge numbers in red counties were driven by new voters stirred out of complacency by the novelty and celebrity of his campaign. But, as more data emerged, it became clear that the crucial factor was Obama voters who defected to Trump or to a third party.

The Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group found that 70 percent of the Democrats’ drop-off from their 2012 presidential vote could be attributed to Obama voters switching sides. In a joint study, GSG and Catalist found that, contrary to expectations, Clinton did better than Trump among new voters in Ohio. New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn similarly concluded that weak turnout among black voters had been exaggerated and noted that “almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr. Trump or voting for a third-party candidate.”

That evidence finally puts to rest the arguments that Clinton’s loss is explained by a failure to turn out her base or by an army of previously apathetic voters coming out of the woodwork for Trump. Democratic strategists are therefore coming around to the idea that they can’t kiss off the white working-class part of their traditional New Deal coalition. To climb out of the hole they’re in, candidates will have to engage with small-town and rural constituents where they are.

Here’s what they’ll find when they get there. To begin with, a mass die-off. Since it began nearly two decades ago, an epidemic has spread across most of the American landmass that has caused more premature deaths than AIDS. Yet it wasn’t until 2015 that the New York Times took note of it.

The geography of the epidemic is telling. The states most affected—Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi—are in deep red zones. There are now counties in Appalachia where life expectancy is shorter than in Bangladesh. Also hard hit, however, are the rural counties and small towns and cities throughout “flyover” America. With few exceptions, the only territories that have been largely unaffected are the deep blue zones of deep blue states: coastal California, downstate New York, the I-95 corridor along the mid-Atlantic coastline.

Just as the epidemic has a particular geography, it also affects a particular demographic group. As two Princeton University professors, the husband-and-wife team of Angus Deaton and Anne Case, recently confirmed in a new paper, it’s overwhelmingly concentrated among working-class whites, who have experienced increasing mortality rates every year since 1999 even as life expectancy has improved for every other demographic group. In 1999, the mortality rate for non-Hispanic white people aged fifty to fifty-four with only a high school degree was 30 percent lower than the mortality rate of black people as a whole in the same age group; by 2015, it was 30 percent higher. The proximate cause of this die-off is “deaths of despair” brought on by record levels of alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide.

If you look at a map of where these deaths of despair are concentrated, you’ll see that it tracks closely with another map, developed by the Economic Innovation Group, that color-codes counties according to their levels of economic distress. These maps show regional inequality growing as more and more of the country’s wealth and economic growth becomes concentrated in a few elite urban, coastal areas. Meanwhile, rural America contracts and depopulates, and once-thriving heartland cities and metro areas fall further and further behind.

One telling statistic captures the decline of rural America. In the late 1970s, one-fifth of the country’s new businesses were launched outside of metro areas. Today, only 12 percent are. That is not enough to replace those that go out of business, so the number of rural businesses continues to shrink, along with opportunities for rural Americans to make a living. It’s probably no coincidence that the changing political allegiance of Greene County, Pennsylvania, has come at a time when fully 53 percent of its adult population is not working.

It’s not just in rural areas where business dynamism is pretty much played out. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. metro areas saw more businesses close than open in 2014. With the exception of a few elite cities, most of America is, in a very real sense, going out of business. And the businesses that remain are more and more likely to be owned by corporations headquartered somewhere else, leading to the effective colonization of local economies. (See Brian S. Feldman, “The Real Reason Middle America Should be Angry,” Washington Monthly, March/April/May 2016.)

If you live in a place where the steel mills and the downtown stores closed twenty years ago, and the malls and the local hospital are closing today, it has been a long time since any national politician besides Trump seemed aware you existed. Indeed, if anyone in blue zone America noticed, whether on the left or the right, they were likely to conclude that it’s your own fault for being a racist or a slob or both.

Here is Kevin Williamson’s take in the March 28, 2016, issue of the National Review:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. . . . The white American under-class is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. 

As hard-sounding and uncharitable as that advice sounds, Williamson is only saying explicitly what many distraught Democrats are feeling. If Trump’s racism was a plus and his sexual assaults weren’t a deal breaker and his attack on Muslims seemed about right, then maybe these people really do belong in a basket of deplorables. Maybe they are best considered implacable political foes who can’t be reasoned with and should be left to their miserable fates.

Yet how is that different from scapegoating “inner city” residents of America’s “ghettos” as an “underclass” beset by “pathologies,” as liberals rightly castigate conservatives for doing? Telling the white working class that they should just move to San Francisco is like telling poor urban black people that they should stop complaining and relocate to Chappaqua. Even if many white Trump voters were motivated by racism, the fact remains that a substantial number of them voted for a black guy in 2008 and 2012. Writing them off as irredeemable is both politically and morally wrong.

Conservative columnist George Will recently noted that “[t]he 1930s confounded the European left because capitalism’s crisis benefited the rancid right, which by melding economic and cultural anxieties produced aspirations from the base metal of resentments.” It’s hard not to see the parallels to the election of Donald Trump. When poor and working-class people in the city feel abandoned or unrepresented by the Democrats, they take to the streets in protest; whites in the country turn to right-wing populism or fascism. The left may think it can leave rural and working-class whites behind, but this will come with a price tag they don’t want to pay.

Democrats may also be tempted to think that they can focus on the educated, suburban places where Clinton outperformed Obama as they plan to take back the House in 2018, then simply switch to an appeal to rural voters for the 2020 presidential election. But that approach is risky. Building a new political movement around a new economic agenda takes time. If the Democrats spend the next year and a half trying to get the most out of the areas where Clinton did well, that’s time not invested in repairing the damage to their brand in the 220 counties that flipped from Obama to Trump. It’s another year and a half for rural voters to feel ignored, adding to their sense of grievance. Losing Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin was almost unthinkable during the 2016 campaign, but the surest way to lose those states again in 2020 is to fail to address, or even to exacerbate, the problems that led to defeat.

In many ways, we’ve been here before. At the turn of the last century, heartland America was deeply troubled and full of grievances against elites. Millions of American farmers saw their way of life threatened by falling commodity prices, predatory lenders, and monopolistic railroads and grain dealers. Small-town merchants faced extinction at the hands of giant chain stores and mail order catalogs. Christian fundamentalism would for the first time become a powerful self-conscious force in American society, along with a revitalized Ku Klux Klan expanding out of the South to places like Indiana and the industrial Midwest.

Yet from this volatile mix came not a fascist takeover, but a fusion of populism and progressivism that for all its tensions became a supermajority movement, drawing support from all over the country and nearly all walks of life. The greatest concentration of support for progressive legislation in Congress in U.S. history would come from southern and midwestern states that, after 1968, would vote consistently for conservative Republicans.

The common cause that drew this coalition together was opposition to monopoly. Then as now, the effects of increasing corporate concentration were felt first and hardest in rural America. Railroads held prairie farmers captive with monopolistic freight tariffs. Ranchers were at the mercy of the “Big Five” meat packers, who offered them “take it or leave it” prices. Monopolistic eastern bankers peddled predatory loans to homesteaders, even bundling them up into what we today call derivatives and reselling them to unsuspecting European investors.

The result was populist prairie fire. An agrarian “Granger” movement pushed state governments to regulate private services like railroads and grain storage facilities. In 1887, Congress created the first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. By 1890, discontent among farmers and small-scale producers of all kinds would lead to passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which its namesake sponsor said was necessary to protect the “right of every man to work, labor, and produce in any lawful vocation and to transport his production on equal terms and conditions and under like circumstances.” By 1896, populism would capture the Democratic Party and make William Jennings Bryan its standard-bearer.

Bryan, of course, never made it to the presidency, but as the forces of monopoly continued to advance, urban professionals began to feel threatened as well. The result was a fusion of populism and progressivism that took over the full spectrum of American politics. By the election of 1912, four candidates—incumbent Republican William Taft, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, running on the Progressive Party ticket, and Eugene Debs, running as a Socialist—all competed over who had the best ideas for containing monopolies. Wilson carried the day, and went on to attack monopolies through the creation of institutions that vastly expanded the government’s ability to prevent mergers and protect independent producers.

A generation later, southern, white populists and northern, urban progressives came together again to form the New Deal coalition, united in common opposition to Wall Street financiers and the other “economic royalists.” Though it is not well remembered today, much of the New Deal, particularly after FDR’s first term, focused on busting monopolies and passing fair trade laws to protect small-scale producers of all kinds, from farmers and small-town merchants to independent businesses in urban America. This program was so successful, both politically and economically, that Republicans generally embraced it as well and monopoly faded as an issue in American politics for decades. (See Phillip Longman, “How to Make Conservatism Great Again,” Washington Monthly, November/December 2016.)

Today, however, monopoly is once again a problem. And, as in the past, heartland Americans have been among the first to feel its effects. At the Brookings Institution, scholars have only recently figured out that increasing corporate concentration has stifled entrepreneurialism, but ranchers and farmers have known all about that for years. Some 84 percent of the meat-packing industry is controlled by just four companies. In most of the country, just one or two (colluding) milk processors dictate the prices they pay to dairy farmers. Monsanto long ago achieved overwhelming control over seed production. Just four railroads control 86 percent of the grain and oilseed traffic in the United States, and in most of rural America, a single corporation monopolizes all rail traffic in all directions, charging the absolute most that the market will bear.

Again, as in days of old, the effects of concentration are now spreading so that they threaten metropolitan America as well. Too-big-to-fail banks helped cause the Great Recession. An airline industry in which just four companies now control 85 percent of the market increasingly gets away with overcharging and mistreating fliers, including forcibly removing paying customers thanks to an overbooking system that jacks up corporate profits.

At the same time, platform monopolies like Amazon and Facebook are stripping away the ability of musicians, authors, and journalists to make a living. Consolidation in health care means fewer and fewer hospitals competing to hire nurses, while independent doctors are forced to sell their practices to corporate masters. Academic scientists find that they must increasingly raise their own salaries from plutocratic donors, who also increasingly control the rest of America’s nonprofit sector and civil society as well. Monopoly has become such a problem in America that even the Economist has begun encouraging the U.S. government to rediscover its antitrust powers.

What distinguishes anti-monopoly enforcement—using the federal government’s power to regulate monopoly industries, break them up, or prevent them from forming—as a political issue is its potential to be a unifying force and coalition builder. It promises not only to restore entrepreneurship and economic vitality to small-town America, but also to help Pakistani business owners in Brooklyn and Silicon Valley inventors stifled by colluding tech behemoths.

It could unite populists and progressives in a way reminiscent of the uneasy alliance they formed to bring us the Progressive Era and the New Deal. It would give Democratic politicians in rural counties a set of policy proposals and messages that actually address the problems facing their communities, something the Republicans’ culture wars and pro-monopoly, limited-government ideology have utterly failed to do. Some pioneering Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have already embraced anti-monopoly as a theme, and others, notably former Representative Tom Perriello, running for governor of Virginia, have explicitly seized on it as a strategy for building an alliance of rural populists and urban progressives. (See “The Monthly Interview: Tom Perriello.”)

Anti-monopoly politics won’t magically erase the country’s cultural divide. Reproductive rights, gun control, police brutality, and energy policy will remain fierce points of contention. What anti-monopoly politics can do is give Democrats a message that has urgent relevance to rural and small-town America and is much more likely to improve their economic conditions than border walls and trade wars. It could even help the party preserve unity on cultural issues. It is often assumed that the best way for Democrats to compete in these areas is to eliminate the distinctions on abortion or gay rights or guns and try to craft a more appealing platform on what remains. That was essentially the Blue Dog model—until the Blue Dog Caucus all but went extinct after the 2010 and 2014 midterms.

With that strategy dead, and distasteful in the first place, Democrats in red areas should welcome a new plan that allows them to speak directly to the needs of the people they want to represent. Throwing out the defensive playbook for an offensive one offers the opportunity to cast aside stale assumptions on what positions a candidate has to adopt in order to be competitive.

Donald Trump taught us that. He could buck Republican ideology on trade and entitlements. He could win over evangelicals despite his notorious sexual behavior. He could even flip-flop on core issues like abortion and nationalized health care without it making a damn bit of difference. The lesson for Democrats may be that they can get away with being pro-choice in an anti-choice district, and pro-climate in a coal-extraction economy, but only if their economic message kicks the shit out of the message coming from the other side.

The progressive left should hope this theory is correct, because the alternative is to abandon these districts to right-wing extremists and continue getting steamrolled in elections from the presidential on down. With a plan centered around taking on the monopolies, there’s some hope for Democrats not only to undo the damage they’ve suffered in rural America, but also to set the stage for a broad populist-progressive alliance that, like the last one, could transform the country for the better.

The post How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For more than half a century, no politician of note has run on the issue of fighting corporate monopolies. Indeed, the very term “corporate monopoly” would have sounded almost as archaic as “free silver” coming out of the mouth of any political candidate until very recently. But that has begun to change, as the damage that industry consolidation is doing to the overall economy and the lives and livelihoods of individual Americans has become more and more apparent.

In 2014, two law professors little known to the general public, Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu, ran a quixotic primary challenge to New York’s powerful governor, Andrew Cuomo, and his hand-picked candidate for lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, in part by stressing anti-monopoly policies. Despite little money and overwhelming odds, Teachout and Wu surprisingly garnered more than a third of the vote. Then last summer, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a high-profile address on the dangers of industry consolidation that we at the Washington Monthly predicted (perhaps with more hope than prescience) could “change the course of the presidential contest.” It didn’t, but in the final weeks of the campaign Hillary Clinton did give a speech that included similar arguments, as did Donald Trump.

The anti-monopoly idea is now getting its most serious political road test yet by Tom Perriello, who is running for governor of Virginia. (He faces Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam in a June 13 Democratic primary.) A former diplomat and think tank scholar who hails from central Virginia, Perriello represented the state’s GOP-leaning Fifth District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2009 to 2011. During his one term in Congress, he sponsored the Health Insurance Industry Fair Competition Act, which would have eliminated an anti-trust exemption that industry has enjoyed since 1945. He lost reelection after voting for Obamacare. Perriello recently spoke to Washington Monthly web editor Martin Longman. Here is an edited version of that interview.

WM: When you were in Congress, why was eliminating the health insurance industry’s antitrust exemption such a priority for you?

TP: Antitrust protections for the insurance companies had been intentionally provided as a temporary stopgap and no longer have much of a justification. This was about getting back to what had been a core American principle for a long time—competition. To me, removing antitrust protection was something that actually could appeal across the aisle even at a very divided time, which you saw with the success of the act [it passed 406–19]. And then it was stripped out in the Senate, because that’s where there is the greatest convergence of concentrated and consolidated economic power.

WM: So, do you see the antitrust issue as one that both Democrats and Republicans can rally around?

TP: One of the problems we have in American politics is we are so divided on partisan lines that we accept this false binary that the only divide in American politics is Republican versus Democrat. But when it comes to corporate accountability or the idea of challenging monopoly or consolidation of power, there are deeply progressive strands across the political spectrum, and we saw that in that case. And, frankly, there are deeply pro-consolidation strands in both political parties. That was certainly one of those issues that reflected a sentiment in my district, where frankly you could even get Tea Partiers and the Obama coalition to be on board.

WM: You’ve been campaigning on this anti-monopoly theme all over the state, from the D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia to small Appalachian towns in southwestern Virginia. Are these really issues that voters are already thinking about and asking questions about?

TP: I actually think in many ways the challenge is people inside the Beltway having too low of an opinion about the sophistication and knowledge of people outside the Beltway. What will often happen to me on a given day is that I will start the day out in a red county, where people are talking to me about consolidation and automation, and then end the day inside the Beltway talking to people who say, “Tom, you sound like a think tank, that kind of thing will never go down with those people out there.” So I think that if we could actually get folks to sit down together, those inside the Beltway could really understand again, this is something voters across the Commonwealth are talking about because they are living the experience.

WM: You mentioned automation. How do you talk to voters about that?

TP: Automation has killed more coal jobs than natural gas has, so it’s not hard to have a conversation in southwestern Virginia about the impacts of automation. Because automation is a factor that, frankly, has hurt the small and medium-sized towns far more than it has the core blue parts of the state. During the Clinton recovery, 70 percent of new businesses were created in small and medium-sized towns and counties. During the recent recovery, it was only 17 percent in medium-sized [towns], zero percent in small towns and counties. So it’s not surprising that those people living in those areas get this and want to talk about it. What’s challenging is trying to talk about it without demagoguing it, because automation, of course, is something that is improving our lives in countless ways, and I think this is a question about whether we can acknowledge the realities of these trends and then figure out where we can push back and where we can’t. Twenty-five years ago, when globalization was the big challenge, the pundits tried to label any critics of the path we were on as “anti-globalization.” And that was a ridiculous label for those of us who were raising questions. Globalization was a reality, not something to be for or against. It was something to understand as a baseline reality and then ask the question, “How do we make sure that this process actually works for people and not just the powerful?” Automation and consolidation are those dynamics on steroids, because they are going to hit far more sectors of the economy, and far more strata socioeconomically.

WM: So should we approach automation and consolidation the same way, or differently?

TP: Consolidation is something we can be more implicitly against. Not in absolute terms, but we don’t have to take it for granted. At the strongest points in America’s economic past, and particularly when the middle class was strongest, we took anti-monopoly seriously. This is a choice. We can choose to essentially allow a smaller and smaller number of companies to control sector after sector, or we can push back. For example, we have had this incredible flourishing of microbreweries across the country. Before, the big brewing companies had 95 percent ownership of the beer market—now it’s 86 percent. So we’re not even talking about destroying these companies;
they are still massively overrepresented. We are just talking about a little bit of space for Main Street to breathe.

WM: How do you envision using the powers of the governor to take on consolidation?

TP: There is certainly room for us to be looking at antitrust enforcement, but I think there are also a number of other areas that are promising. One is challenging the electric utility monopolies to modernize their business model from a command-and-control last-century approach to distributed energy production. Because this is crucial for protecting our environment and climate, but also for giving a lot more space for communities and smaller business to see a bigger part of the energy economy. There is additional room for that in the areas of local food production and consumer production of some goods and services. We were talking to a small welding business that has developed an apprenticeship program for those who served their time in prison and are trying to find a second chance in the economy. People come out of the program with great marketable skills. If local and state contracting included a greater advantage for local production in the bidding process, we would all end up saving a ton of money, because you could greatly expand the amount of trade work to be done locally, and if the job keeps that person from going back to prison at a cost to the taxpayer of nearly $30,000, versus making $30,000-plus a year and paying taxes, that small advantage for locally produced and manufactured goods starts to look like a pretty good investment.

WM: Looking beyond your own race, how would you advise Democrats elsewhere to run and win in communities where they lost so badly in the last election?

TP: We need to stand for an American dream that is redesigned for a very different economy, one that includes the triple threats of globalization, consolidation, and automation. And in order to do that, we’re going to have to make sure that small and local businesses have a shot. We are going to have to make sure that our education and workforce training reflect those realities, which is why we proposed going from a K–12 system to a P–14 system that includes at least two years of debt-free trade school, apprenticeship program, or community college. And we need to recognize that the tax-and-spend Republicanism of the past is not something we can afford, where they raise our taxes and spend it on prisons instead of prevention. We can’t have tax reforms that actually accelerate anti-growth consolidation instead of investing in pro-growth middle-class economics. Ultimately, I think people do feel like both parties have left some regions and sectors behind, and we need to have a pretty smart strategy. We need to show up, listen, and have something to say.

The post The Monthly Interview: Tom Perriello appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One day in early January, a letter appeared on my desk marked DIN92A5501, an inmate’s identification number from the Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The author, Glenn Rodríguez, had drafted it in upright, even letters, perfectly aligned. Here, in broad strokes, is the story he told:

Rodríguez was just sixteen at the time of his arrest, and was convicted of second-degree murder for his role in an armed robbery of a car dealership that left an employee dead. Now, twenty-six years later, he was a model of rehabilitation. He had requested a transfer to Eastern, a maximum-security prison, in order to take college classes. He had spent four and a half years training service dogs for wounded veterans and eleven volunteering for a youth program. A job and a place to stay were waiting for him outside. And he had not had a single disciplinary infraction for the past decade.

Yet, last July, the parole board hit him with a denial. It might have turned out differently but, the board explained, a computer system called COMPAS had ranked him “high risk.” Neither he nor the board had any idea how this risk score was calculated; Northpointe, the for-profit company that sells COMPAS, considers that information to be a trade secret. But Rodríguez may have been stuck in prison because of it.

Proprietary algorithms are flooding the criminal justice system. Machine learning systems deploy police officers to “hot spot” neighborhoods. Crime labs use probabilistic software programs to analyze forensic evidence. And judges rely on automated “risk assessment instruments” to decide who should make bail, or even what sentence to impose.

Supporters claim that these tools help correct bias in human decisionmaking and can reduce incarceration without risking public safety by identifying prisoners who are unlikely to commit future crimes if released. But critics argue that the tools disproportionately harm minorities and entrench existing inequalities in criminal justice data under a veneer of scientific objectivity.

Even as this debate plays out, the tools come with a problem that is slipping into the system unnoticed: ownership. With rare exceptions, the government doesn’t develop its own criminal justice software; the private sector does. The developers of these new technologies often claim that the details about how they work are “proprietary” trade secrets and, as a result, cannot be disclosed in criminal cases. In other words, private companies increasingly purport to own the means by which the government decides what neighborhoods to police, whom to incarcerate, and for how long. And they refuse to reveal how these decisions are made—even to those whose life or liberty depends on them.

The issue has been percolating through criminal proceedings for years. I work for the Legal Aid Society of New York City defending criminal cases that involve computer-derived evidence. I regularly see defendants denied information that they could use to cross-examine the evidence against them because it’s a trade secret.

Right now, in Loomis v. Wisconsin, the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether to review the use of COMPAS in sentencing proceedings. Eric Loomis pleaded guilty to running away from a traffic cop and driving a car without the owner’s permission. When COMPAS ranked him “high risk,” he was sentenced to six years in prison. He tried to argue that using the system to sentence him violated his constitutional rights by demoting him for being male. But Northpointe refuses to reveal how it weights and calculates sex.

We do know certain things about how COMPAS works. It relies in part on a standardized survey where some answers are self-reported and others are filled in by an evaluator. Those responses are fed into a computer system that produces a numerical score. But Northpointe considers the weight of each input, and the predictive model used to calculate the risk score, to be trade secrets. That makes it hard to challenge a COMPAS result. Loomis might have been demoted because of his sex, and that demotion might have been unconstitutional. But as long as the details are secret, his challenge can’t be heard.

What surprised me about the letter from Eastern was that its author could prove something had gone very wrong with his COMPAS assessment. The “offender rehabilitation coordinator” who ran the assessment had checked “yes” on one of the survey questions when he should have checked “no.” Ordinarily, without knowing the input weights and predictive model, it would be impossible to tell whether that error had affected the final score. The mistake could be a red herring, not worth the time to review and correct.

Glenn Rodríguez had managed to work around this problem and show not only the presence of the error, but also its significance. He had been in prison so long, he later explained to me, that he knew inmates with similar backgrounds who were willing to let him see their COMPAS results. “This one guy, everything was the same except question 19,” he said. “I thought, this one answer is changing everything for me.” Then another inmate with a “yes” for that question was reassessed, and the single input switched to “no.” His final score dropped on a ten-point scale from 8 to 1. This was no red herring.

So what is question 19? The New York State version of COMPAS uses two separate inputs to evaluate prison misconduct. One is the inmate’s official disciplinary record. The other is question 19, which asks the evaluator, “Does this person appear to have notable disciplinary issues?”

Advocates of predictive models for criminal justice use often argue that computer systems can be more objective and transparent than human decisionmakers. But New York’s use of COMPAS for parole decisions shows that the opposite is also possible. An inmate’s disciplinary record can reflect past biases in the prison’s procedures, as when guards single out certain inmates or racial groups for harsh treatment. And question 19 explicitly asks for an evaluator’s opinion. The system can actually end up compounding and obscuring subjectivity.

That’s what happened to Glenn Rodríguez. “It took a lot of energy and effort to maintain a clean record for the duration I had,” he told me. Looking at his fellow inmates’ COMPAS reports, he realized that some guys who had engaged in violent behavior within the past two years, but whose evaluators had checked “no,” had gotten a low prison misconduct score.

Rodríguez went before the parole board last July. “This panel has concluded that your release to supervision is not compatible with the welfare of society,” the board explained. Of significant concern was his “high COMPAS risk score for prison misconduct.”

Trade secrets are a form of intellectual property for commercial know-how that are both stronger and weaker than patents. When the government grants a patent, no one is allowed to use your invention, period—but only for twenty years. After that, it’s open season. By contrast, a trade secret lasts as long as you can keep it, well, secret. If rivals obtain the secret through “misappropriation”—that is, lying, spying, or fraud—you can sue them, and they can even face criminal charges. But if they reverse-engineer your product or simply come up with the same idea on their own—or if you just do a bad job hiding it—then it’s too bad for you. Software developers like trade secrecy because their technology is not always patentable, and because patents are expensive to acquire and enforce.

There is debate among legal scholars about why the law recognizes trade secrets. Some even argue that it shouldn’t. But the most commonly accepted rationale is that granting protections for information that may not be patentable, like an abstract idea or a mathematical formula, will incentivize new intellectual creations.

What’s alarming about protecting trade secrets in criminal cases is that it allows private companies to withhold information not from competitors, but from individual defendants like Glenn Rodríguez. Generally, a defendant who wants to see evidence in someone else’s possession has to show that it is likely to be relevant to his case. When the evidence is considered “privileged,” the bar rises: he often has to convince the judge that the evidence could be necessary to his case—something that’s hard to do when, by definition, it’s evidence the defense hasn’t yet seen.

Based on state appellate court opinions, the invocation of trade secrets to prevent criminal defendants from accessing evidence against them didn’t start happening frequently until the 1990s, when companies began refusing to disclose details about DNA testing kits that were being adopted by forensic labs around the country. There was some early pushback by judges and experts, but eventually most courts ruled that DNA test kit manufacturers were entitled to keep aspects of their methods secret—and that prosecutors could still use the results as evidence to convict. In the past five years, courts in at least ten states have ruled this way for DNA analysis software programs.

But, like any technology, DNA testing can be flawed. In 2016, Michael Robinson, a death penalty defendant in Pennsylvania, tried unsuccessfully to subpoena the source code for a probabilistic genotyping software program called True-Allele. A thirty-year-old “family guy” with no prior criminal history, Robinson had been charged with murdering two people. TrueAllele matched his DNA to a bandanna found near the scene of the crime.

Probabilistic genotyping software results are not gold standard DNA evidence. The programs were developed to test tiny amounts and complicated mixtures of DNA, and their accuracy is disputed. Last September, President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology found that more testing is needed to establish the validity of programs like TrueAllele.

Robinson sought to evaluate the TrueAllele code and check whether it worked the way its developer claimed. The judge denied his request. One reason she gave stands out: TrueAllele’s developer, Mark Perlin, had said that ordering the code disclosed to the defense could “cause irreparable harm to the company, as other companies would be able to copy the code and put him out of business.” As a result, the judge decided that compelling disclosure would be unreasonable. “Dr. Perlin could decline to act as a Commonwealth expert,” she wrote, “thereby seriously handicapping the Commonwealth’s case.”

Robinson was forced to defend himself without access to the code. Despite the DNA test results, in February he was acquitted on all counts. While the outcome was ultimately a happy one for Robinson, he had to sit through the trial knowing that the jurors were weighing evidence that he was unable to fully scrutinize and contest. How many future defendants will be wrongfully convicted based on misleading “proprietary” DNA software that they couldn’t see or challenge?

Recently, companies have begun invoking proprietary secrets in the context of police investigatory tools. Accessing information about how these technologies work can be critical to a defendant’s case. He or she might want to argue that they violate privacy rights, or aren’t reliable enough to justify an arrest. In our adversarial legal system, these claims by individual defendants are often the main way to hold police to account.

That’s what happened with Stingrays. A Stingray is a military surveillance device that masquerades as a cell phone tower in order to suck up information from your phone. When the manufacturer, the Harris Corporation, applied for certification by the Federal Communications Commission, it requested that information about the technology be kept secret for both law enforcement purposes and to maintain its commercial “competitive interests.” As a result, police departments around the country signed non-disclosure agreements promising to conceal details about how the technology works—and even its mere existence—from defendants, courts, legislatures, and the public.

One man undid the secrecy scheme. When Daniel Rigmaiden was arrested for wire fraud and identity theft in 2008, he insisted that police must have used a secret device to beam “rays into his living room” and gather data about his location. After years representing himself pro se from a prison cell, he proved that he was right. He noticed a handwritten note with the word “Stingray” buried in his own 14,000-page court file. Internet searches for the term yielded a Harris Corporation brochure and a purchase order for the device from the police department that had arrested him. Some courts have since found that warrantless use of Stingray devices violates the Fourth Amendment—holdings that would have been impossible without Rigmaiden’s efforts. That means police spent years getting away with potentially unconstitutional Stingray searches and hiding their tracks with non-disclosure agreements.

Of course, not all secrecy is driven by profit. Some investigative methods must be kept under wraps to be effective. If anyone could predict IRS audits or airport security screenings, fraudsters and terrorists could avoid getting caught. The trouble is that the flip side is also true: excessive secrecy can let police evade accountability for illegal or unconstitutional methods. Proprietary technology makes this too easy: First, outsource policing techniques to private companies. Then, claim those techniques are trade secrets.

The use of predictive policing tools shows how this can occur. These computer systems use machine learning to forecast where crimes are likely to be committed. One leading vendor, PredPol, has refused for years to reveal certain details about how its system forecasts future crimes. Wanting to protect that information is understandable: the tool took six years to develop and now generates an estimated $5–6 million in annual revenue.

In January 2016, PredPol finally responded to public pressure and published a general description of its algorithm. That allowed independent researchers from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to re-implement and test it. They showed that applying the algorithm to police records could exacerbate past racially biased policing practices: even when crimes were spread evenly throughout a city, PredPol would home in on areas that were overrepresented in police databases, intensify policing in those same areas, then use the foreseeable spike in crime reports to justify its earlier predictions. The problem comes from the data, not the algorithm, but PredPol’s describing the algorithm publicly helped researchers to demonstrate the issue empirically.

That doesn’t mean we should never use machine learning systems; researchers are developing methods to audit, simplify, and try to reduce bias in predictive models. But it means that if courts allow the systems to be cloaked in secrecy, we may not be able to find the flaws, much less be able to fix them. What kinds of transparency we need most is a matter of technical debate. Trade secrets should play no role in determining the answer.

Once Glenn Rodríguez had figured out that a single survey response had swung his “prison misconduct” score from low to high, he sent a written complaint to a supervisor at Eastern. The “yes” response to question 19, he argued, was at odds with his exemplary behavioral record and was likely to hurt him at his next parole hearing, in January. Without COMPAS, his case for parole was nearly perfect. Question 19 was standing between him and freedom.

Rodríguez got farther than most people in his position. Thanks to the network of fellow inmates who shared their COMPAS scores, he was able to convince the rehabilitation coordinator that his score was inaccurate. “The question surrounding your disciplinary should be changed,” she wrote in a letter to Rodríguez last September. “Since you will be going to the Board in less than a year, we need to make sure the original one isn’t used.”

For Rodríguez, the next step was to wait. And wait. Despite the written assurances, no new COMPAS was provided. He sent letters to attorneys. (One arrived on my desk.) New Year’s came and went. He filed a formal complaint with the Inmate Grievance Resolution Committee. The score was never fixed.

There’s no question that we could use some innovation in the criminal justice domain. New technologies could help us find and convict criminals, exonerate the innocent, reduce human bias, and incarcerate fewer people. But recognizing the benefits of innovation does not require permitting developers to withhold their secrets from individual defendants. It’s one thing to argue that forcing companies to disclose trade secrets in public would hurt business and derail technological progress. It’s another to claim that making them share sensitive information with the accused and their defense team, in the controlled context of a criminal proceeding, would do the same.

The most common justification for withholding proprietary information from a defendant is that without that guarantee, innovative companies will be deterred from investing in new criminal justice technology or from selling existing products to the government. But it isn’t always clear that this concern is legitimate. Take TrueAllele, the probabilistic DNA testing software. Mark Perlin, who developed it, did not answer my requests for an interview. But he has submitted declarations to courts across the country explaining that allowing defendants, their attorneys, and defense expert witnesses to see his “source code would enable the reverse engineering of the TrueAllele technology, allowing others to learn the trade secrets that keep [his company] solvent.” Prosecutors have fallen in line with Perlin’s view. One warned a court that ordering the code disclosed to a defense team would be “financially devastating.”

But Perlin’s more transparent competitors appear to be doing just fine. TrueAllele’s main rival, a program called STRmix, which claims a 54 percent U.S. market share, has an official policy of providing defendants access to its source code, subject to a protective order. Its developer, John Buckleton, said that the key to his business success is not the code, but rather the training and support services the company provides for customers. “I’m committed to meaningful defense access,” he told me. He acknowledged the risk of leaks. “But we’re not going to reverse that policy because of it,” he said. “We’re just going to live with the consequences.”

And remember PredPol, the secretive developer of predictive policing software? HunchLab, one of PredPol’s key competitors, uses only open-source algorithms and code, reveals all of its input variables, and has shared models and training data with independent researchers. Jeremy Heffner, a HunchLab product manager and data scientist, explained why this makes business sense: only a tiny amount of the company’s time goes into its predictive model. The real value, he said, lies in gathering data and creating a secure, user-friendly interface.

HunchLab is not alone. In March, another start-up in the field, CivicScape, published its source code and examples of its input variables online. Publishing models and the actual data used to train them would be even better, but the disclosure was a step in the right direction.

The fact that competitors in the same field as products like TrueAllele and PredPol have no problem revealing details about their methods should make courts less willing to take a company’s word when it comes to the need for total secrecy. It’s too easy for claims about financial devastation to mask a more troubling motive: avoiding scrutiny. Developers of tools that a jurisdiction has already purchased may decide that they have nothing to gain from letting the defense poke holes in their software.

That explains why even governmental bodies have claimed trade secret protection. The New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has argued for years that the source code for a forensic software program that it developed itself, using public funds, should be privileged. This is absurd: the government has no legitimate commercial interest in keeping details about forensic technology from the defense. Yet the agency has won. Whether the motive is winning or profit, trade secrets can be abused as a way to keep the defense in the dark. (Last year, a federal judge finally ordered the city to turn over the program’s source code to one defendant; expert witnesses promptly discovered an undisclosed code function likely to aid prosecutors.)

Even when revealing a company’s techniques could spell economic ruin, there are already ways to protect them without barring the defense from examining the information. In the business world, companies working on a deal sign non-disclosure agreements promising not to misuse any valuable information that gets revealed as part of negotiations. In civil lawsuits, judges often order that proprietary information be shared subject to a protective order, which is like a non-disclosure agreement but with extra sanctions for a violation, such as being held in contempt of court. A federal judge in Delaware once even ordered Coca-Cola to hand over its secret formula in a contract dispute.

The same approach should work in criminal cases. It’s true that the protective order solution can fail. People cheat, especially in a cutthroat industry where only a few people know the technology and the opposing party’s expert witness could be a competitor. As some measure of these anxieties, Coca-Cola chose to concede certain disputed facts rather than comply with the Delaware court’s order.

But even in cases where legitimate business risks exist, withholding information from the accused is the wrong answer. Where a company’s business strategy falls on the secrecy-transparency spectrum should not limit the full array of arguments available to a criminal defendant. The law already lets businesses sue if someone steals their trade secret. While that might not be a foolproof solution, making up for any imperfections on the backs of the accused is unfair.

The Supreme Court has an opportunity in Loomis v. Wisconsin to rule that the Constitution forbids the government from taking life or liberty based on proprietary secrets. If the Court declines, state legislatures should lead the way by passing laws that direct criminal courts to safeguard valid trade secrets with a protective order and nothing more. It’s time to make clear that no one owns the means of decisionmaking in the criminal justice system.

It took weeks for me to get Glenn Rodríguez on the phone. Coordinating collect calls, dialing restrictions, and scheduling from a maximum-security prison takes work. A few times, we narrowly missed each other. Finally, in mid-March, another colleague emailed to say he was on the line and I dashed into her office to speak with him.

No one had granted his COMPAS reassessment, he said. He had gone in front of the parole board again in January 2017 with the same “high risk” score. “I went in there feeling confident about my accomplishments,” he told me. “I said, even though the score is high for my prison misconduct, I know that score doesn’t represent who I am. I was a different person now, and that would shine through.” The hearing started out like a trial, with the commissioners focused in uncomfortable detail on the crime he had committed a quarter century before. Then, Rodríguez recalled, it shifted. “You’re forty-three,” one commissioner said. “You were sixteen. You’re still young. You still have the opportunity to rebuild your life. We’d like to give you that opportunity.”

Rodríguez made parole. He would leave Eastern with 110 college credits from Bard University and a plan to finish his degree and go to graduate school for social work or public health. I asked him if he had any final words on his experience with COMPAS.

“Guys are seeing that pretty much one question can skew the whole thing,” he said. “Why is it that there’s so much secrecy surrounding this? This is evidence that’s being used against you. They are making a determination on a person’s life on the basis of this evidence. So you should have a right to challenge it.”

The post Code of Silence appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Eric Christopher is the kind of young, gifted, committed teacher that any principal would want to hire. A straight-A student from a public high school on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he gave up a chance for an Ivy League education to take care of his sick mother and attend nearby Washington College, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 2006. He spent the next seven years at a public elementary school near his hometown, teaching the Spanish-speaking children of agricultural and poultry workers while earning a master’s degree in bilingual education. But opportunities to advance were mostly based on teacher seniority, the pay was low, and he was eager for a fresh challenge in a new environment. So, in 2013, he moved to the big city—Washington, D.C.

The nation’s capital had become something of a magnet for well-educated, idealistic young teachers like Christopher, many of them drawn to the rapidly expanding network of public charter schools. Some 43 percent of D.C. students were enrolled in charters in 2013, up from less than 15 percent a decade earlier. Many of these schools, with names like DC Prep, KIPP DC, and Achievement Prep, were earning attention for their innovative strategies and strong results. Foundations heaped money onto them, and the young talent entering teaching through prestigious pipelines like Teach for America were keen to work in the schools.

After moving to Washington, Christopher quickly got hired at one of the city’s oldest and largest charter schools, the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy. But not long after he started, reports surfaced that would lead to the indictment of the school’s founder for embezzlement. (The school has since reopened as a non-charter public school.) Christopher found himself planning his departure from Height only a year after arriving.

After that discouraging experience at a public charter, Christopher decided to check out openings in the city’s traditional schools, run by the District of Columbia Public Schools system. To say that DCPS had a poor reputation would be an understatement—the national media had long labeled it one of the worst school districts in the nation. But as Christopher spent time on the DCPS website, he saw opportunities for high-performing teachers to become instructional coaches—just what he was looking for.

He applied, and was surprised by the rigor of the hiring process—much tougher than what he had experienced in previous teaching jobs. He was judged on a video of his teaching, his analysis of another teacher’s instruction, a written test on teaching strategies, and multiple rounds of interviews with central office staff. Once he had run that gauntlet, his name was posted to a central candidate bank where principals, who had the final say in staffing their schools, could choose to follow up.

Several did, but one in particular impressed Christopher. His name was Eric Bethel, principal of Turner Elementary School, located in one of the city’s poorest southeastern neighborhoods, seven miles and a world away from the White House.

It was a hot Friday afternoon in late August when Christopher, who has the close-cropped hair and slight build of a long-distance runner, arrived at the school for his interview. He was sweating in a suit and tie. Bethel, wearing a Turner T-shirt over a dress shirt and suit pants, and the assistant principal, Lisa Rosado, put him at ease with a warm welcome. Bethel asked about Christopher’s background, teaching philosophy, and experience working with impoverished students. It quickly became clear to Christopher that Bethel was as serious as he was sociable—“clearly a man on a mission,” he would later recall. Bethel, then thirty-seven years old and new to Turner, was open about the school’s difficulties. Ninety-seven percent of its students were black, and 88 percent received public assistance. Test scores were among the lowest in the district. But Bethel expressed infectious excitement about assembling a new team of teachers and his commitment to working closely with them to turn the school around.

Bethel was equally impressed with Christopher, especially his commitment to the school’s mission. “This is really tough work,” Bethel would later say. “If you’re not driven by a sense of social justice, you’re not going to last.” At the end of the ninety-minute meeting, he told the candidate to let him know if he heard from other schools. Not taking any chances, he emailed Christopher an offer early Sunday morning. Christopher accepted.

Turner used to be the type of school where many teachers ended up because they couldn’t get jobs elsewhere. But after three years there, Christopher, now thirty-two, has no regrets. During two long Saturday-morning conversations at a high-end coffee shop in an up-and-coming neighborhood near Nationals Park, he explained why he loves his work. Today, he said, there is a “strong sense of professionalism, a sense that we’re a team.” Thanks to his own strong performance over two years as a teacher and instructional coach, Christopher is earning $127,000, more than double what he was making on the Eastern Shore.

After decades of dismal academic results, Turner has begun to change the educational equation in its classrooms. The percentage of students reading at or above grade level has risen from 23 percent in early 2014–15 to 60 percent today. Suspensions are down from 13 percent of the student body to 5 percent. And despite intense competition from charter schools, its enrollment is up 32 percent since Bethel’s arrival, to 520 students.

Turner’s nascent resurgence reflects progress in the DCPS system as a whole. Daily attendance has reached 90 percent, up from 85 percent in 2010–11. Chronic truancy is down by nearly 40 percent over the past four years. Graduation rates have climbed to 69 percent, the highest in the city’s history.

And student achievement has begun a long climb toward respectability. While Washington’s test scores have traditionally been among the lowest in the nation, the percentage of fourth graders achieving math proficiency has more than doubled on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the past decade, as have the percentages of eighth graders proficient in math and fourth graders proficient in reading. Scores have risen even after accounting for an influx of wealthier students. And DCPS has caught up to the middle of the pack of other urban school districts at the fourth-grade level on the national exams.

In addition, the school system’s strongest teachers are no longer leaving in droves for charter schools. In many cases, the flow has been reversed, leaving even Washington’s most prominent charters struggling to compete for talent.

When most people think of school reform in the District of Columbia, they probably remember the Time magazine cover photo of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee with a broom in her hand and a hard look on her face. In leading the school system from 2007 to 2010, she was the polarizing public image of a controversial national strategy to improve public education by cracking down on bad teachers. But in the seven years since Rhee left Washington—and with the national press having turned its attention elsewhere—Rhee’s successors have quietly but persistently continued to pursue change. Teaching in D.C., and in public education generally, had long been a low-status occupation marked by weak standards and factory-like work rules. Building on Rhee’s early work, and learning from her mistakes, her successors have effectively transformed it into a performance-based profession that provides recognition, responsibility, collegiality, support, and significant compensation—features that policy experts, including many of Rhee’s harshest critics, have long sought but never fully achieved.

Ironically, Rhee’s successors at DCPS have redesigned teaching through some of the very policies that teachers’ unions and other Rhee adversaries opposed most strongly: comprehensive teacher evaluations, the abandonment of seniority-based staffing, and performance-based promotions and compensation. They combined these with other changes, like more collaboration among teachers, that these same critics had backed. Just as notably, the transformation is taking place not at charters but in the traditional public school system, an institution that many reformers have written off as too hidebound to innovate.

The story about D.C.’s teacher reform efforts since Michelle Rhee’s departure has gone untold until now. One reason is that her successors have sought to escape the media glare of the Rhee era; they haven’t presented the press with natural protagonists. Another is that amid the trench warfare that the school reform debate has settled into in recent years, with the liberal-left and unions rallying around traditional schools, and moderates and conservatives supporting charter schools, neither side has had an interest in promoting the story.

But in the course of research I have been doing on teacher reform nationwide, I have followed DCPS’s evolving human capital system, interviewing senior school system officials and watching reforms play out in Washington schools. What I’ve found is a story that confounds the traditional battle lines in public education, and gives each side in the school reform war reason both to cheer and to rethink its assumptions.

Eric Bethel knows firsthand what the District’s school system was like before the era of reform. His parents, D.C. natives and part of the city’s accomplished black middle class, were public school teachers before and after his father served two decades in the U.S. Army, eventually as a captain in the 82nd Airborne Division. They moved back to Washington for Bethel’s high school years, and after graduating from a local Catholic school, playing point guard for Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, and earning a master’s degree, Bethel decided to follow the family tradition and apply for a teaching job in the D.C. area.

He was hired at Marie Reed Elementary School, part of DCPS, after a ten-minute interview at a folding table in the school gym. “Back then, if you had a pulse, you got a job,” he told me during one of several visits I made to Turner this year. On his first day, his colleagues walked out of a staff meeting, with the principal in midsentence, at exactly 3:30, the union-negotiated end of the teachers’ school day.

Bethel’s early experiences were emblematic of DCPS’s myriad failings. The patronage-plagued central office couldn’t calculate daily attendance, much less educate students. New hires often didn’t get paid for months. New textbooks gathered dust in warehouses while there weren’t enough to go around in classrooms. Elementary schools mostly didn’t teach art or music. High school electives were rare. And the system was hemorrhaging students to charter schools.

Low pay made it hard for D.C. teachers to live in the city and forced many to take second jobs. When Bethel sought to take advantage of a federal home subsidy program called Teacher Next Door, he tried repeatedly to get documentation from the school system’s central office to verify his teaching status. It never arrived.

In the absence of a common curriculum and citywide teaching standards, instruction in many classrooms was a steady diet of work sheets and other drudgery. “You were never sure what, or how, you should teach,” Bethel said.

Bethel had been at Marie Reed for seven years when Washington’s thirty-six-year-old mayor, Adrian Fenty, named Michelle Rhee chancellor, the day after a desperate city council shifted control of the school system from an elected school board to the mayor’s office. Rhee was the seventh chancellor in a decade. Many commentators characterized her as a tough-talking but inexperienced outsider, an ingénue with an attitude. In truth, she had been working closely with D.C. school officials for nearly a decade as the founder of the New Teacher Project (now TNTP), a national organization conceived by Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp to help urban school systems recruit more talented teachers by skirting the traditional education school pipeline. It was Kopp who recommended Rhee to Fenty. To Rhee, higher-quality teachers were key to exploding the notion that poor kids couldn’t learn—to proving, in her words, that “demography is not destiny.”

She realized that she first had to get a clearer sense of the talent in the city’s classrooms. While upward of 90 percent of Washington’s students were performing below grade level the year before Rhee arrived, 95 percent of the city’s teachers had earned “satisfactory” ratings. Rhee quickly resolved to build a new evaluation system that made performance matter.

Kaya Henderson, who had been Teach for America’s D.C. director and then managed Rhee’s New Teacher Project work in the city, supervised the project as the new chancellor’s chief of human capital. She worked with Jason Kamras, a Princeton graduate who had arrived in Washington a decade earlier through Teach for America and stayed, becoming the national Teacher of the Year in 2005–06.

At the beginning of the 2009–10 school year, Henderson and Kamras launched the most comprehensive teacher measurement system ever implemented in public education. It set citywide teaching standards for the first time ever. In the past, principals would spend a few minutes in teachers’ classrooms every year, looking mostly for quiet students and clean blackboards. Under the new system, every teacher would be observed five times a year—three times by the administrators in their schools and twice by “master educators” from the central office who would provide an independent check on principals’ ratings. Teachers would be gauged on their “commitment to the school community,” such as their contributions to school priorities like lowering suspension rates, and on student performance on nonstandardized assessments, like science projects, known as “student learning objectives.” Principals could dock teachers for chronic absenteeism and other failures of “core professionalism.”

But Henderson also wanted teachers to be measured on their students’ standardized test scores, to send a clear signal that performance mattered. Strategies for fairly comparing teachers with students of varying backgrounds were both complex and imperfect. Undeterred, Henderson ordered that student test scores make up 50 percent of teachers’ ratings if they taught tested subjects and grades. That turned out to be only 15 percent of the school system’s teaching force, but the move stoked anxiety and resentment throughout the city’s teaching ranks.

Rhee’s team deepened teachers’ angst by not piloting the new teacher evaluation system—dubbed IMPACT—despite the fact that many principals weren’t sufficiently trained to use it and that teachers in some schools weren’t briefed on IMPACT until after the school year started. The need for the new system was too great to delay, Henderson argued. Suddenly, teachers were confronted by a new, untested evaluation strategy they barely grasped, with their livelihoods on the line.

Bethel saw the drama play out at Marie Reed. “People were panicked about losing their jobs,” he said. “Everyone thought IMPACT was aimed at getting rid of veterans.” Later, he would spend two years rating teachers as a master educator, often taking part in difficult conversations with teachers distraught at the performance reviews he gave them.

But Bethel supported IMPACT. “I liked the new teaching standards that were a part of the new system,” he said. “And I was tired of looking down the hall at Mr. Johnson teaching work sheets five days a week to his fourth-grade class, knowing that I would have to catch them up the next year in my class.” He was among the 663 of Washington’s 4,195 teachers rated “highly effective” when IMPACT’s first scores were released in July 2010. Seventy-five teachers were labeled “ineffective” and received termination letters with their scores.

The firings brought opposition to Rhee to a boil. Early on, she had gotten rid of dozens of untenured teachers for sleeping in class and other misbehavior. She had removed 250 teachers and 500 teacher’s aides for lacking proper teaching credentials. Within weeks of rolling out IMPACT, she had announced that budget cuts required her to lay off another 266 teachers. She had fired a quarter of the city’s principals, including the one at her daughters’ school; she even showed one principal the door in front of a PBS camera. She had announced the closing of twenty-three under-enrolled schools without telling anyone at the schools ahead of time. And she had declared in a speech at the National Press Club that consensus building and compromise were “totally overrated.”

Now, she was firing veteran teachers for ineffective teaching—something that had virtually never happened in public education. The nation’s teachers’ unions deployed every ounce of their considerable influence against her. The story became a cable news staple. Rhee was so controversial that the Gates Foundation refused to include D.C. in a $500 million national study to measure teaching effectiveness.

Ultimately, she cost Adrian Fenty, her patron, his political career.

Rhee was firing Washington’s predominantly black educators during the height of one of the worst recessions in the nation’s history. The city’s majority black voters held Fenty, himself black, directly responsible. He lost the September 2010 Democratic primary in a landslide. With a primary victory tantamount to election in the overwhelmingly Democratic city, Rhee resigned in October—but not before another magazine cover, this time Newsweek’s, trumpeted her plans to launch a $100 million anti–teachers’ union lobbying organization called StudentsFirst.

Even in defeat, Rhee couldn’t shake controversy. In March 2011, USA Today ran a front-page story headlined “When Standardized Test Scores Soared in D.C., Were the Gains Real?,” an examination of suspected Rhee-era cheating. The problem turned out to be concentrated in a few schools, and investigations found no evidence of widespread cheating. But the incident cemented the conventional wisdom that teacher reform in Washington was mostly about test scores, and mostly misguided.

In the wake of Rhee’s departure and the controversy that enveloped her, the school system worked hard to stay out of the spotlight that Rhee had welcomed. Kaya Henderson, Rhee’s successor, would largely refuse to talk to the national media at the outset of her nearly six-year tenure as chancellor, which ended last September.

But rather than abandon her predecessor’s commitment to teacher reform, Henderson doubled down. She was smoother around the edges than Rhee, but just as driven. She had spent her early years in public housing just north of the Bronx as the only child of a single mother who was a public educator by day and a postal worker by night. After attending public and parochial schools, she went on to Georgetown University and then back to the Bronx to teach. School reform was personal for her.

[media-credit name=”Pete Marovich” align=”alignright” width=”415″][/media-credit]

Before becoming chancellor, she had led bruising negotiations with the teachers’ union on a new contract that ended a wide range of industrial-era employment practices. In exchange for a 22 percent salary hike for many teachers, the new deal, inked months before Rhee departed, stripped senior teachers’ right to claim vacancies; made performance, rather than seniority, the key factor in layoffs; and effectively ended teacher tenure.

It also scrapped public education’s sacrosanct “single salary schedule”—paying teachers strictly on the basis of their academic credentials and longevity in the classroom—in favor of performance pay. “Minimally effective” teachers would be frozen on the salary scale. But their “highly effective” counterparts would qualify for bonuses and permanent hikes that lifted Washington’s top teachers’ salaries from $87,000 to $132,000.

With the new teacher evaluation system and financial incentives in place, Henderson and her team launched projects to recruit and retain high-caliber teachers, like Eric Christopher, who in the past had mostly shunned the troubled urban school system. It wouldn’t help much to fire bad teachers if they couldn’t replace them with better ones.

Under the leadership of a young Stanford graduate and Rhodes Scholar on Kamras’s team named Scott Thompson, they constructed a “career ladder” based on experience and performance that would provide teachers a range of new opportunities, and higher pay, as they moved up. The important and lucrative work of teaching summer school, for example, would go to the city’s best teachers, rather than merely to the most senior ones.

Henderson revamped teacher recruitment, pouring people and money into marketing D.C. schools to 15,000 urban traditional and charter public school teachers in the Washington region and nationally—a move that prompted local charter school leaders to complain to Henderson and to take their teachers’ email addresses off
their websites.

Meanwhile, the IMPACT system was producing vast amounts of previously unavailable data. For example, Henderson and Jason Kamras, her successor as chief of human capital, learned from studying the ratings that teachers hired by May were 20 percent more effective than those hired in August. So they pressed principals to push up their hiring timelines. University of Michigan researchers discovered that teachers hired under the new, centralized teacher-screening system, called TeachDC, produced sharply higher IMPACT scores than those recruited by principals directly. Henderson and Kamras began marketing TeachDC heavily to principals.

The moves made a difference. Today, three times as many recruits are under contract by the end of the previous school year, more new hires have previous teaching experience, and university research has found that replacements for low-rated teachers produced four or five months’ worth of additional student learning in math and nearly as much in reading over three school years.

Henderson and Kamras worked just as hard to keep top talent from leaving. Beyond the better pay and the career ladder, they made changes to IMPACT to get more teacher buy-in, including reducing the influence of student test scores on teacher ratings. They revamped the central office to better support teachers. They also established the Teacher Retention Team, which feted high performers with personalized thank-you notes, leadership opportunities, membership in the Chancellor’s Teacher Cabinet, and an annual black-tie event at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts complete with Grammy-winning entertainers and a rooftop dinner for 2,000.

The retention strategies paid off. While charter schools and surrounding suburbs once poached Washington talent with impunity, the city last year lost only 6 percent of its top-rated educators, even as “highly effective” teachers grew to 37 percent of the teaching force. That contrasted sharply with the 49 percent attrition rate among teachers rated “minimally effective,” who made up 4 percent of the force.

Even as Henderson and Kamras upgraded their talent pool, they realized that they couldn’t produce the student improvement they wanted with pink slips and thank-you notes alone; they had to ratchet up the performance of the entire teaching force. Brian Pick, another Princeton graduate and TFA veteran in the DCPS central office, worked with dozens of the city’s highest-performing teachers to craft entirely new reading, math, and writing curricula based on the demanding Common Core State Standards. After watching teachers struggle to deliver the new subject matter effectively, Pick’s team created sample lessons for every subject at every grade level to give teachers models, again with the help of the school system’s leading teachers.

Last summer, Henderson and Kamras went further, assigning teachers to learning teams in every school to deliver a comprehensive new teacher-training curriculum. These “LEAP” teams—short for “Learning Together to Advance our Practice”—are weekly ninety-minute sessions, led by subject-matter expert teachers and administrators, in which faculty work together to hone their teaching techniques, deepen their subject-matter knowledge, and review student work and school data. The sessions are followed up with weekly informal observations in every classroom, giving teachers regular feedback without the high stakes attached to IMPACT. It’s the kind of collaboration and support that many public school teachers, isolated in their classrooms, have long asked for but rarely gotten. As Turner reading teacher and seventeen-year DCPS veteran Ericka Logan put it, “Now it feels like people care about our work.”

Henderson and her team also worked to produce stronger school leaders, because research showed that lousy principals were a big reason why top teachers departed. In 2013, Eric Bethel, after his two-year tour as an
IMPACT master educator, became one of the first trainees in the school system’s new eighteen-month principal apprenticeship program, serving in two elementary schools before taking over Turner Elementary.

Turner is a standard-issue-looking public elementary school dating to the Truman administration—a rectangular, three-story redbrick building with a small gym and a cafeteria that doubles as an auditorium. Its classrooms are bright and stocked with attractive new furniture; the gym floor shines, thanks to a renovation the year before Bethel arrived. The din of young children at play rises during recess from brightly colored playground equipment, a basketball court, and an adjacent sports field.

It could be any school in the country, except for the fact that it is surrounded by often-troubled housing projects. Some of the aging, low-slung redbrick housing units have been replaced in recent years by suburban-like townhouses with a vaguely Tudor look. But as Bethel told me on one of the days I visited, “They look a lot better than what’s going on inside of them.” One day in March, as students were leaving at the end of the day, two men in a BMW were raked by automatic-weapon fire five blocks from Turner and crashed their car just outside the school’s entrance. One of the men died.

I sat with Bethel in his office near the end of a school day just before Thanksgiving, talking about a veteran teacher who had vowed that Bethel would burn in hell for giving her a low IMPACT rating during his two years working out of the DCPS central office as a teacher-evaluator. “It was tough work,” he told me, as his walkie-
talkie crackled. “Especially when teachers are working hard but just aren’t effective.” Two big picture windows opened onto the playground, with bands of the city’s townhouses visible in the middle distance. There was a picture of Bethel’s wife and four-year-old son on his desk; on a bulletin board hung a note from a second grader addressed to “the best principle ever.”

When the bell rang sounding dismissal at the end of the day, we walked into the hallway as orderly rows of young students in blue or white polo shirts and khaki pants moved down either side of the hallway, backpacks bulging behind them. Just under six feet tall and dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and pale blue tie, Bethel put his arm around students who paused to say goodbye, addressing them by their names and wishing them a good day in a calm, caring voice.

As students filed past the front security desk to parents and guardians waiting outside, many other adults were entering the building headed in the opposite direction. They were there for the school’s monthly food bank. I watched some 300 students, more than half the school’s enrollment, along with relatives, many of them grandparents pushing strollers, snake through Turner’s gym, filling brightly colored shopping bags with fruit, vegetables, and other basics supplied by a local nonprofit, as City Year volunteers dressed as giant fruit serenaded the kids.

While the food bank was concluding, Bethel and a team of Turner’s math teachers were gathering for an after-school LEAP session around a modern, maple-veneer table in the school’s “professional development room,” a converted second-floor classroom. Assistant principal Rosado, Eric Christopher, and other teacher leaders were also at the table. The school’s latest math results were projected on an interactive whiteboard behind them.

Bethel, pitched forward in his seat with his elbows on the table, jumped into a review of spreadsheets that showed a lot more red, for students below grade level, than green, for those at grade level. The new results were from tests used to help with instruction rather than rate teachers under IMPACT. But Bethel stressed that the interim scores were highly correlated with the city’s new standardized exams and urged the teachers to track their students’ results closely.

“We’ve got to do better with ST Math,” he told the teachers at one point, concerned that the self-paced instructional software that supplements teachers’ instruction was underused. Simple things like logging young children on to their computers proved challenging and cut into instructional time, the teachers responded.

After more discussion of the new results, Bethel turned the meeting over to instructional coach Jessica Johnson, who led a LEAP seminar on the most productive ways of having students do math problems in class. Johnson started by talking about ways to ensure that students grasp what’s being asked of them in word problems. “Ask students to read the question aloud together,” she suggested. “Or have them turn and talk about the problem with the person next to them. Other ideas? Yes, Ms. Gilbeaux?”

“Manipulatives and other visual aids are often helpful,” Janeé Gilbeaux, a second-grade teacher, offered.

“Scaffolding is key,” added Bethel, who had been tracking Johnson’s presentation closely. “You have to make sure students understand what the problem is asking of them and keep adding more levels of explanation until they get it.”

The session continued in this vein—Johnson presenting information followed by a back-and-forth conversation about the nuts and bolts of educating young math students—for two and a half hours. By the time the meeting ended, it was nearly six p.m. and dark outside. As the teachers made their way to the parking lot, it was hard not to be struck by the difference between the culture at Turner and the one that, years ago, had led Bethel’s colleagues to walk out on their principal at precisely 3:30.

There’s no doubt that the school reform stars aligned in Washington over the past decade. There was a rare infusion of talent in the central office; stable leadership enabled by mayoral control of city schools; freedom from key collective bargaining obstacles; and substantial funding, first from grants, then from savings from improvements in the city’s special education system.

By no means is every Washington teacher happy with the reforms and a handful of DCPS schools struggle with teachers leaving during the school year. Teaching in neighborhoods like Turner’s is stressful; Turner’s teacher absenteeism rate is higher than Bethel would like, and a handful of DCPS schools struggle with teachers leaving during the school year. Some principals have been less fully committed to the reforms than Bethel has. The quality of the implementation of the new LEAP initiative has varied from school to school, according to Bridget Hamre, a University of Virginia researcher who is studying the effort.

And despite academic gains, the school system still has a very long way to go. Achievement levels among Hispanic and black students, who make up 82 percent of enrollment, lag badly behind their white peers. Only 15 percent of black students scored “proficient” in reading last year on Washington’s new, more demanding, Common Core–aligned exams, compared to 74 percent of white students.

Still, the transformation of the teaching profession in the nation’s capital has demonstrated that traditional public school systems, not just charter schools, can be laboratories of innovation. And the reforms that the school system’s detractors have opposed most strongly have been central to the transformation. Creating the opportunities to advance within the profession, the substantial compensation incentives, and the culture of collegiality and continuous improvement that LEAP provides would have been next to impossible without abandoning seniority-based staffing, without performance-based pay and a career ladder, and, ultimately, without knowing who is doing a good job in the city’s classrooms and who isn’t.

Henderson, Kamras, and their colleagues have proved that it’s possible to attract talented teachers to the nation’s urban school systems and get them to stay. Teaching can be turned into attractive work with career opportunities, professional support, and substantial pay. No school system can simply wave a wand and overcome the impact of poverty on the students it serves. But by overhauling its teaching corps and teachers’ daily lives in schools, DCPS has given its students a far better chance than they had before. And it has created an important reform blueprint for other leaders to follow.

The post Hot for Teachers appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I was flat on my back staring in terror at the hall ceiling, like a turtle some malicious child had upended. I couldn’t move my arms or legs. My wife, Nancy, heard me cry out. She came running and saw me floundering at the foot of the stairs, where I had fallen midway through my morning exercises.

“Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” Nancy said in a panicked tone of voice. She frantically dialed 911. In a matter of moments, I heard a siren come to a high-pitched halt outside. Several black-clothed, heavy-booted first responders came stampeding up the stairs to our house. The one in charge leaned over me. His face hovered above mine like a harvest moon.

“Can you hear me?” he bellowed.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good! Don’t move a muscle,” he commanded.

He said something to his partner. She disappeared and returned with what looked like a large valise. I heard it click, a metallic clang, and next thing I knew my head was being screwed in place with what felt like a vice. They placed me on a stretcher. Although I could feel my body tipping from side to side as they navigated the landing and the stairs, my head remained absolutely fixed.

I found myself surprised at how cold the outside air felt. I heard the back of an ambulance open. The stretcher slid inside. Someone got in with me. Someone else slammed the doors shut. All I could hear were noises from a game playing on a cell phone. I remember staring at the ceiling wondering why the lights were so bright.

Such small thoughts for so large an event. I couldn’t focus on the big picture—that here I was, at the age of seventy-eight, a professor of linguistics at MIT, a jazz trombonist, a father and husband who was possibly staring at my very last moments on earth. I thought I might never see Nancy or my children again.

I certainly had no idea that I was about to be plunged into the heart of the nation’s medical industrial system, in which I would experience firsthand the downsides of some of the most highly regarded health care organizations in America, and the wondrous sides of one of the most pilloried, the Veterans Administration.

“Where do you want us to take him?” the driver asked.

“Mass General,” Nancy replied, referring to Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospital, Massachusetts General.

“Good choice,” he said.

The ambulance coasted to a stop, and the rear doors flew open. I was wheeled through to a brightly lit cubicle. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a doctor. I think his name was Liu. He told me he was a spinal cord injury doctor. He used the initials—SCI—and I couldn’t work out what they stood for. I was preoccupied with the wish that someone would put a bullet in my head. Another doctor was asking me a question.

“If you have a heart attack,” he said, “do you want us to try to resuscitate you?”

Why is he picking now to ask such a question? 

“If you get pneumonia,” he pressed on, “do you want us to intubate you?”

Then it dawned on me. While I’m still alive, he wants to know how I want to die. My questioner had his reasons. After all, if it turned out that I lived but couldn’t answer questions, then Nancy would be stuck with a vegetable.

I have no recollection of what happened next. I woke up the following day in an intensive care unit. A casually dressed young man wearing no identification was waiting in the room. He introduced himself as Kris Kahle.

“You’re the neurosurgeon everyone genuflects to?” Nancy asked in a surprised voice.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirty-seven,” he said, smiling.

Kris told us that he and his colleagues were debating whether to operate tomorrow or wait. In the end it was decided that I would go under the knife in two days.

I spent thirteen hours in the operating room for two operations. The first lasted nine and a half hours. It seems that for a very long time my spinal column had been abnormally narrowing from a kind of degenerative arthritis known as Forestier’s disease, or DISH (diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis). The ligaments connecting the cervical vertebrae in my neck were slowly becoming calcified. No one seems to know the exact cause, and there is no cure.

A normal spinal column is about fifteen millimeters in diameter; mine had shrunk to about seven or eight millimeters. In addition, my spine was riddled with bone spurs, and those at the top of the column had hammered my cord like tiny mallets when I fell. Kris Kahle said it was “the crappiest spinal column” he had ever seen.

The first operation involved exposing my spinal column from the base of my skull to about the middle of my shoulder blades. The surgeons shaved away as much as they could of the excess bone that had barnacled it, thereby relieving the pressure on my spinal cord. When they finished, they installed two rods to shore up what they had scaled down.

That the American health system is capable of such high-tech surgery is truly a wonder, and Mass General does it better than just about any hospital in the world. It’s also pretty remarkable that it’s not just the super-rich who have access to such miracles of modern medicine. Even though far too many Americans lack health insurance, most middle-class Americans, including a retired college professor like myself, have insurance that will pay for most of the cost of these procedures.

Yet as the rest of my story illustrates, even though my insurance covered a world-class surgical team at a world-
renowned hospital, it was nowhere near enough to guarantee that I would be able to sidestep a very real risk of being physically and financially ruined by the inadequacies of the American health care system. As it turned out, I was very lucky. I got the safe, coordinated, long-term care I desperately needed after my surgery from just about the last place I would have expected to find it: the VA. For most Americans, unfortunately, that’s just not an option.

My first operation went well, but I acquired an infection as a result of it. This is a big problem in the American health care system. About 150,000 Americans are infected by inpatient surgeries every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. It’s apparently a bigger problem at Mass General than at other facilities. In 2015—the most recent year for which data is available—the hospital’s rate of surgical site infections was 73 percent worse than the national average.

The infection turned the area around my incision spongy. The surgeons went in to cut out the affected tissue, but then a further complication ensued. During the surgery, they discovered a tear in my meninges—the membrane that separates the skull from the brain. This had resulted in the leakage of cerebrospinal fluid, and the liquid itself had become infected. Had this gone on undetected, my brain would have sunk inside my skull. The tear was located close to bone, which meant that it was going to be very difficult to mend with sutures. After much debate, Kris and his colleagues decided to cover the tear with muscle fiber held in place with glue.

After my first operation at Mass General, a team of doctors—sundry members of the neurosurgical staff, residents, and fellows—streamed into my room every morning. It was comforting to see them all there, gazing down at me, intent on my well-being.

But not all my visitors were so welcome. One day a doctor I didn’t know came into the room, introduced himself, and, without preamble, told me that, while the operation was a success, I would never walk again.

Fuck you, I thought. Aloud, I said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I know it isn’t what you want to hear,” he said in a consoling way. “But it’s best to be realistic in situations like yours.”

I have never understood why he felt the need to be “realistic.” I learned later that the nurse on duty had overheard the conversation and given him hell when he left the room.

While I was at Mass General, I was, for all intents and purposes, paralyzed. I couldn’t feed myself, and for a time I could not eat. I had to be force-fed with a tube that went up into my nose and down into my esophagus. My bladder wasn’t working, so I had to be catheterized. Pushing a foreign object—in this case the plastic tube of the catheter—into my bladder every six hours also creates a serious risk of infection, even if it’s done properly. Data shows that Mass General is 43 percent less likely to infect its patients by this means than the average American hospital—but that statistic didn’t mean I was spared. E. coli bacteria spread through my bladder.

At the time, I had no idea how dire my condition was. Nancy, who kept copious notes, told me later that my caregivers did not expect me to survive the bacterial onslaught I suffered after the first operation. She also told me about the pain I experienced. It was this account that surprised me the most, because I couldn’t recall it later. I spent my days floating in and out of opiate-induced dreams, and being shuttled back and forth between the intensive care unit and a regular room, depending on the state of the two infections. Thirty-three days later, after I finally recovered, the doctors pronounced that I was ready to be moved to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, in Charlestown.

U.S. News & World Report ranks Spaulding as the fifth-best rehab hospital in the nation. Indeed, it is a marvel of modern hospital construction, light and airy, with lots of glass and shiny metal, gleaming floors, and murals of aquamarine abstracts meant to connect the interior with Boston Harbor, just outside. An atrium-like gymnasium with floor-to-ceiling windows contains state-of-the-art body-rebuilding equipment. I have never seen a hospital so invitingly designed.

Unbeknownst to my medical team, or to me, when I entered Spaulding my intestines were riddled with yet another hospital-acquired infection. This time it was Clostridium difficile, more familiarly known as C. diff. More than half a million hospital patients are infected with C. diff each year in the United States, and about 29,000 die within thirty days of initial diagnosis, according to the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The bacterium lives in the gut and, in normal amounts, causes no problems. But when you have to take heavy-duty antibiotics after major surgery, they can knock out all the good bacteria in your gut that normally keep C. diff in check.

C. diff is very contagious and can spread like wildfire in a hospital. A patient is typically prescribed the antibiotic
Flagyl and quarantined for a month. Flagyl usually kills the C. diff bacteria but can also cause side effects, including the growth of a fungus in a condition called thrush. My tongue was coated with a thick milky-white substance that had the consistency of Greek yogurt, and I couldn’t stand the sight of food. I became so sick from my C. diff infection that for three weeks I was just taking up space instead of getting the kind of therapy Spaulding is famous for. I was so weak, I kept falling asleep in the middle of sessions, and I could only receive therapy in my room, using equipment that could be sterilized afterward.

The unfortunate consequence of all this was that by the time I had finally gotten the C. diff and thrush out of me, it was time for Spaulding to look seriously into the question of getting me out of Spaulding.

I had come face-to-face with one of the huge problems at the heart of the U.S. health care system: the “length of stay” issue. Most Americans don’t realize this, but neither Medicare nor most standard private insurance policies will cover the full cost of staying at a rehabilitation unit like Spaulding beyond twenty days, and won’t pay anything at all beyond 100 days. If you deplete your savings or have a very low income, you may meet the means test for Medicaid and find a nursing home that takes Medicaid patients. But quality nursing homes generally do not, and there is no entitlement for long-term support and services provided in the home.

This means that just about anyone of any age who has a need for long-term support and services—whether they’ve broken their back, fractured their hip, or suffered a traumatic brain injury, or have just become too frail or forgetful to manage at home without help—is left to dangle slowly in the wind. At the moment, some twelve million Americans are left dangling—44  percent of them under the age of sixty-five. Approximately half of all Americans age sixty-five and over will need long-term care before they leave this earth, and an estimated one in seven will face medical bills exceeding more than $250,000 for the cost of such care.

I didn’t yet know all that at the time, however. I thought I was basically alone in going through this experience, and my biggest worry was about being a burden to Nancy. I couldn’t see subjecting my wife to a regimen of bowel management for her husband that would turn her from a life partner into a caregiver. Although it was much too early, I began to contemplate drastic measures, like a colostomy bag. I knew virtually nothing about the operation, so when one of the ranking doctors came in, I asked him what he thought of a colostomy. “I think it’s a great idea,” he said unhesitatingly. “Shall I schedule you for an operation now?” He took a step toward the door, taking me by surprise. I had expected him to say something like “Why do you ask?” or “Let’s go over the pros and cons.” Instead, he did that quickstep toward the door.

After he left, I raised the question with two of the nurses who tended me, and both of them were adamant about it being much too early. They said I needed more time to see which way the wind was blowing. They spoke to me the way I had expected the doctor to. This was the moment when I first realized the importance of having a care coordinator. Shouldn’t someone who knew my case be raising questions instead of me?

Meanwhile, because I was so weak and helpless, I had to worry about another reality. Since I could barely move, let alone raise my voice, the call bell attached to my hospital bed was my only connection to the world outside my room. It was a long, beaded, bendable tube that looked a bit like an Indian peace pipe. When I blew into the mouthpiece, it sounded a bell at the nurses’ station. The device was fixed to the side of my bed with a clamp, its mouthpiece positioned close enough to my lips that I could reach it by lifting my head slightly. The problem was that as each night wore on, the pipe would gradually sink toward my chest and fall hopelessly out of reach.

One night around two a.m., I awoke to find my right hand jammed under my chin, the result of muscle spasms that come with spinal cord injuries. My wrist hurt like hell, and, to my horror, I found that the mouthpiece of the pipe had sunk onto my chest. The blanket imprisoned my arms, and I didn’t have the strength to free them, let alone grasp the pipe. I lay in bed for close to an hour, yelping for help, but the nurses’ desk was too far away. Finally, an orderly from the floor below happened by, heard me, and released my hand. The next day, my wife and son reported the incident to the head nurse, and both she and the director of planning appeared in my room, apologized profusely, and assured me that it would never happen again.

But it did, the very next night. This time it was my coccyx that hurt. Nurses typically turned me every two hours during the night to prevent bedsores. But my pain began before the two-hour period had passed. I blew into the pipe, and a nurse came in and started to reposition me. Just then an alarm sounded; someone had gone into cardiac arrest. The nurse ran to help and never came back. The emergency must have driven me out of his mind.

The third night I suffered the same coccyx pain. I blew into my pipe, a night aide showed up, repositioned me, and that was that.

The fourth night, the same pain appeared. I blew into the pipe. A night aide came, and she took the pipe away.

“What do you want?” she asked impatiently.

“Can you reposition me?” I asked. “It’s my coccyx again.”

“No!” she snapped. “You haven’t been lying on your back long enough.”

Without another word, she turned away, switched off the blinking alarm light, and left the room. She left the pipe out of reach.

As a result of my experience, Spaulding instituted hourly night rounds of each room. I welcomed the change, but it drove home the harsh reality of how vulnerable I had become.

Still, the therapy I did receive at Spaulding was excellent. I was exposed to devices that shocked the muscles of my hands into action and stimulated my legs to peddle a bicycle. There was a motorized plank that I was strapped onto, Frankenstein–like. The board slowly tipped me upright to acclimate my blood pressure after almost two months of lying flat. I was taught how to drive a wheelchair, and how to instruct someone to put a Hoyer lift harness around me.

But during the last two weeks of my stay at Spaulding, the focus shifted from rehabilitation to relocation. The level of care I received plummeted like the stock market on Black Monday. No more balancing acts on the mat or electrical stimulation of my immobile hands. No more teetering on tilt tables. Substitute therapists would come into my room and ask me what I felt like doing instead of telling me what I needed to be doing. I had become a lame-duck patient.

Fortunately, one person really came through for me. My case manager, LaChelle Capalla-Chery, who was charged with my relocation, discovered that fifty-two years before my accident I had spent three and a half years on active service in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. I never saw combat. I left the Air Force in 1965 and began a university career as an assistant professor at Brandeis University. By the time I ended up at MIT as head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and then as associate provost, my Air Force career had receded in the rearview mirror.

As it turns out, the West Roxbury campus of the VA Boston Healthcare System has one of the best spinal cord injury rehabilitation centers in the country. And although my injury was not combat related, any vet with a spinal cord injury requiring 24/7 care was immediately moved to the front of the line.

But I still had to prove that I had served, and like a lot of vets I had no idea where my discharge papers were. Nancy discovered that military discharge records are kept in the National Archives, but also learned that requests for paperwork can take much longer than the insurance coverage I had left at Spaulding. She and I immediately thought of David Ferriero, the 10th Archivist of the United States and a good friend. Nancy emailed him on a Thursday, and by the following Monday at three p.m. the relevant documents were in her hands.

So on the morning of my seventy-ninth birthday, July 7, 2014, I took another ambulance ride, strapped into the familiar metal box like a magician’s assistant. I heard an engine start up, and the electronic gurgles of instruments. I was on my way to the West Roxbury VA.

Within a few days of admission I was assigned my primary care physician, Dr. Vidya Jayawardena, and she declared ownership of my rehabilitation. Every Wednesday afternoon I sat in my wheelchair at the head of a horseshoe-shaped table. Dr. Jayawardena would begin with a report on my physical progress. Representatives from each specialty—occupational, physical, and recreational therapists, along with nurses, a social worker, a case manager, and a psychologist—joined us and would describe how I was doing and what I needed to work on. My family was always welcome to attend.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out that these meetings were part of an innovative model the VA uses to coordinate patient care. It centers on so-called patient-aligned care teams, or “PACTs.” All PACT members meet regularly with the patient and his or her family to plan visits, conduct exams, process tests, and do any necessary follow-up care. They collaborate closely to integrate mind and body care in a way that, as I’ve since learned, is seldom found in the U.S. health care system.

The PACT system is very labor intensive compared to how medicine is typically practiced outside the VA. Primary care doctors in the private sector, for example, are responsible for an average of 2,300 patients, and often more. So they must move quickly from patient to patient, with each visit lasting only ten to fifteen minutes. At the VA, by contrast, primary care physicians and their PACT team are responsible for only about half that number of patients. And as studies show, this allows them to provide safer and more effective care.

Dr. Jayawardena was a superb doctor, proactive but careful. If, for instance, I showed the slightest signs of a urinary tract infection—something anyone using a catheter was particularly susceptible to—she immediately prescribed an appropriate antibiotic, but she was always careful not to overdo it. She is not alone at the VA in her attention to patient safety and evidence-based care. According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, VA hospitals outperform non-VA hospitals on six out of nine standard indicators of patient safety, including vastly superior performance in preventing postoperative infections, and do as well on the remaining three indicators.

A few days into my stay at the VA, I was jolted awake at one a.m. by all the lights blazing in my hospital room and people shouting, “What’s your name?” A ninety-three-year-old veteran had been admitted because he had become dehydrated to the point of complete confusion. He was unable to reply, and the nurses and doctors in the room were obviously very worried. It took four days to bring him back. By then he was fully conscious and able to answer questions sensibly—as long as they were shouted at him; apparently he was very hard of hearing. It seems that no one at his private nursing care facility had been making sure he drank enough water. He was sent back as hydrated as a freshly used sponge. The staff was elated, and I could not help but think, There but for the grace of God go I—if I hadn’t qualified for Roxbury.

This kind of focus on the patient was something I noticed when I first came to West Roxbury. There was something ineffable in the air, a sense of solidarity that we were in this together. Staff I didn’t know would nod and smile at me as if they were assigned to my ward. Workmen would thank me for my service. Patients with complete spinal cord injuries who would never walk again often cheered on patients who were struggling to regain some semblance of ambulation. I mentioned this to one of my nurses. She understood immediately. “Once you come into the VA, you are part of our family,” she said. “We never say goodbye.”

Many of my friends were curious about the other patients on my ward—perhaps expecting mostly IED victims from Iraq or Afghanistan. They anticipated political fights about what those wars were really about. That never happened. Everyone—nurses, patients, doctors, therapists—conscientiously avoided the usual taboo topics, religion and politics. In any case, the average age of the population in the ward, at least during my stay there, was somewhere around seventy. My fellow patients’ war was most likely mine, Vietnam, although, again like me, many of them were admitted because of non-service-related accidents.

The VA is unique among U.S. health care providers in that it has nearly a lifetime relationship with its patients. It starts when they leave the military, typically in young adulthood, and often extends to long-term nursing home care near the end of life. This gives the VA an institutional incentive—often missing in the rest of the health care system—to keep its patients well. But it’s more than that. About a third of VA employees are veterans themselves. In my experience, most are strongly motivated by a strong sense of mission, of wanting to give back, as opposed to being in it just to make a living.

The spirit at the VA probably goes a long way toward explaining why the VA does so well in objective measures of quality. Over the last few years, problems at specific VA facilities have been widely publicized, so the public reputation of the VA system has suffered accordingly. Yet study after study continues to show that, as a recent report by the RAND Corporation put it, “the quality of care delivered by VA is generally equal to or better than care delivered in the private sector.” The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that men with heart failure, heart attacks, or pneumonia were less likely to die if treated at a VA hospital than at a non-VA hospital. Research shows the VA exceeding the rest of the U.S. health care system in the treatment of many other specific conditions, including mental illness.

This certainly comports with my personal experience.

On my first day with my physical and occupational therapists I had asked if I could incorporate trombone playing into my therapy. My accident had reduced my lung capacity by 25 percent, and the trombone required me to breathe from my diaphragm and to move my right arm as I pushed the slide of the horn in and out. My therapists thought it was a no-brainer.

A friend loaned me his apple-green pBone, a plastic trombone that has a surprisingly good sound. The biggest advantage for me was its weight, just under two pounds. Even so, it was too heavy. My therapists had to hold the horn on my shoulder while I brought my lips up to the mouthpiece. Those first notes sounded like a Paris taxi rounding the Arc de Triomphe. It was as if I had never played before.

I practiced several times a week. As a kind of reward after I had gone through a regular therapy session, I could play the pBone in the hospital gym. As with everything else, each week I got a little stronger. After a while I was able to hold the horn, even if I could not move the slide.

I also worked every day with my primary physical therapists, Jess and Barbara. On the first day they sat me on the edge of a mat two feet above the floor and told me to plant my feet firmly on the ground and try to balance for one minute. After a few seconds, I would begin to list to one side. Both therapists would grab me before I fell over. This went on for a month, until one day it was as if a switch had flipped inside me. I could balance for as long as I wanted. I could lift my arms off the mat and still stay upright. My therapists could leave to go to the bathroom or the water fountain. My recovery was like that: long periods of nothing followed by something. One morning I surprised myself when I pushed the start button of my electric toothbrush and it began to whir. Watching myself improve felt like watching grass grow.

One March day, Barbara and Jess wrapped a harness around me tethered to the ceiling track, handed me a walker, and told me to walk. The first time it was one step. The second time, twenty-five steps. The third, fifty steps. The fourth, 100 steps. Then, on the last day of June, when I went into the gym for my usual therapy, I pushed my heels into the floor and slowly rose up out of my wheelchair, transferring my hands from the armrests to the walker. No strap connected me to the overhead track, and no safety harness was around my chest. For a brief instant I felt like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, one where he runs over a cliff and remains suspended in midair until he realizes where he is and then plunges to the desert floor below.

“I’m not tethered,” I said, startled.

Jess was smiling. “I know.”

An important obstacle to walking had been removed. But now I had to learn how to transfer from my wheelchair to my bed and back.

“I don’t think I can do it,” I said, wavering.

“I think you can,” Barbara retorted. “Now stand up.”

That was the major breakthrough toward normalcy. I could move between my bed and my wheelchair or commode on my own. A major obstacle to leaving infancy behind me had been removed. It had taken a year and a half.

As I readied to leave the VA, there were many changes to make, including trading my car in for a wheelchair-accessible van. My ward mate Pete had already been through the drill and referred us to a firm that had a special arrangement with the VA under which we could get the van for a discounted price and the special accessibility equipment I needed for free. We got caught up in red tape when it came time for the VA to pay the dealer; the whole thing was finally straightened out, but it took a toll in needless stress.

The VA combines high-quality care with a bureaucracy that can sometimes infuriate. In another instance, the VA agreed to pay for two superb caregivers to look after me at home—something I could never have gotten from Medicare or from a private insurance plan at a price I could afford. (Standard private health insurance typically does not cover nonmedical expenses beyond short-term rehabilitation care.) Everything was going along swimmingly until one day the head of the home care agency called and said that they had not been paid for three months, and that unless the VA paid them, they would have to discontinue care. They said they had called the requisite person in the VA hierarchy numerous times, but she wasn’t returning their calls. So I called her.

I asked her what I could do to unlock the logjam. She said, “I’m very sorry, but I cannot talk to you about your case.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It isn’t appropriate,” she snapped. “I have four hundred other cases to deal with. I can’t single you out for special treatment.”

In the end it was resolved. I learned from these experiences that the quality of care the patient received at the VA hospital was directly proportional to the distance between the patient and the hands of the caregiver. As soon as I had to deal with someone who couldn’t pick me out of a lineup, my experience was not always smooth. But, of course, anyone who has ever had to deal with the bureaucracies of private insurance companies is likely to have had many of the same experiences.

I still receive all of my meds and my bed and bathroom supplies as needed. The VA provided me with custom shoes, and maintains the $7,000 wheelchair I was given. It also supplies other necessary equipment, like an overhead hoist, a hospital bed, and walkers. I still go to the VA gym as an outpatient for therapy whenever I need it. My VA doctors see me once a year for a full-scale medical checkup, and whenever a medical problem arises, I can schedule an appointment, be seen at the Spinal Cord Injury Clinic, or go to the hospital’s emergency room. I’ve never had to wait for any of these appointments.

That, too, turns out to be typical, despite all the political grandstanding you may have heard. Although there are some VA facilities where wait times have been a problem, a recent study by the RAND Corporation found that “VA wait times do not seem to be substantially worse than non-VA waits, based on the limited available evidence.”

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly criticized the VA as “the most corrupt” and promised to outsource much of the care it provides to the private sector. As I write this, his secretary of veterans affairs, David Shulkin, has announced plans to downsize the VA’s workforce in anticipation of the closing of VA hospitals and clinics that he thinks won’t be needed as more and more vets get their care “in the community.”

I’m a linguist, not a health care expert, but I think my personal story should be considered by those making decisions about the future of the VA and of the American health care system generally. If someone were to ask me what my story is really about, I would say that it isn’t just the story of an individual who faced a catastrophe like none other. Nor is it about a remarkable wife and supportive children and the army of caring health care professionals who stood by him in his darkest hour and helped him on the long journey back to normalcy. It is the story of how wrong we all can be in what we think we know about health care, and about just how deeply at risk we all are until the American health care system becomes, like the VA, much more driven by public purpose and less by money.

The post The Best Health Care Money Can’t Buy appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Not gonna lie: I enjoy watching Donald Trump fail. I await each new revelation about his Russian ties with gleeful anticipation. I smile every time another judge blocks his Muslim ban. I delight in his ongoing struggle to get the gum of Obamacare out of his hair. I am gratified by his budget negotiator’s inability to get a dime for his border wall. To me, these are not guilty pleasures, but righteous ones. Trump’s failures are a kind of justice, a confirmation that the political universe still operates according to rules I can understand and appreciate, like a beautiful sunset. Presumably I am not the only one who feels this way.

But as with any form of gratification, if taken too far, this one can lead us astray. The danger is that we on the left will bet our political future on Trump imploding rather than confront the weaknesses in our own political vision—weaknesses that allowed not only Trump to win but Republicans to control the House, the Senate, and thirty-two state legislatures.

Right now, Democrats see a real possibility of taking back the House in 2018. The most likely pickups are districts in metro areas that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or that Trump won by a hair. The most straightforward way to win these seats is to pump up the Democratic base of professionals, single women, Millennials, minorities, and immigrants. But that is precisely the strategy that Clinton’s campaign followed, with disastrous results.

The alternative is for the party to start contesting the geographic areas where increasingly, over several election cycles, they’ve been getting crushed: exurbs, smaller towns, and rural areas. Unless they can do this, and soon, Democrats are fated—because of well-known biases in our electoral system that favor sparsely populated states and regions—to be a permanent minority party that also happens to represent the majority.

Many Democrats, however, shrink from this challenge. Part of the reason is snobbery. Part of it is a sense of hopelessness—that rural and working-class whites simply won’t support Democrats (even though many of them voted for a black guy eight years ago). And part of it is the fear that to win over these voters, liberals will have to downplay or compromise their own deepest ideals—about environmental protection, gun safety, criminal justice reform, women’s rights, and tolerance of diversity.

That last concern is actually justified. The Democratic Party has enough trouble getting its voters to the polls. Asking it to dial back the “cultural” issues that most strongly motivate its base is politically foolish—not to mention morally questionable.

The only way to overcome this dilemma is for Democrats to put forth new ideas that appeal to voters across geographic, class, and racial lines. In the current issue of the Washington Monthly we offer three such ideas, which Trump’s actions are nicely teeing up. Though not unfamiliar to longtime readers of the magazine or to students of American history, these ideas remain on the fringes of the current political conversation.

Idea #1: Fight corporate consolidation. As Martin Longman reports (“How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Voters”), leading Democrats increasingly agree with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that to win outside of blue regions the party needs “a strong, bold economic message.” Yet the policies Democrats are currently peddling aren’t terribly promising. They range from technocratic tweaks to Obama-era proposals that didn’t work for Hillary Clinton (such as paid family leave) to bolder Bernie Sanders promises (such as single-payer health care) which, while appealing to some white working-class voters, are more about redistribution than about increasing economic growth.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. A growing body of scholarly research suggests that many of America’s most persistent economic problems—inequality, wage stagnation, declining entrepreneurship—stem from the same cause: industry consolidation. Decisions by Washington over the last thirty-plus years to green-light corporate mergers have left most sectors of the economy—from airlines to banking, seed corn to social media—dominated by a few behemoth companies, or in some cases just one.

Reversing this consolidation trend would do far more to improve the economic circumstances of distressed voters than border walls and trade wars. Such an approach also has a historical track record. As Longman notes, anti-monopoly was the issue that united agrarian populists and progressive urbanites behind Woodrow Wilson, defined FDR’s Second New Deal, and helped fuel a broad-based prosperity that lasted into the 1960s. The idea is now being resurrected by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tom Perriello (“The Monthly Interview”), who reports that rural Virginians are especially excited by it. And with a Trump administration that caters to corporate plutocrats like no other in recent memory, it’s an idea whose time has come.

Idea #2: Preach a new/old gospel that regulations create jobs. The Progressive and New Deal eras also gave rise to a broad array of new federal regulatory statutes and agencies that are still with us, from the FDA to the SEC. As Anne Kim explains (“Deconstricting the Administrative State”), the political leaders who championed these (quite popular) regulatory regimes cast them as ways not just to reduce harms (from adulterated meat or Ponzi schemes) but to strengthen markets. And so they did: the disclosure requirements in the FDR-era Securities and Exchange Act, for instance, helped the United States become “the largest and most prosperous market for publicly traded companies in the world,” Kim notes.

During the 1970s and ’80s, however, the idea that federal regulations could enable economic growth was replaced by a new argument—one crafted by libertarian thinkers at places like the University of Chicago—that regulations are a drag on the “free market,” so the less of them the better. The result has been a series of attempts to “regulate the regulators” that have slowed the rule-making process to a crawl. Seven years after the passage of the
Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank, for example, many of the regulations those statutes required have still not been finalized.

Nor are they likely to be. Trump has vowed to cut back on what he calls “job-killing regulations,” and this is a promise he may get to keep. Legislation that would grind nearly the entire federal rule-making process to a halt has already passed the House and is being considered by the Senate, where some vulnerable red-state Democrats are open to supporting it.

But here’s the thing: despite what conservative think tanks say, academic economists can’t find any evidence that regulations overall hurt economic growth. And there is evidence galore, hiding in plain sight, of regulations sparking innovative start-ups and economic growth. A quarter of a million Americans now work in solar-related jobs as a result of federal clean energy regulations. The many new banking and investment apps you see advertised on TV were made possible by specific provisions in Dodd-Frank. ACA mandates helped give rise to at least ninety new health-related companies.

Yet no leading Democrat talks about federal regulations generally as tools for economic growth. If Democrats want to stop Trump’s deregulatory agenda, and be trusted by voters as stewards of the economy, they’d better start now.

Idea #3: Propose sweeping reform of government. The original Progressive Era was also defined by its far-reaching transformations of government—replacing patronage workers with professional civil servants, having senators elected directly by voters rather than appointed by plutocrat-dominated state legislatures. The political moment is ripe for another wave of change. Prior to the 2016 elections, the Washington Monthly published a slew of stories by pollster Stanley Greenberg and others arguing that a substantial portion of white working-class voters actually agrees with Democrats on issues like inequality and environmental protection, but that these voters are so cynical about Washington’s ability to deliver that they simply will not listen to any Democratic candidate who doesn’t first present a plan to fix the government.

Hillary Clinton offered no such plan other than a hoary pledge to reform campaign finance laws. But other successful presidential candidates have. Bill Clinton ran on a promise to “reinvent government” and took actions that got at least some positive results, including major performance turnarounds at FEMA and the VA. Barack Obama vowed to overcome Washington’s crippling gridlock with a new, post-partisan form of politics (obviously, he did not succeed). Even Donald Trump pledged to “drain the swamp.”

Liberals would say that Trump has so far done the opposite—filling his cabinet with plutocrats, making a mockery of transparency rules, and so forth. But to many conservative voters, “the swamp” means “the bureaucracy,” and as Gilad Edelman reports (“Trump’s Plan to Make Government Older, More Expensive, and More Dysfunctional”), Trump is making progress on a campaign pledge to substantially cut the number of federal employees.

Such policies resonate with many voters because of the widespread belief that the federal bureaucracy is bloated. The truth, however, is that the typical agency is severely understaffed because Congress keeps tight limits on the official federal head count. There are the same number of federal civil servants as there were fifty years ago, even though the federal budget and the GDP are four times bigger in real terms. The work of government gets done only because agencies have resorted to hiring ever-greater numbers of contractors, largely for jobs civil servants could easily do themselves. Those contractor jobs don’t save money. Rather, they cost, on average, nearly twice as much. Nor do they necessarily perform better. In fact, the opposite may be true, since there aren’t enough federal employees supervising their work.

Donald Trump’s plan to cut the federal workforce, in other words, really amounts to a bonanza for contractors—one that will make the government more expensive and less effective. Reversing this trend ought to be the basis of a new government reform plan, one that would be good for the country and for Democrats politically; most voters hardly love contractors any more than bureaucrats. As a start, argues Joshua Alvarez, liberals should target contractor CEO salaries in a way that encourages insourcing of contractor work.

Bringing more government work in-house could save taxpayers billions while improving government performance. To make that idea work in practice, however, liberals will need to support changing some civil service rules to make it easier to hire and reward good employees and get rid of not-so-good ones. Federal employee unions may balk, but the prospect of more jobs and possibly better pay for their members should bring them around. If you doubt such reforms are possible in a government setting, read Thomas Toch’s story (“Hot for Teachers”) about the astonishing transformation of the D.C. public schools’ teaching corps.

These three ideas have several things in common. First, they hold the promise of attracting voters in rural as well as urban areas. Second, they don’t fall neatly on one side or another of the Bernie/Hillary, left/moderate divide, and therefore ought to appeal to both. Indeed, you can imagine conservatives getting behind at least some of them. Third, they require liberals to reacquaint themselves with ideas and subject matter—about the working of markets and the structuring of bureaucracies—that were once part of the everyday progressive conversation but haven’t been for decades.

That reeducation will take work. But the alternative is to rely on familiar ideas that have gotten the Democrats to a point where they hold almost no formal power. And the reward for that hard work promises to be not just a return to political parity and more gridlock, but a full retaking of power that befits a true majority party.

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The evening of Easter Sunday, a couple dozen people at Flying Dog Brewery, in Frederick, Maryland, were singing and shuffling along to a concert by the Slants, an all–Asian American rock band whose leader is a plaintiff in a pending Supreme Court case. A loud “No!” reverberated around the bar as the crowd joined the chorus of “From the Heart”:

No, we won’t remain silent,

Know it’s our defining moment,

We sing from the heart,

We sing from the heart.

Those lyrics may sound generic, but the Slants have a very specific complaint. When, in 2009, the band sought to trademark its name—a tongue-in-cheek way of reclaiming and defanging the common anti-Asian slur—the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office turned down the application, citing a provision of the Lanham Act of 1946 that allows the federal government to deny registration of trademarks that “disparage” any person or group. In essence, the band name, an ironic commentary on racism, was itself deemed racist.

The band sued, and the long-running case has made the Slants, a Portland, Oregon–based quartet who sound a bit like Fall Out Boy, a darling of First Amendment enthusiasts. They’ve gotten used to entertaining audiences like the one at the brewery, where the crowd was a mix of mostly older, conservative locals, D.C. lawyers, and Ayn Rand–thumping libertarians. (There were no Asian Americans.) While Flying Dog prides itself on in-your-face, adolescent labels (In-Heat Wheat, Doggie Style Pale Ale), the brewery is quietly tucked inside a bland corporate park, its interior decorated with industry-standard faux-rustic craft brewery fare: a long wooden bar, wooden picnic tables inside and out, Edison light bulbs. The only signs of edginess were several framed drawings by Flying Dog’s official label artist, Ralph Steadman, who illustrated Hunter S. Thompson’s journalism with derangement and splatter. The band was set up on a makeshift stage past one end of the bar.

Among the audience, sipping a beer and dressed in blue chino shorts and a short-sleeve button-down, was Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, and author of a satirical amicus brief in support of the Slants. “Getting a trademark would really do a lot for them in terms of marketing nationally and breaking out of their Pacific Northwest audience—and this weird niche of legal nerds who know about them and want to support them,” he said. (The band’s lawyers argue that a trademark is crucial for getting a record deal.)

“We’re playing at law schools and law conferences,” Simon Tam, the bandleader and bassist, said after the show. That’s in addition to their usual venues, which include rock clubs, Asian American community centers, and the occasional anime convention. Like the rest of the group, Tam was dressed in an untucked black dress shirt and black jeans. He is often asked to talk about the case. “Sometimes they want me to debate a law professor, which is really not what I want to do,” he said.

The Slants’ legal battle endeared them to Jim Caruso, the fast-talking CEO of Flying Dog. Caruso, a self-described “hard-core libertarian,” spent the show taking pictures and video on his phone. Before the concert, he described his conversion to Randianism with the precision of a born-again Christian recalling a moment of salvation: “July 21, 1977. That weekend, I read Atlas Shrugged cover to cover. I discovered who I was that weekend. I knew I’m about freedom. It’s part of who I am. It can be annoying.”

Michigan’s Liquor Control Commission once found Caruso’s company more than annoying. In 2009, it banned Flying Dog’s most popular beer, Raging Bitch Belgian IPA, from the state, citing its name as “detrimental to the health, safety or welfare of the general public.” In 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the commission had violated the brewery’s First Amendment rights. Caruso used the $40,000 in damages to create the nonprofit 1st Amendment Society, which sponsors readings of banned books and has set up a scholarship for investigative reporting at the University of Maryland’s journalism school. (It was the official host of the Slants concert.)

Painted in white lettering over the threshold to a hallway where official tours of the brewery begin was the full text of the First Amendment, which says in part, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which handles patent and trademark cases, broadly ruled in the Slants’ case that the disparagement provision of the Lanham Act does precisely that and was therefore unconstitutional. The government appealed, and the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in January; the justices seemed deeply skeptical of the government’s position. (As this article went to print, a ruling was expected by late June.)

The crowd at the brewery didn’t seem perturbed by the implications that a victory for the Slants would have for less sympathetic trademark applicants. In 2014, the Patent and Trademark Office canceled the Washington Redskins’ trademark under the same provision that it invoked to deny the Slants’. A broad ruling striking down the law could even force the government to grant trademark protection to, say, a white supremacist band that uses racial slurs un-ironically.

In Tam’s view, that would be a price worth paying. The law, he argued, disproportionately affects “communities of color, members of the LGBTQ community, because these are groups that tend to re-appropriate language and icons.” One famous example is the San Francisco lesbian group Dykes on Bikes. “We can’t be so obsessed with punishing Dan Snyder and his racist football team to accept that the collateral damage would be experienced by burdened communities,” Tam said.

Naturally, the Slants have used their creative platform to respond ironically to their predicament. They titled their fourth album, released in 2012, The Yellow Album. Their newest is called The Band Who Must Not Be Named.

The audience seemed to enjoy the music, and several people walked away with copies of the new album. Tam packed up his bass, which had a sticker reading, “Slanted Eyes, Slanted Hearts.” The band was in the midst of a seventy-city tour, next stop D.C.

Caruso said he would host the Slants again to celebrate if the Supreme Court rules in their favor, as it is widely expected to do. “Not only are they fighting the right fight, they’re pretty talented guys,” Caruso said. “I’m eager to see what they do with their music.” He added, “Society will never be as free as I wanted it to be as a kid, but you always move in the direction of more freedom or less freedom. So I look at today, and this is in the direction of a little bit more freedom.”

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