Now and in the coming decades, the country faces a daunting set of challenges: transitioning to renewable energy, forestalling financial crises, increasing housing supply, and preparing for the next pandemic.
Yet our public infrastructure is in tatters, as suggested by the staggering governmental failures associated with our COVID response. Institutional distrust is at historically high levels ; the number of public employees relative to the U. Despite the mismatch between the scope of the challenges and the fragility of our institutions, there is little appetite on either the right or the left to rethink public administration and administrative law. Republicans and Democrats instead are locked in the same tired pas de deux that has characterized their approach to state capacity for five decades.
Conservative reform proposals travel under an array of names and acronyms, but they embrace a common tactic: They stack procedure on procedure to create a thicket so dense that agencies will either struggle to act or give up before they start.
The proposed Regulatory Accountability Act , which would require agencies to hold trial-like proceedings before issuing some rules, reflects that impulse, as do similar laws that have been proposed and adopted at the state level.
Democrats have generally opposed these anti-statist measures, which would frustrate their efforts to protect the environment, consumers, and workers. But Democrats do not usually ask the obvious follow-up. If new administrative procedures can be used to advance a libertarian agenda, might not relaxing existing administrative constraints advance progressive ones?
