Bryan D. Jones
01/01/2006
Tom Korologos, a former Nixon aide who is now ambassador to Belgium, once said: “The two things Congress does best are nothing and overreacting.” Congress, and indeed the whole government, has an amazing capacity to ignore critical problems for long periods of time, and then, sporadically, become obsessed with them. This policymaking zeal generally does lead it to address problems, so that, yes, they are solved. But frenetic urgency may also cause it to overshoot the mark, resulting in too much government.
| What is desperately needed is a rebirth of the progressive spirit, led by civic reformers and businesspeople. |
The second is how government officials allocate a very scarce resource: their attention. Political scientists call this “agenda setting.” Psychologists tell us that emotion governs attention. We know that when we are attending to one problem, we find it difficult to shift attention to a second one unless we feel a sense of some urgency. The same is true of government. As we show, even the Enron scandal did not move Congress to act on corporate corruption, perhaps because the agenda was consumed by 9/11. But the WorldCom bankruptcy in June 2002 did create a sense of urgency. The result was not just Sarbanes-Oxley, but also the McCain-Feingold campaign reform bill, swept along because it seemed relevant at the time.
Alarmingly, government agencies often focus only on one part of a difficult, multifaceted problem—the problem that currently captures their attention. These agencies are not necessarily wrong for tackling a given issue, but this approach throws their priorities out of whack. For example, it became crystal clear after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast that FEMA had lost its traditional focus on natural disasters when it was swept into the Department of Homeland Security, a huge agency focused on terrorism. There is certainly nothing wrong with fighting terrorism, but in FEMA’s case this drew attention away from disaster preparedness—with horrible consequences.
When a sense of urgency hits, officials invariably fall back on prepackaged solutions. They do not so much search for the proper alternatives as grab off-the-shelf remedies, too often pushed by self-interested policy advocates. Adopting poorly designed policy remedies to solve new problems is a dangerous, but probably unavoidable, aspect of democratic government.
Attention-deficit policymaking, combined with a reliance on off-the-shelf policies, means that errors in policymaking accumulate over time. Reality eventually crashes the party. We see this in play today as federal spending and the overall size of the government continue to spiral upward. Conventional wisdom—from both politicians and pundits—argues that we should “starve the beast” of tax revenue to yield smaller government in the future. But if we actually analyze government revenue data, we can easily show that argument is flatly incorrect. Given our current political process, however, we may well continue to starve the beast until critical indicators of prosperity deteriorate to the point where people notice.
Today the great challenge to democratic government is the need to correct errors more quickly than appears to be happening today. What is desperately needed is a rebirth of the progressive spirit, led by civic reformers and businesspeople. We are being inundated with incorrect information, dishonest budget numbers and consequent overspending. The pressure to reform these issues must come from America’s middle and upper classes. Our politicians may be unable to do it.
 | Bryan D. Jones is the Donald R. Matthews Distinguished Professor of American Politics at the University of Washington. |