Q&A: Making government work

Philip K. Howard is a lawyer, author, and advocate for government and legal reform. He’s also the founder and chairman of Common Good, a nonpartisan coalition dedicated to simplifying laws to empower Americans in their daily choices. Howard spoke with me about the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—and what effective reform should look like. Here are portions of our interview, edited for brevity and clarity.

You’ve spent your career calling out government waste, yet you criticized DOGE, the cost-cutting entity led by Elon Musk. What’s the problem? The idea behind DOGE is great. Government badly needs disruption. But in practice, DOGE isn’t about efficiency. It’s about indiscriminate slashing of jobs and programs. Some of the cuts, like the DEI programs, make sense. But the real waste in government stems from red tape. For example, building a transmission line to a city takes 10 years of permits and hearings. That’s bad for business. In healthcare, administrative bloat eats up 30% of every dollar of spending. That’s a trillion and a half ­dollars per year. So far, DOGE isn’t going after that, and that’s a major missed opportunity.

What grade would you give DOGE so far? I’d give it a “C.” It’s ignoring the biggest inefficiencies of bureaucracy and red tape. And it’s cutting in ways that aren’t particularly thoughtful. At one point, they fired employees who happened to be in charge of the nuclear arsenal. Well, that’s pretty stupid. And they fired lots of scientists. The scientists are not the problem in government.

Still, you’d agree DOGE has revealed problems worth fixing? Completely. The government is overdue for a spring cleaning. It’s like a household that never throws anything away: Eventually the closets are piled high with outdated things nobody uses anymore. Take federal job training. There are dozens of those programs, but none have proven effective and they cost billions of dollars.

If you were running DOGE 2.0, what would you do? I’d create small, informal committees of experts to go to each agency and propose new operating structures. Get rid of obsolete programs. Throw out thick rulebooks and instead create a framework where one official makes the decision to give out a permit or not, and another official oversees it, making sure it’s not a stupid decision. That’s about the best that government can do. When law is a framework and not an instruction manual, things move faster and cost less.

You founded Common Good in 2002 to promote the simplifying of American laws. Have lawmakers in D.C. implemented any of your ideas for reforms? The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, enacted in November 2021, converted into law two of our major policy recommendations. The act includes the goal of no more than two years for permitting of major projects, and it also limits environmental impact statements to 200 pages. We’ve also worked with a bunch of governors on civil service and regulatory reforms, including Zell Miller, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Lawton Chiles.

Why do we have such a persistent ­problem with government waste? Because it’s easier for government to give than to take away. Also, after the 1960s, we redesigned government to avoid human error and eliminated human responsibility. But that resulted in 1,000-page rulebooks—and teachers lost control of classrooms because they had to prove in a due process hearing that Johnny threw the pencil first, or whatever. Our governing system is fundamentally defective because it’s based on the proposition that governing is about compliance. But governing involves making value judgments. Every public dollar is a moral choice. If you waste it here, it’s not available there.

You say reform efforts often fail because they merely “prune the jungle.” What’s the alternative? Real success comes from recodifications, meaning you rewrite the operating system. That happened in the 1950s with the Uniform Commercial Code, a set of state-adopted standards that enabled companies to operate across state lines without hiring 48 different sets of lawyers. That’s the kind of simplification that works.

Do you agree that dismantling the Department of Education is a good idea? Generally, yes, because it just created red tape. The best it could do is standardize national testing, but even that doesn’t require a federal agency. Just let states and communities decide.

Sen. Tom Coburn once told me ­government reform needs three things: term limits, lawmakers ­subject to the rules they put on the citizens, and a balanced budget amendment. Tom Coburn was a man of great character, and we’ve lost people like that. Washington today is built to protect the status quo. Interest groups make sure nothing changes. Some of the worst actors are public employee unions who suddenly look like heroes thanks to DOGE’s overreach: They go out and sue on behalf of some fired federal employees and say, We’re the heroes saving the country’s nuclear arsenal.

So how do we make reform transparent and accountable? Our system is the least accountable. There are probably 15 levels of approval in government, so who do you blame for a bad decision? Environmental reports run thousands of pages. That’s not transparency. That’s obfuscation. For real transparency, give a known person authority to decide and another person authority to oversee. Now you know where to shine the spotlight.

What role should regular people play in reform efforts? Social services work best when managed locally. For example, people in the Ozarks ought to be able to deal with the problems in the Ozarks. Nationally, I think we often give too much attention to individual complaints. Someone pounds on the table for his “rights”—meaning his self-interest—and then throws a monkey wrench in some project. Leaders must have the spine to consider the hard trade-offs and make them.

You say we’re at an inflection point in American history. Can you explain? Change is overdue. Democrats, the party of the status quo, have no vision of how to govern effectively. Republicans criticize government but don’t know how to fix it. Both sides fail, and then alternate control. What we need is a new movement whose core principle is the reempowerment of the spirit of each American. Give people back the freedom to speak freely, live by their values, and lead with accountability. That’s the spirit that made America great—and can again.