“What’s The Matter With Congress?” Part Two: The Weakened Presidency

Further Comments On An Article By Thomas Edsall

In my previous note, I began a two-part response to a New York Times Opinion piece by Thomas B. Edsall and George Washington University Professor Steven Pearlstein on why Congress was so dysfunctional. I have little to subtract but much to add to their observations. In that first part, I discussed how past Congresses, with the support of Presidents, gradually destroyed fiscal democracy by mandating how all future revenues, and then some, would be allocated. That left future Congresses with the job of telling the public why the promises on which they have come to rely cannot possibly be sustained.

It should be obvious that Congress requires Presidential support and usually leadership to undertake that and other difficult political tasks. In this piece, I examine how efforts to centralize power within the White House have greatly damaged the Presidency. Much of my focus here is on how the White House has increasingly blocked the flow of information required to reveal problems and opportunities that arise continually. More generally, today’s centralization of so much within the White House has constrained the ability of millions of civil and military workers, and the President himself, to fully exercise the primary power vested in the only elective office established in the Constitution: to represent the public as a whole. The weakened Presidency, combined with the decline in fiscal democracy, helps explain why Congress has become so dysfunctional.

I started writing this before the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. Slaughter, in which the Court held that the President had the power to remove officers of the Federal Trade Commission and others whom Congress and 90 years of judicial precedent had previously protected. It remains unclear how far that decision goes in allowing the President to fire anyone, including those whose primary role is providing information to the public. Whatever the legal merits of the Slaughter decision, it further threatens to centralize power and information at the White House in a way that weakens, rather than strengthens, the President’s ability to serve the public.

The Complexity of Managing a Large Economy and a Large Government

No one, and no modest-sized assemblage of people, has anywhere near the capability to know how to handle all the functions of a large government that spends and taxes trillions of dollars each year, spells out in regulations and rulings how to handle and interpret the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of provisions within the laws on the books, and then must enforce these laws through billions of interactions with citizens, businesses, and intermediary organizations.

It’s messy. Just as only competition within the business sector can ultimately regulate and inform it about what to provide efficiently, where, how, and for whom, so government must also employ competition and a fairly open system to determine what it can do best, where, how, and for whom. Yet, culminating in the Trump Presidency, the White House has, over recent decades, attempted to centralize and control decision-making and hide ever more information within the White House.

Controlling the Message Has Become More Important Than Executing the Laws

Across Republican and Democratic Administrations, the centralizing impulse has increasingly aimed to control the media and the public’s understanding of issues and to promote the President’s views, however partisan they may be. The ultimate distortion occurs when the President deliberately lies or asserts clearly illegal authority, and political party officials and top appointees spread, support, and expand those lies and claims. At the same time, many civil and military servants who know better are ordered not to inform the public of any contradictory information, even when doing so would prevent unjust treatment of individuals or deny the public and the Congress the information to which it is entitled.

In today’s world, many public servants have been forced to resign, if not fired directly, because they will not lie, will not illegally attack their fellow citizens, and will not write reports that support what they know to be false. My own family has members who were pushed into this box.

Meanwhile, society and the economy continue to evolve, and new problems arise all the time. Most solutions are more practical than partisan. Most generally require learning by testing and doing, reporting on and adjusting for mistakes.

For a good public servant, elected or not, principles matter. I am amazed these days by how many people act as if there were no principles of public finance and public administration. Governing is not simply about promoting partisan interests or, when necessary, balancing partisan goals to achieve majority approval. Take the issue of tax design. People can differ over how progressive the tax or outlay system should be. Yet when policymakers, for naïve or purely partisan reasons, arbitrarily favor one poorer group, one richer group, one region, or one industry over others in similar circumstances, a typical nonpartisan analysis by any agency within the President’s Executive Branch would point out that the choice violates principles of equal justice and efficiency.

Yet such information—and, increasingly, information about what is happening on the ground—is unlikely to make it through today’s White House filters for two reasons. One is that many of the political appointees in the White House have no more understanding of basic policy principles than they do of the plumbing, architectural, and administrative principles that guide the construction and maintenance of buildings. They also don’t want to confront a President who has supported violations of straightforward principles of equal justice and efficiency on Twitter. If the President wants a dangerous bridge built, they are more likely to ask the agencies to provide supporting data than critical policy analysis.

The second reason is more mundane. All White House staffs, from best to worst, lack the capacity to handle the information overload caused by the extraordinary number of issues the Executive Branch must address, not to mention the multiple layers of review required to pass information through the bureaucracy. Do the calculation for what it takes to get information through n layers, each with a 70 percent chance of making it to the next level. Also, White House staff are famous for their infighting over being heard first.

Over the past century and a half, Congressional laws have evolved to create protected space for independent thinking, safeguards against corruption, and an emphasis on ability rather than politics in interpreting and executing the laws. Congress generally delegated power to various agencies because it simply didn’t have the time to gather the necessary information or make all those decisions itself, and it wanted to remove many of those processes from politics as much as possible. Those laws, however imperfect, often represented a response to the ways that prior information and decision-making systems had failed to serve the public’s interest.

In throwing obstacles in the path of the powers and protections of agencies and their staffs, the Supreme Court has only added to the problems facing a Congress in desperate need of the information that a well-informed Executive Branch can develop and provide.

All this is to say that the Executive Branch has become increasingly broken and less able to help Congress address its role in society’s ongoing evolution. The Presidency has not been organized effectively to study or address a range of modern issues, especially the difficult ones that require widespread trade-offs forced by limited resources and knowledge. To the extent we care about housing, the deficit, Social Security, health care, artificial intelligence, or a whole host of other issues, we are in trouble when the driving concern of the Executive Branch, as driven by the White House, centers on how it appears on the soundbite circuit.

In sum, strengthening the Presidency to do its job ultimately strengthens Congress. Perhaps counterintuitively, this requires empowering the millions of knowledgeable people within the Executive Branch and reducing the centralization of power and information within the White House. The Czar approach works no better in the government sector than it would if some individual monopolist were granted the power to control all activity in the business sector.