Would we want the president elected in 2024 to jitterbug through the inaugural balls and arrive to the inauguration in a Ford Edsel? We certainly wouldn’t want to rely on the third quarter of the last century rather than the next quarter of this one.
But that’s just what the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” transition guide recommends, in reaching back to the government of the past instead of forward to the government of the future.
Its guide promises to “eliminate functions and programs that are duplicated across Cabinet departments or spread across multiple agencies.” That, in fact, was the strategy that former president Herbert Hoover followed in the two famous commissions he chaired during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. They worked then — but that was the last time a major reorganization effort did.
Since then, we’ve created six Cabinet departments, always with the promise to streamline government and boost its efficiency. They’ve unquestionably boosted the political prominence of key constituencies, from local schools (when the Department of Education was spun off the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1979) to veterans (with the elevation of the Veterans Administration to Cabinet status in 1989). But there’s not much evidence that these reorganizations made government work better or saved much money.
In fact, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, which brought together 22 agencies into one department following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has created fresh frictions across the vast DHS empire. It has muddled accountability across the more than 100 committees and subcommittees on Capitol Hill that own a piece of the department’s oversight. Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff reports that, in one year, he had to figure out how to deal with more than 5,000 congressional briefings and 370 hearings. It’s so confusing that Congress has tried — and failed — to create basic ground rules for who ought to oversee which pieces of Homeland Security. That’s led to either too much oversight or, sometimes, to no oversight at all.
The problem — and here’s where the Heritage plan gets things wrong — is that we’re far past the point where we can reorganize our way out of important problems. There’s no problem that matters — no problem at all — that we can comfortably put into the box of any single government organization.
Consider the derailment of the Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio. Local police and fire units immediately responded to the scene. Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency soon arrived. Within hours, the federal Environmental Protection Agency joined teams from the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Railroad Administration, and FEMA. Public health experts from the Department of Health and Human Services added their expertise to toxicologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There’s no way that it’s possible to create a single agency, at any level of government, that could deal with all the issues that caused such devastation for the people of East Palestine. Government’s agencies don’t operate like a top-down vending machine, where taxpayers insert their money and wait for their services.
Rather, they’re more like different pieces of a very big orchestra, where we rely on different instruments to play different music, depending on what the situation demands. Eliminating programs spread across multiple agencies could leave the orchestra without cymbals just when we need an exclamation point in a governmental response.
Moreover, the next issue we face might very well need a different collection of instruments. We’ve learned that any reorganization created to solve one problem would only breed new problems for the next.
We should, of course, constantly be on the prowl for ways of eliminating duplication and overlap. Those opportunities, however, are far fewer than we typically presume, and they’re much harder to accomplish than we might hope. Government’s functions and programs are the product of congressional decisions. That means every single one of them has a friend on the Hill who’s reluctant to give up on something that, at one time or another, was hard-won.
What we need instead are bridgebuilders inside the bureaucracy: a new breed of agile, light-stepping government leaders who focus on the problems to be solved, who identify the organizations that can bring the assets needed to solve them, and who can conduct the orchestra to make the pieces fit seamlessly together.
We know how to do this. It’s the leadership that Admiral Thad Allen brought to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It’s the job that FEMA’s leaders used in south Florida, in concert with Florida’s state emergency managers, when Hurricane Ian struck last year. And it’s the effort that officials in the VA, HUD, nonprofits like the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and state and local officials across the country have brought to the campaign to reduce veterans homelessness, which is now down 11 percent since 2020.
And since we know how to do this, we need to do more of it. Our focus ought to be on building a new generation of bridgebuilders, who forge collaboration across the many barriers that too often separate government agencies — and who focus on producing outcomes for Americans rather than guarding the boundaries that separate government’s bureaucracies.
Donald F. Kettl is the co-author, with William D. Eggers, of the upcoming book ”Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.”