Kludgeocracy

[Lemur]

A really long but worthy read, especially if you have an interest in un-screwing-up the US government.

Choice bits:

A "kludge" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose...a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem." [...] When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept. [...]

The most obvious reason why American institutions generate policy complexity is our system's numerous veto points. The separation of powers means that any proposal must generate agreement at three different stages — each house of Congress and the president. But opportunities for vetoes turn out to be more extensive than the simple text of the Constitution would imply. Most legislation has to pass through separate subcommittee and committee stages, each of which presents opportunities for legislators to stymie action. Many ambitious proposals are considered by Congress under "multiple referrals," in which more than one single committee is given jurisdiction. This multiplies the number of veto points [...]

[E]very veto point functions more like a toll booth, with the toll-taker able to extract a price in exchange for his willingness to allow legislation to keep moving. Most obviously, the toll-taker gets to add pork-barrel projects for his district or state in exchange for letting legislation move onto the next step. [...]

[M]any of our legislative toll-takers have a vested interest in the status quo. In exchange for their willingness to allow a bill to proceed, therefore, they often require that legislation leave their favored programs safe from substantive changes. Consequently, new ideas have to be layered over old programs rather than replace them — the textbook definition of a policy kludge. Second, the need to gain consent from so many actors makes attaining any degree of policy coherence difficult at best. Finally, the enormous number of veto points that legislation must now pass through gives legislative strategists a strong incentive to pour everything they can into giant omnibus legislation. The multiplication of veto points, therefore, does not necessarily stop legislation from passing, but it does considerably raise its cost and, more importantly, its complexity. [...]

The deepest cause of kludgeocracy is the structure of American governing institutions, and the incentives that they provide for individual politicians. Any attempt to chip away at policy complexity must involve reducing the number of extra-constitutional veto points in our system. These are not features of the original design of our system of government but are more like barnacles that have built up over time. If anything, removing them would lead to institutions that function in ways that are truer to the founding design.

[Montmorency]

Kludgeocracy is also a significant threat to the quality of our democracy. The complexity that makes so much of American public policy vexing and wasteful for ordinary citizens and governments is also what makes it so easy for organized interests to profit from the state's largesse. The power of such interests varies in direct proportion to the visibility of the issue in question. As Mark Smith argues in his book American Business and Political Power, corporations are most likely to get their way when political issues are out of the public gaze. It is when the "scope of conflict" expands that the power of organized interests is easiest to challenge. That is why business invests so much money in politics — to keep issues off the agenda.

+1

Though I think he means "inverse" rather than "direct".

[...] our complex, hidden welfare state obscures government action, leading citizens to mistake as "private" programs that are in fact pervasively shaped by government. [...] This perpetuates the national myth of radical individualism and independence while creating the impression that only other, less deserving people draw upon government largesse.

+1

Complexity thereby leads to diffuse cynicism, an attitude certain to undermine good citizenship — of either the conservative or liberal form — in our republic.

+1

But the price of multiple veto points is much larger than an accounting of pork-barrel projects would suggest. First, many of our legislative toll-takers have a vested interest in the status quo. In exchange for their willingness to allow a bill to proceed, therefore, they often require that legislation leave their favored programs safe from substantive changes. Consequently, new ideas have to be layered over old programs rather than replace them — the textbook definition of a policy kludge. Second, the need to gain consent from so many actors makes attaining any degree of policy coherence difficult at best. Finally, the enormous number of veto points that legislation must now pass through gives legislative strategists a strong incentive to pour everything they can into giant omnibus legislation. The multiplication of veto points, therefore, does not necessarily stop legislation from passing, but it does considerably raise its cost and, more importantly, its complexity.

+1

This army of consultants and contractors then became a lobby for even greater transfer of governmental functions to outsiders — including, as Janine Wedel shows in Shadow Elite, the transfer of such core roles as formulating policy recommendations and overseeing contractors. This kludge industry, having pulled the fundamental knowledge needed for government out of the state and into the private sector, has thus made itself nearly indispensable. And with its large, generally non-competitive profits, the kludge industry has significant resources to invest in ensuring that government continues to layer on complex policies, and hence continues to need to purchase more services.

+1

Public policies would also become less kludgey if Congress shifted the power over the "micro-design" of policies away from Capitol Hill and toward the agencies that will actually have to administer them once they are passed. This is not a plea for greater delegation of congressional power to the executive. In some ways, it is the opposite. Congress often avoids actually producing a piece of legislation that is worthy of the name — a general, abstract statement of authoritative lawmaking and basic policy design — and instead passes a wave of specific measures unconnected by any general logic. It does too much of what the executive is best equipped to do, and too little of what it actually has the authority to command. Giving the people who will actually have to administer policies greater power over the design of those policies would likely increase their simplicity.

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[...] we could relieve states of the costs of Medicaid entirely and send education — lock, stock, and barrel — back to the states. [...] This is an area where the conservative majority on the Supreme Court could actually generate greater pure nationalism, forcing federal programs to be fully and openly run by the federal government, by establishing rules that make it harder for Democrats to expand federally supported, state-administered social-welfare programs (like Medicaid). [...] Increasing the salaries of high-level federal workers throughout the government and reducing caps on their numbers could also go hand in hand with drastically cutting the amounts that agencies can spend on consultants and contractors.

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[...] companies that receive the vast majority of their business from the government are not really in the private sector at all. Private profits and public risk is hardly a conservative combination, and it is not hard to see how the spirit that has lately led conservatives to question government support for the big banks could be turned against the rest of modern government's corporate dependents.

+1

Insisting on constraints that force state action into the open would lead to a government with higher levels of outright taxing and spending, but one that was less sprawling, less intrusive, more democratically accountable, and more transparent than today's kludgeocracy. [...] A Congress that operated under rules that restricted hidden taxing and spending but enabled more transparent forms of both would probably be one that passed fewer, but larger and more effective pieces of major legislation.

+1

This is an important piece of writing.

"Kludgeocracy" garners only a little over 2,000 results on Google. If anything has ever been deserving of a media buzzword...

I like the idea of big-but-focused government. I like the idea of increased efficiency and accountability. I like the idea of rent-seekers getting a kick in the rear.

However, the picture I've put together from the essay is that "middle-of-the-ground" "compromise" legislation is poison in this (current) environment. It is a Trojan Horse for the exacerbation of the disease - and yet it is prospectively the only reasonable way out.

It's a shame: Incremental change of appropriate urgency or definite legislative prospects is not forthcoming; there is only one way available to us to avert the threat of the implosion of the state into a kleptopocalypse.

Here's the plan:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

1. Encourage the Tea-Party's "fascist"-ic tendencies.
(1. Quietly strengthen the UN while setting up world governments with hidden links and a unifying purpose.)
2. Encourage governmental dysfunction in the medium term.
(2. Secure the cooperation of the American security and intelligence sectors.)
3. Bring the Tea Party into power and encourage extremist policy-making.
(3. Enter a phase of international tranquility as nations throughout the world speed up local development and amicably settle many of their outstanding grievances.)
4. Engender a US civil war.
5. Orange! Orange! Orange! The 'sleeper' governments are activated worldwide. The UN holds an extraordinary session and determines to dispatch a Peace-Keeping force of unprecedented size and international collaborativity to quell the global economic crisis, secure American nukes, and halt "human-rights abuses and war crimes" within the warring continent.
6. Large segments of the warring USAnian governments and militaries openly defect to the Peacekeepers, delivering access to all American WMDs to the UN and crippling American C3I for all non-conforming factions.
7. Liquidate all who resist the Peacekeepers and place the United States under military administration.
8. Reinstate the old US federal and state governments and have them commit to extensive amendation, if not complete redrafting, of the US Constitution.
9. The world governments of the Unity, in conjunction with the government of the USA, convene to unanimously ratify a new Charter for the United Nations.
10. All territorial states pass legislation to abolish themselves.
11. The United Nations is permanently dissolved as an institution and replaced with an Anthropic Federal Republic possessed of the mandate to 'ensure the future stability and security of the species, as well as any and all potential future offshoots'.
12. Establish the One-World Government and implement all necessary reforms.
13. Ein Reich! Ein Volk! Ein Fuehrer!

[HoreTore]

If anything, removing them would lead to institutions that function in ways that are truer to the founding design.

I questions this; why is it seen as good to go back to something someone designed 200+ years ago? Why should we trust the judgement of dead people instead of trusting our own judgement when trying to create a system of government/society that fits our needs and wants?

[Montmorency]

instead of trusting our own judgement when trying to create a system of government/society that fits our needs and wants?

Our judgement right now is the problem. If you'll recall that one post from the Minimum Wage thread, this notion nicely fits my idea: of temporarily re-establishing an earlier version of political function/legal framework in order to provide a stable basis for radically innovating a new system "that fits our needs and wants".

[Montmorency]

I found a somewhat-critical reaction:

A less fractured and less polarized political system might handle these midcourse corrections more gracefully and with less acrimony. But one should acknowledge that policy complexity can't be completely avoided; nor should it be entirely lamented, either. The challenge is to manage policy complexity with greater aplomb and proficiency, to make the necessary software patches less buggy, more disciplined, transparent, and efficient, and thus less vulnerable to interest-group malware than they currently are.

But make no mistake. Complicated patches will still be needed for our existing code. Somewhere in the Danish ministry of whatever is an updated and revised 20,000 page disability manual that wrestles with dilemmas arising from a myriad of medical conditions, workplace injuries, and disabilities. Politicians can thwap thousands of pages on the table for rhetorical emphasis. Neither they, nor anyone else can really do away with the need for bureaucracy and stacks of paper.

Length isn’t the fundamental problem, anyway. It’s what’s actually written on those 20,000 pages that really matters. Maybe even more important is how that 20,000 pages is continually edited, proofread, updated, and fixed. That’s where much of the art of public policy actually resides.

Well, complexity of this type can be managed by dragging the slider just a notch or two toward Technocracy.

Write broad, flexible, widely applicable (i.e. truly national) legislation. Make it with a clear overarching goal in mind, instead of some sort of degenerate collage. Give federal agencies -both executive and independent - more power, and leeway in implementation, and staff them adequately; if they have concrete functions as individual organizations, coherent purposes, they'll know what to do better than the Congresspeople. Those latter should really be putting out frameworks for the agencies to operate within.

How to comprehensively reform lobbying and interest groups, though - preserving (really enhancing) the capacity for ordinary citizens to petition the government individually or in groups, while burning away the ticks and leeches?

[Rhyfelwyr]

So this is suggesting a sort of streamlining of government? It sounds like a reasonable idea in and off itself, but if you want to "un-screw-up" the US government (or any Western government), the changes would have to be a lot more fundamental than that.

This won't end some of the features that are really crippling a healthy political life in America - polarization, radicalization, partisanship, popular media, excessive lobbying etc, as well as on-going social changes that threaten the very foundations of democracy (growing inequality, political alienation, collapse of community and so on).

[Montmorency]

Triple-post!

I'll just end for now with a troubling proverb. I've already paraphrased it but it's nice and succinct:

"Garbage in, garbage out".

This won't end some of the features that are really crippling a healthy political life in America - polarization, radicalization, partisanship, popular media, excessive lobbying etc, as well as on-going social changes that threaten the very foundations of democracy (growing inequality, political alienation, collapse of community and so on).

Good thing you posted. See the proverb - all those issues would surely have to be overcome to a considerable extent before the 'de-kludgeing' could proceed. The idea, I suppose, is that the soimplification in process would contribute to a strengthening of the democracy and continue to reduce and prevent the named issues.

[Lemur]

Yeah, my take-away was that the kludgeocracy serves to mask the function, purpose, scope, and cost of governance. So long before we get to addressing the concerns @Rhyfelwyr raises, we're lost already.

As a father of three kids, and family provider of health insurance and all its attendant headaches, I see this in action every week. Instead of some sort of open debate about what kinds of costs and services we should have and pay for, everything is hidden behind a very high wall of cross-purposes, conflicting services, masses of paperwork, and a general kludgeification. I am not even slightly surprised that $0.20 of every dollar spent on healthcare goes to administrators trying to shove the costs onto someone else.

Kludgeocracy serves to prevent an open and honest debate about the direction of our country. And for some people, as outlined in the article, that is a very profitable situation.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Montmorency/Lemur - I think the relationship between society and the political system is a two way stream. While it is true that "kludgeocracy" (to run with the idea) prevents more core issues being tackled, it is equally true that it is these same issues that often allows kludgeocracy to grow in the first place. You would have to reform both to stop them from strengthening each other.

We are maybe actually all in agreement here - I guess I'm just saying that streamlining government alone will not be enough, since you have to make sure that such a process really does make real improvements in other areas of social/political life.

Otherwise you will just make the government more efficient at screwing people over.

[Xiahou]

The problem is the inexorable growth in the power and influence of our federal government. As its influence grows, people seek favor with politicians. Crony capitalism ensues. Laws are so complicated and obscure because groups get carve outs to protect or enhance their interests.

I really don't think people understand how pervasive this is. Even the most innocuous seeming legislation is to the benefit of a favored constituency...

[Strike For The South]

Well yea, but the same thing happens in the states too....

Hell there is a reason why JimBob is the dogcatcher in Hale county

[Papewaio]

Someone should run a kludge index that rates the kludge factor for each department/process/bill.

It would be interesting to see how much is pork barreled.

[Ironside]

The problem is the inexorable growth in the power and influence of our federal government. As its influence grows, people seek favor with politicians. Crony capitalism ensues. Laws are so complicated and obscure because groups get carve outs to protect or enhance their interests.

I really don't think people understand how pervasive this is. Even the most innocuous seeming legislation is to the benefit of a favored constituency...

I think the idea has to do with why the US seems to have a less efficient goverment than most of the west. Kludging by itself is something you'll get in all larger organisations, the critical is how you deal with it.

[Xiahou]

I think the idea has to do with why the US seems to have a less efficient goverment than most of the west. Kludging by itself is something you'll get in all larger organisations, the critical is how you deal with it.

A major difference is that the USA was never designed to have a large all-controlling central government. It's taken a system of dodges, end-runs and dare I say... kludges to get us here. Congress can't transparently come out and pass the laws they'd like- they have to wrap them around frameworks that they don't really belong to.. like the Commerce Clause.

[ICantSpellDawg]

Good luck "streamlining" government; ie. eliminating checks and balances when you can't even pass a budget. A political party who wants to cripple the system merely needs to refuse to finance the Federal government and the whole thing can come crumbling down. Want to solve a problem? Solve it at the state level. Maybe this can finally be the end of the federal behemoth. Have we finally figured out a way to debilitate the abusive system?

The 2 Houses should refuse to pass all laws, the President should veto everything, the Supreme court should uphold every right of individuals and then States over the central government. Devolution of authority, destruction of the central planners.

This is how modern wars should be fought. Use of procedure is the only way we can stop the Federal government from consuming every power there is. Any time people threaten the foundations of the governmental system, I'm for it. I only support the rights protected by the government, the government itself is an necessary evil that seems more evil than necessary these days.

An adjustment is needed. The American people can either throw the GOP out of every position of power or allow some federal powers to atrophy. Let's go for bottom, nobody lives forever

[Xiahou]

I think this fits in well with my earlier points in the thread....
Amid surge of the cut-rate 'sharing economy,' a backlash grows

Allow me to sum up the article I've linked. People find more efficient and cheaper ways to get the services they need. The government and their favored businesses are mad that someone is horning in on their turf. So the government proposes laws to shut them down.

It's disgraceful.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I questions this; why is it seen as good to go back to something someone designed 200+ years ago? Why should we trust the judgement of dead people instead of trusting our own judgement when trying to create a system of government/society that fits our needs and wants?

Okay, don't. Assemble a proper constitutional convention and then draft a new one. Lemur's point about the kludge version sucking is truth whether your answer to dealing with the kludge is revert OR replace.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Someone should run a kludge index that rates the kludge factor for each department/process/bill.

It would be interesting to see how much is pork barreled.

If you mean "interesting" the same way a Chinese fellow might say "May you live in interesting times..."

[Papewaio]

If you mean "interesting" the same way a Chinese fellow might say "May you live in interesting times..."

Yes, but I enjoy change, delta v, rpm, GHz and moar power. I also like it done with finesse and nuance.

It would be much better if some of the big data crunching was applied to more then who will win an election based on opinion polls. It would be great to have dashboards on government particularly the laws they pass and the performance of parties and individuals. It would also be nice to see at a glance who is lobbying whom.

[ICantSpellDawg]

Some want a change to the system. I would prefer that the system collapse under its own weight and revert to local control. The system was designed this way to keep very different interests away from controlling the entire country. A dysfunctional federal system is exactly what we need to keep the Federal government from passing more laws that destroy the rights of individuals and the States that better represent local interests. The Feds should focus less on forcing cable companies to sell channels a la carte, making sure kids think the same exact way, or taking away my property and more time on foreign policy and immigration law.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Yes, but I enjoy change, delta v, rpm, GHz and moar power. I also like it done with finesse and nuance.

It would be much better if some of the big data crunching was applied to more then who will win an election based on opinion polls. It would be great to have dashboards on government particularly the laws they pass and the performance of parties and individuals. It would also be nice to see at a glance who is lobbying whom.

Chuckles at the first part.

I would LOVE to see transparency in lobbying etc. I might have no problems with a Senator who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of GE -- but not knowing is unfair to me.

[Montmorency]

a Senator who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of GE

c.f.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0anl...SwjkcQ&index=4