House Republicans should include a battle against bureaucracy among their pledges for the 2022 campaign cycle.
The House GOP held a working “retreat” of sorts late last week to further develop their so-called “Commitment to America.” The Commitment is a derivative but still useful policy agenda akin to the semi-famous “Contract With America” in 1994 that helped sweep onetime back-bencher Newt Gingrich into the speakership. The new iteration, noticeably unconcerned with spending restraint but otherwise identifiably conservative, is intended to find the sweet spot where substantive policy ideas meet popular politics.
What the representatives seem to be planning looks just fine, albeit highly predictable. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said priorities will include ideas to battle inflation, stem the influx of illegal immigrants, and boost energy production. Plus, so Republican activists can have what even key committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky called “red meat” to chew on, these wannabe solons also will promise investigations aplenty into alleged perfidy by Democrats, the Biden family, and the public health establishment that conservatives blame for overreacting to the coronavirus.
Some of that may even be necessary, although plenty of swing voters are justifiably disdainful of the tit-for-tat, partisan probes that often seem intended more to secure political advantage than to promote the public weal. The irony in this bid for partisan power is that by being too explicit with these investigatory promises, Republicans may do their own political prospects more harm than good.
Counterproductively, House Republicans easily could fall into a useless bout of sloganeering and partisan threats. It all risks becoming an enterprise most voters think sounds like the “yada yada yada” of Seinfeld fame, not even really worth a mention.
If these political geniuses want a topic on which conservative hard-liners, suburban parents, and low- or fixed-income workers and retirees all agree, they should listen to more mundane, apolitical conversations in which people complain about government. As important as border policy is, two soccer moms watching their children play or two blue-collar workers during lunch breaks probably aren’t gabbing about leniency on granting asylum to cardless immigrants. What really hits home in their daily lives are frustrations with IRS hotlines, federal permitting where they hunt and fish, lost Social Security checks, confusing healthcare “open window” periods, and navigating Medicare options and regulations.
It would be both a major policy improvement and a political boon to pledge a major effort to reform the federal bureaucracy. Bolster IRS customer service sectors, not its auditing powers. Give the “Taxpayer Advocate” office real teeth not just to refer to the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which now contains literally no enforcement mechanisms.
Odds are that every adult in the country has at least one experience of horrendous incompetence or mistreatment by a government bureaucracy.
And, while the particulars of broader bureaucratic reform are far too complicated to serve well on a political postcard, a pledge to streamline the federal bureaucracy across the board can be made to sound serious, rather than like mere boilerplate, if candidates at least identify the laws that need the major reforms.
Pledge a “massive effort to revise the Administrative Procedure Act of 1947 and the Pendleton Civil Service Law of 1883 — yes, 1883! — to make government service friendly.” All sorts of TV ads nearly write themselves, featuring ordinary people on endless telephone hold or stuck in a maze of government hallways seeking relief. Then promise to “cut the federal bureaucracy by a third within ten years.”
Almost nobody outside the D.C. suburbs would take umbrage at such a campaign pledge. But, handled right, it could gain traction. And it certainly wouldn’t sound like yada yada yada.
