In this year’s train wreck of a presidential campaign, neither of the two major-party tickets is advocating serious policies that come close to addressing crucial challenges facing our nation.
The United States faces dire threats or massive impediments in three major areas the federal government can directly address, plus a fourth with which federal officials can assist at the margins or indirectly. The first involves severe military and diplomatic challenges. The second consists of the combination of a near-calamitous debt outlook with the imminent insolvency of Social Security and Medicare. The third, which adds considerably to the second, is a federal bureaucracy that is simultaneously overweening, invasive, unaccountable, unresponsive, and sclerotic. The fourth is a culture degraded by social pathologies, dangerously misplaced tribalism, civic ignorance, and pockets of extreme poverty. Most of those degradations are best handled at the state, local, and civil society levels, but federal leadership can, in some ways, lend a hand.
Except in small subsets of these issues, political realities do not allow for the passage of immediate, sweeping measures to fix them. Most will require a two-step process: First, an achievable short-term bandage to buy time for bigger fixes by stopping things from getting worse and at least start moving in the right direction. Next, larger and more permanent reforms, some of them resulting from a “special commission” process akin to ones that worked in the past for Social Security and military base closures but admittedly failed on other subjects.
While strongly Reaganite conservative solutions will indeed be the best prescription for the larger, long-term reforms, most of the salutary but short-term bandages, fortunately, lend themselves to broadly centrist, coalition-worthy approaches. They will require, however, an attitude of openness to all non-radicals of goodwill who work with respect and integrity — no cheap shots or demagoguery, no bait-and-switch tactics, and no hidden agendas.
Debt and reorganization of government
In a previous column, I outlined the intermediate steps for areas two and three above, namely debt and entitlements and an abusively large bureaucracy. The foreshortened summary of the debt approach involves a series of small changes in formulas for cost-of-living adjustments along with readily achievable discipline on domestic discretionary spending. (Longer-term solutions will require major reforms to entitlements along with a reversion of welfare-type programs to principles embedded in the 1996 welfare reform bill, many of whose provisions Democrats have since eroded. But that’s for further down the road.)
Meanwhile, the reorganization of bureaucracy will almost certainly require a special commission to review and propose a major reworking of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, the provisions still in force from the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act from way back in 1883 (!), and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. If former President Donald Trump wants to have billionaire Elon Musk also do an “efficiency commission,” that’s fine, too, but its practical effects would be small potatoes compared to what major reform of those acts could achieve.
Much of the direction for the reorganization and streamlining of bureaucracy should spring from the insights of Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and subsequent books that argue for less rule-bound, more accountable systems for administrative agencies. And almost all public-sector unions should be phased out of existence.
National security, writ large
The same principles should inform an effort that must be part of the primary issue area above, national security. As this newspaper editorialized last weekend, unmet security needs are so great that the cost could completely wipe out the savings from the interim debt solutions I’ve outlined. The only way to make a stronger security posture affordable will be to begin with major procurement reform. In a comprehensive report released in July, the already existing Commission on the National Defense Strategy mentioned “procurement” challenges 29 separate times, with various suggestions for improvement. Yet, frankly, procurement reform is not something that even the most experienced of staffers or members on Capitol Hill can direct. A procurement reform commission led by experts in the field — I know some wise ones, both Democratic and Republican — could recommend to Congress and the Pentagon the major changes needed.
That said, the most important goal of procurement reform isn’t cost savings, but effectiveness. In the long run, the overriding focus should be to provide the security needed for essential U.S. interests at home and abroad, at any rational cost. The needs should drive the security budget rather than the budget determining which needs are met.
Those needs are immense. As the defense strategy commission explained, what is required is an “all elements of national power” approach that involves not just traditional military forces but also “a coordinated effort to bring together diplomacy, economic investment, cybersecurity, trade, education, industrial capacity, technical innovation, civic engagement, and international cooperation.”
For the purely military part of this, and contra the blinkered insistence of some “America Firsters” that the U.S. should merely concentrate on protecting the “homeland,” the crucial element is rapidly deliverable, effective, long-range force projection. If the U.S. cannot maintain freedom of the seas and air throughout the world, its prosperity and even freedom at home could suffer greatly.
Manpower is important here — and crucial in the long run because, in the end, nothing is secure until boots are on site — but the armed services must focus intently on and grow stockpiles of unmanned vessels, drones, and other mass-producible, lethal weaponry. Even then, some force projection still must depend on actual, physical human presence. That’s why our Navy, which, at fewer than 300 ships, is only half the size it was 40 years ago, needs to expand at least to 350 ships sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, because most wars, even defensive ones, end up requiring that real-Earth territory be occupied by real live humans, Congress should keep trying to increase pay and benefits to counter today’s growing enlistment gap throughout the services.
All of which, of course, will be costly, which is all the more reason the Pentagon bureaucracy, no less than in all other agencies, should be subject to reforms of civil service and administrative procedures as mentioned above. And, of course, why the cost of the rest of government must be far more tightly controlled.
The culture
What is not in control at all today, as anyone with an ounce of observational ability can see, is the anger, divisiveness, and misplaced tribalism both in this nation’s politics and in its broader culture. Worse, other pathologies — drug addiction, broken homes, atomized loneliness, and poverty-related hopelessness — plague the culture as well. There are ways a president and his policies can help with some of this, but sometimes, direct presidential or governmental action is counterproductive.
Sometimes, indeed, the worst instinct of all is to have the national government or national leader rush in with a plan, an order, or a law. When every problem is nationalized and, well, governmentalized, then every problem ends up being politicized, too. And, when politicized, it easily becomes divisive and fraught with larger downstream effects than it can bear. In other words, if every problem is treated as a matter to be solved by the force and authority of a national government, then every problem becomes a power struggle. That’s a recipe for turmoil.
National lawmakers or administrators all too often see a problem or controversy and want to jump in to regulate, mandate, finance, prohibit, or criminalize something or some side of it. Each time they do, the culture wars grow too intense.
We need a president who will do just the opposite: Stay out of the wars wherever possible while making space for and creating an ethic of respect for intermediary and subsidiary institutions or, only if necessary, local governments to handle. Don’t rush to change long-established interpretations of laws. Don’t summarily redefine words, concepts, or, well, genders. And don’t demonize, much less criminalize, those who disagree.
A president should reduce the cultural stakes while giving rhetorical support for cultural tolerance freely chosen rather than mandated by the government. A president also should find rhetoric that encourages mutual respect, not mutual recriminations, in both political and cultural spheres.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Our next president should exemplify a unifying spirit, a dedication to voluntary civil renewal, with an eye on and public attention to the semiquincentennial of this nation’s birth, which is a commemoration that will occur less than 18 months after the new president takes office. Neither presidential candidate is talking about this. Both of them ought to. The commemoration will not be a happy one, though, if we’re at each other’s throats. Only a president who steps back from the culture wars, left or right, can lead the civic renewal that we need and that the anniversary deserves.
Alas, our candidates are talking about cat-eating Haitians and crowd sizes at rallies, or calling opponents “weird” while offering gauzy, Marxist-sounding platitudes about “a new way forward.” Without real substance on debt, defense, civil service, and civil society, both parties are failing the public.