Francis Fukuyama has a post at Persuasion in which he gives his two cents on why the American government can’t “get things done”. Here’s his conclusion:
The private sector has complained for many years of over-regulation by the government. But the government itself faces decades of accumulated regulations that limit its ability to act effectively. There are many powerful interest groups who want to limit regulation of the private sector, but relatively few voices advocating de-regulation of the government itself. Indeed, many on the right and left believe that the government has too much discretionary power and needs to be further constrained.
Restoration of state capacity will thus depend on a culling of the veto points that have been delegated over the years to different stakeholders in and out of government, and delegation of actual authority to the appropriate parts of the government to carry out the people’s wishes. We need new mechanisms to hold that form of delegated power accountable to the people. It has been done before in American history—remember the Apollo program?—and can in theory be done again.
I can summarize my explanation in a single sentence. The federal government bureaucracy is 250 years old.
That is how bureaucracies work; it is what they do. And there is no known way of organizing something as large as the federal government other than bureaucracy. There is no solution to the problem without doing a major disruption of the federal bureaucracy which would be fought tooth and nail by anyone with a stake in things as they are.
Said another way, it’s not going to get better. It will only get worse.
