The Hill’s Committee Disaster
(Architect of the Capitol)
Barack Obama is trying to kill the F-22. The relevant congressional committees, by contrast, are trying to keep the F-22 alive, and they’re doing it by shifting money out of nuclear waste cleanup. Now the Obama administration is threatening to veto the authorizing bill unless Congress obeys the request of his administration (and the Defense Department and analysts everywhere) to kill the damn thing. Stan Collender hails this move and rightly so.
But it’s also an illustration of America’s desperately dysfunctional institutional structure. One basic problem of democratic governance relates to concentrated interests versus diffuse ones. Organizing broad groups of people to advance the public interest in the face of entrenched opposition is difficult. And the committee structure is like it was designed to make this problem as bad as possible. The upshot of the way congress does business is that agriculture policy is made by a special minority of legislators who represent the interests of agricultural producers. And energy policy is made by legislators who represent the interests of energy producers. And defense policy is made by legislators who represent the interests of defense contractors. If you just announced an unexpected swap and had the Armed Services Committee set farm policy and the Agriculture Committee do procurement, you could get better results.
It used to be that institutional reform was an important priority for progressives and in the 1970s they managed to make some progress on curbing the authority of committee chairman. I think it would be smart to continue to put emphasis on that kind of thing—encouraging policy to be set by broad national governing coalitions rather than idiosyncratic committees that are easily captured by interest groups.
17 Responses to “The Hill’s Committee Disaster”
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June 26th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Someone has to draft the legislation, and develop it through its early stages, and that work can only be done by people who care enough about the subject. So there will always be committees of agriculture experts writing farm policy, etc.
It seems to me the process falls apart when politicians who aren’t interested in the topic fail to care about what they’re voting on. If you’re interested in Policy Area A but not B, then easy thing to do is determine your vote on B by making a trade with a colleague who cares about it, and who’ll vote your way on A in return. How do you make a politician not make that trade, but instead to learn enough about B to figure out what vote on it actually serves his constituents?
This problem is also connected to a core ethical problem surrounding the notion of expertise. Few politicians have the intellectual training to be a quick-learning generalist like, say, Matt Yglesias. Most of them have to defer to experts, and most of the people who present themselves as experts are really advocates for an interest or ideology.
As a transit planning expert, part of my job is to help lots of people be just a little bit smarter about transit. Because like any field, if it’s left only to the people who are really passionately interested in it — including me — you’ll end up with really distorted policy. I also see my role as being to help people figure out what kind of transit policy will serve their values, not mine. We need more expertise, in all fields, that can make that distinction.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Just as a question, if Congress appropriates the money for a bunch of F-22s, does that obligate the Obama to go ahead and purchase them? I mean, I understand that he can’t spend those dollars on other things, but I imagine that there’s money budgeted for all kids of staff and equipment that never winds up getting spent.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:01 am
… obligate the Obama administration to go ahead and purchase them.
It’s early yet.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Interesting idea — it’s reminiscent of the end of the movie The Untouchables where Capone is on trial for tax evasion and is believed to have soborned his jury. The authorities swap the jury with the one empaneled for another case and Capone is convicted. lllegal, I’m sure, but a cute concept.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Matt, you might get more public support if you ceased this ridiculous notion that the F22 program is being “killed.” 187 planes either produced (or planned to be produced) is not a killing of the program.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:15 am
This isn’t being driven by the defense contractor involved. Lockheed Martin makes both the F-22 and F-35, and the F-35 is way more important to them at this point. They aren’t in a mood to publicly challenge Gates & Co. when Gates has come out in heavy support of the F-35 program.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Political Science literature is mixed on whether or not committee members are “preference outliers.” So I’m not sure that your basic point (policy is made by nonrepresentative subsets of the legislature) holds. See Krehbiel.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:30 am
This isn’t being driven by the defense contractor involved. Lockheed Martin makes both the F-22 and F-35, and the F-35 is way more important to them at this point
Well, yes and no. LM doesn’t make all of either of them, there are hundreds of subcontractors, spread one per district all across the country (well, more or less). Plus, LM teamed up with Boeing to build F-22, but competed with them for the F-35 contract. And the point is that lots of F-22s are being built now, while the F-35 won’t reach that stage for some time to come, whatever happens to the F-22.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:35 am
You left out health care and their Congressional/White House lackeys.
The upshot of the way congress does business is that agriculture policy is made by a special minority of legislators who represent the interests of agricultural producers. And energy policy is made by legislators who represent the interests of energy producers. And defense policy is made by legislators who represent the interests of defense contractors.
Dirty Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Nancy-Ann DeParle, Gail Wilensky, Tom Daschle, Evan Bayh
June 26th, 2009 at 10:21 am
It used to be that institutional reform was an important priority for progressives and in the 1970s they managed to make some progress on curbing the authority of committee chairman.
Unfortunately, they just devolved power to the sub-committee chairmen.
June 26th, 2009 at 10:23 am
There is a lot of agreement in the political science literature that policies that distribute goodies (Distributive Politics) are the home to iron triangles. This cozy, mutually supportive relationship consists of committees, agencies and interest groups. They are hard to break, as this example illustrates where the agency part has broken off but the other two hold on. The veto threat raises this up out of the low visibility level of politics where distributive politics usually takes place. Matt did a good job of illustrating this when he described who serves on which committee.
June 26th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Well, yes and no. LM doesn’t make all of either of them, there are hundreds of subcontractors, spread one per district all across the country (well, more or less).
True, but the hundreds of subcontractors don’t have Lockheed Martin’s lobbying muscle or skill. They’re scattered and not able to organize as effectively as one of the major primes.
Regarding LM, Gates was also careful to note his support for higher initial production of the F-35 at the time he announced he wasn’t supporting further production of the F-22, an important show of support when the GAO and other analysts are saying that buying the F-35 in large numbers before the program is mature is too risky. Also, Boeing makes the F/A-18 in addition to the work it does on the F-22. I don’t see them wanting to get into a pissing match with Gates over 20 F-22 fuselages and wings when there’s the prospect of another 100-150 Super Hornets beyond the current program requirement on the table going forward. So the big primes don’t seem to care very much whether the F-22 lives or dies.
June 26th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Veto the damn thing.
If Congress makes the budget wore than it already is, then vetoes are appropriate. The progressives are the problem, they want their spending and willing to support massive inefficiencies to get their spending. Progressives need to use the Veto, stop the budget if it is just getting worse.
I may start believing progressives if they would just once threaten a shutdown based on efficiency concerns.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
We won’t get our govt back until and unless we take the money out of politics. We should be devoting our time to forcing congress to pass all-public financing of elections asap.
June 26th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Just as a question, if Congress appropriates the money for a bunch of F-22s, does that obligate the Obama to go ahead and purchase them? I mean, I understand that he can’t spend those dollars on other things, but I imagine that there’s money budgeted for all kids of staff and equipment that never winds up getting spent.
Declining to spend appropriated moneys is known as “sequestration”. Congress has set limits on what can be sequestered – largely in response to Nixon using it willy-nilly to turn their budgets into his – but this might be vulnerable to a separation of powers challenge. Even if you won, though, you’d be stepping on a lot of congressional toes.
June 26th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Obama could just let them appropriate the measly $1 billion for building the new F-22s for long-ordering purposes (and to ensure that we can actually get spare parts for the planes we do have), and for the replacement engine for the F-35 – but no, that would be “fiscal irresponsibility”, and certainly of much less value than giving banks guarantees in the hundreds of billions.
June 26th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
“Iron triangles?” What is this, 1975? I thought the current en vogue terminology was “policy subsystems.”