Maybe we could empower the bureaucracies to do their jobs, see what happens? Just a thought.
Yes. Executives are allowed to issue orders. The vast majority of EOs are completely legal and have full legal force. You know this, right?
I’d expect someone with an agenda to claim that fixing every last operational issue with the federal government is a prerequisite to creation of new laws, but a) this doesn’t actually make sense and b) I fully expect that your opinion here will change if the Republicans ever actually get the ability to start pushing their agenda.
Not everything, but a) there is virtue in focusing on this as a major priority. Clinton did it in his first days in office, assigning Al Gore to the task, which he called the Reinventing Government Initiative. And Clinton could actually get legislation passed his first two years. If you are in office and you can’t get legislation passed, then that’s all the more reason to focus on fixing what is already wrong with the government. What exactly does the current President do? Just issue statements to the press daily about how he can’t get good laws passed?
and b) you do actually need to fix parts of government that are integral to implementing huge new policies. The President himself admitted after two of his major accomplishments, the stimulus, and the health care bill, that the government’s existing apparatus was poorly designed to handle what he was trying to do. There were few shovel ready projects due to regulatory red tape(something which FDR noticed when he was dealing with depression and took steps to alleviate), and the government’s IT policies were badly out of date.
These are mistakes that future management novices looking to become President need to avoid repeating. Obviously, it won’t be likely to happen to Hillary Clinton, probably not even to Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. They’ve given orders and seen them get screwed up by the bureaucracy. But for guys like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, it could be an issue. Depends on whether they know exactly what went wrong, or if they just think, “I’m better than Obama, so that won’t happen to me.”
Absolutely, without a doubt.
Dems didn’t need the “black vote” to win with HRC in '08.
They need it now.
Well, he got that Iran deal done despite several members of both Houses actively working with foreign powers to try and scupper it. But what’s a little borderline treason between friends?
Okay, so he has conducted foreign policy, that’s definitely a huge part of his job. And most of the accomplishments I approve of are in foreign policy(although many of those are probably more Clinton’s accomplishments than his).
And that brings up another question about pretty much all of the Republicans: Obama had a great foreign policy team: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel, and Samantha Power. I wonder who would help a Republican President make such decisions who still has an intact reputation? I can’t really think of anyone except Robert Gates and James Baker, both of whom probably won’t be interested. Oh wait, there’s still John Huntsman. He seems like the only guy who could be a credible SecState in a Republican administration.
As a general comment about governance this is very perceptive. Thank you.
One issue any administration faces is that Congress is quite willing to underfund an agency into ineffectuality while still leaving its charging legislation intact. The president’s ability to move funds to counter that is, by design, quite limited. And the one year budgeting cycle means that even if the administration finds a miraculous and quickly effective source of efficiency to accomplish much more of the agency’s goals, Congress can quickly cut the budget again to offset that. In the real world of government operations, where miracles are rare, and fast-acting ones especially so, this amounts to Congress being able to run rings around the administration’s ability to improve or even to re-prioritize agency efforts.
When I was in USAF we used to marvel (and not in a good way) at some of the stuff that came down to us peons from the interaction of Congress & the Pentagon. I coined the phrase “That’s what you get when you couple a 6 month planning horizon to a 10 year implementation cycle.” I’m sure other pundits made similar observations using different terms.
A challenge for the “shovel ready projects” of whatever nature is that all agencies are overtasked at the tactical time horizon. IOW, their immediate budget is insufficient to accomplish all their mandates (much less all their goals) at their current level of efficiency. All three of those factors are adjustable over strategic time horizons, but not much more quickly.
As such, agencies have an incentive to not waste current resources on planning, then shelving, projects for which they have no realistic expectation of receiving the budget to implement.
For such agencies, “shovel-ready” is an oxymoron. A project is only brought to shovel-readiness when the budget is in hand.
This structural factor is why large budget “windfalls”, especially of only 1- or 2-year duration, tend to be ill-spent. This is equally true in the private sector although budget windfalls there are more rare.
Going to budget issues as an excuse makes no sense since in the case of both the stimulus and the health care bill, the Democrats had the votes and could have included more money. The reason that wasn’t done wasn’t neglect, it was because the problem was in executive branch processes, not funding levels. The executive branch has the rulemaking responsibility and if the rules are getting in the way, the President can change them. This President acts like he’s still in the Senate. He claims to be able to alter duly passed laws at will, but pleads helplessness when it comes to simply changing executive branch regulations, something which he can do easily with “the stroke of a pen”.
“More money” is the whine of ineffective managers. If only I could spend more on labor, if only I could spend more on material resources. Well, our competitors are kicking our asses and spending at comparable rates, so the problem is you. Of course, since the US government has no competitors, the government can always complain that the problem is insufficient funding and it’s difficult to prove them wrong until you give them more funding and their performance doesn’t improve. It’s a pretty expensive way to find out what the problem is, and it lets Presidents off the hook, since you won’t know for sure until they’ve left office.
DACA, Clean Power Plan, ending solitary confinement for minors, moving forward on normalization of relations with Cuba, Iran nuclear deal, TPP negotiation, pushing the country forward on SSM, pushing the FCC on net neutrality, vetoing Republican shenanigans… Sheesh, this is just off the top of my head, and just stuff since Republicans took over Congress. Do you really think the President is just issuing statements to the press daily about how he can’t get good laws passed?
Your two big things here are 1) continually failing to distinguish between what you want to happen and what you think will happen and 2) irrational hatred of Obama. You’ve built a very long, very deep case for #1 already. Good job basically proving #2 in one fell swoop: anything goes wrong in the administration, blame Obama. Anything goes well, credit his underlings.
It’s a better thought out process than the reverse, which has been to credit Obama for good things and say he’s not responsible for bad things. Damn rogue administration!
Here’s a crazy idea: how about we credit him for his successes, ding him for where he’s fallen short, and come up with a balanced assessment? It might be scary for you though, since on balance his has been a successful presidency.
So, Obama was good and Hillary will be even better! OK, then.
Obama’s crap, Clinton will be okay, and Rubio will be either great or fairly poor.
John Kasich will be the greatest President of the post-war era.
ayylmao
You mean WWIII, as started by Trump? And that Kasich will be the only candidate left alive to campaign in 2020?
You say that like it’s a good thing.
Sure did.
Merely a bump, to give Dopers of any political stripe a chance to weigh in after Rubio’s “win” in Iowa.
Well, Rubio did have a rather good night last night. As I said in the post-Thanksgiving thread, he didn’t poll above the mid-to-upper teens anywhere, anytime, during the long pre-primary season. But last night he got 23%.
That certainly gives him more of a leg to stand on when making the case that Establishment lane voters should forget the other three guys, and rally around him. (The other candidates themselves aren’t going to step aside, of course, but the message won’t be aimed at them, but just at their supporters.)