Should the government become more fragmented and specialized?

Great Debates
1

The recent ongoing stink over SOPA got me thinking (or rather, remembering), any individual member of Congress (or parliament, or whathaveyou) can only know so much. You really can’t expect that there can be a person in every district who is really, truly some kind of good ol’ renaissance polymath. We kind of alleviate this with committees and advisers, but even so, even if something passes committee it still goes to the floor with all the people who really don’t know.

Sometimes this is a chance to allow in outside perspectives, but other times this can be a disaster. At this point, when you have so many potential laws on the floor the ones you’re less informed on become a matter of listening to the people in your district that scream the loudest and give the biggest donations. It’s not good, but I can certainly see why it happens, you can’t be informed about all umpteen million things that could be on the floor at any moment.

But rather than expecting 435 congressman and 100 senators (substitute numbers as appropriate for your own government, other countries) to know what’s going on at all times as some have suggested, what about changing the structure to have more of a hierarchy?

Now there are certainly major issues that can arise, after all, the Supreme Court has proven that you can make an argument that damn near anything affects “interstate commerce.” So any subgovernment (say, the technology subgovernment) is almost always going to have some effect on another one (say the environmental subgovernment). I’m not sure, maybe any attempts to rectify this will make the government just devolve back into the current structure of things. But as a pure thought experiment (I doubt any major government structure reforms are on the horizon), do you think this idea could be serviceable? Splitting the government into semi-autonomous sub-legislatures that can interact with each other seems like a decent idea to me, but it could be much more trouble than it’s worth.

Yes, I’m aware this already kind of happens with the FCC, FDA, basically any executive branch agency, but they’re still ultimately at the mercy of what congress decides to pass, so I’m looking closer at the legislative branch.

2

Seems to me that your suggestion is just re-arranging how the specialization is labeled. As you say, the actual representatives can’t be expert at every damn thing, so they have to rely on advisers and committees and whatnot. I don’t see how it would improve the situation to have many more departments of this and that at smaller and smaller levels.

As I recall, this was the very thing being lampooned in the famous Monty Python “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch.

3

You are describing Congressional committees, and their senior members are specialists in the committee’s field.

4

Maybe I should be more clear. They should interact, but there would never be anything on the level of a “floor vote.” Basically each agency would have a mechanism to pass laws that affect their field, as well as a mechanism to dispute them between one another, rather than the current mechanism of drafting in committee and then bringing it to the floor for a vote by everyone.

5

So, how does representation get divied up? Does everyone get at least one representative on each sub section of Congress? Or do some regions get to decide energy policy while others get to decide military policy?

6

How would issues that span multiple sub-legislatures be handled? Say there was a bill that provided online education to help job seekers. Would it be handled by Technology, Education, Economics, Labour or Treasury sub-legislatures? Nearly all laws would affect multiple areas.

A department of independent experts who could advise legislators could be a good idea. Maybe like the Congressional Budget Office.