Eternal Life

Why government programs won't die.

Jonathan Rauch from the August/September 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

However, killing just the odd program or two is a sucker's game. No one cares if maritime subsidies stop tomorrow except the maritime lobby, which will lash out like a rattlesnake. The treatment for demosclerosis requires, instead, rounding up and killing enough subsidies to make a difference that is visible to the voters, whether in the form of a lower deficit, lower taxes, some new programs, or some blend of the three. With a big enough package and a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the broad electorate can, in principle, be mobilized against a collection of narrow lobbies. It happened, after all, in the tax reform of 1986.

Here is where Gingrich comes in. Unlike Bill Clinton, he understood the problem. His troops burned with hunger to do something about it. Their Contract with America gave them something they could wave as a mandate. All in all, last year appeared to give the Republicans an opening for reform on a scale that might make a difference. Gingrich, like me, believed that reform would be a hard sell at first but could win friends at the end of the day. He was wrong and he failed. Why?

Most obviously, because President Clinton put up a fight. He controlled enough Democratic votes to sustain his veto, and he began to enjoy using it. The most common interpretation of Republicans' failure--the Republicans' own favorite--points to Clinton and says, "Just give us the presidency. Then you'll see something."

Maybe, but probably not. Two noteworthy facts undermine the notion that the Republicans' failure was mainly the White House's doing. The first is that, as became clearer over the weeks, the president had the public on his side. The Republicans bet everything on their assumption that Clinton's veto would be too unpopular to use more than sparingly. Faced with an electorate clamoring for change, they believed, the president would have to meet Congress at least halfway. The reverse turned out to be true. The more obstructive Clinton became, the more people liked him. Conventional wisdom initially said he could not get away with vetoing both a budget package and a welfare reform. Wrong. He vetoed both, and not only did he look more presidential as a result, but the public expressed relief rather than rage. Reform, yes, but not this welfare reform. Not this budget. What the Republicans ran into was public opposition, not just political opposition.

A second fact is still more damaging to the "Just give us the White House" interpretation: The Republicans themselves abandoned most of their "revolution" well before it reached the president's desk. To be sure, they stood by their laudable determination to make serious strides against the deficit. They also proposed some significant (though hardly huge) reductions in Medicare. And, finally, they held to their genuinely revolutionary plans to cap welfare and Medicaid and turn them into block grants for the states. In the main, however, what they did was nothing like a housecleaning. That was all the more disappointing because they began promisingly, in May 1994, with a budget proposal that went further than anyone, including President Reagan, had gone. It would have eliminated about 300 programs, some of them fairly big. But six months later, by the time the lobbies had done their work and various members of Congress (of both parties) had ridden to the rescue of various damsels in distress, the list of significant eliminations was more like 30, according to Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute. In the House, a proposed reduction of about $15 billion in direct subsidies to industry ended up as an actual reduction of $1.5 billion, according to The Washington Post.

This is not to say that no reforms were made. Things have improved somewhat. In 1992, when President Bush asked to get rid of 246 mostly small programs, Congress eliminated all of eight, worth a total of $58 million. In 1994, the Congress managed to kill 41 small items, worth a total of $1.3 billion. In the latest budget cycle, Congress got rid of (by my count, from Appropriations Committee data) 184 items, worth $2.9 billion. That was not nothing, and a handful of the dead were worth noticing: the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Bureau of Mines, the U.S. Travel and Tourism Administration, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Most, however, were on the order of the Interior Department's $1 million locomotive fuel-cell program--and $2.9 billion, remember, is less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the budget. "If this were a normal year, this wouldn't be a bad first step," Robert J. Shapiro, an economist with the Progressive Policy Institute, told the Post in December. "But this is not a normal year."

Or was not supposed to be. But, with a few exceptions (notably welfare), the Republicans' budget wasn't so different from the Democrats'. As usual, it cut budgets instead of programs. That is, it reduced spending mostly by freezing and squeezing programs across the board instead of by picking and choosing. Government would still be doing practically everything it ever did. And, as usual, change was driven much more by the desire to save money than by any appetite for coherent reform.

For example: The Republicans' single biggest successful reform was their farm bill, which Clinton signed in April. For corn and wheat farmers, the new farm law does something genuinely bold: Instead of propping up prices with supply controls, acreage bases, planting requirements, and other implements of New Deal dirigisme, it just gives farmers cash. Grain farmers will still be wards of the state--their subsidies decline only slightly over the bill's seven years, from $10 billion to $8 billion--but markets, rather than Washington, will decide how much of which crops to grow.

Splendid. But why did the peanut program survive? Begun in 1934 as a temporary measure, this remarkable contrivance requires farmers to own--or rent--a federal license to grow peanuts for the domestic food market. The scheme props up prices by keeping supplies down, and also props up the rentiers who earn six-digit royalties from the peanut licenses they control. The Agriculture Department decides how many peanuts can be grown each year. A government price guarantee and quotas on foreign peanuts complete the baroque picture. In a floor vote this year, the Republican Congress voted, albeit narrowly, to preserve this amazing program virtually unchanged.

The reason is that the peanut program, being based on mar-ket-fixing and protectionism rather than direct spending, doesn't cost the treasury much. So Congress could not be bothered with it. Why offend the peanut people if doing so won't reduce the deficit?

Many of Gingrich's followers, notably the Republican freshmen, were serious about reform, or thought they were. But they could not withstand the ubiquitous pressure brought to bear by a thousand persistent lobbies, each of which argued--usually with some justice--that eliminating this or that program would cause hardship for some group while leaving other groups unscathed. Had Clinton given the Republicans everything they sought, the result would have been a different, somewhat tougher budget plan than his, but not (always excepting welfare reform) any big reform of government. Like the Democrats, the Republicans were stretching government thinner and thinner while leaving its sprawl unchecked.

To do better than that, Republican reformers--and non-Republican ones, for that matter--need to do more than win the White House. They need to win the people.

I said in my book, and I still say, that the social disease of demosclerosis must be treated by explaining to the public why reform of government is necessary despite being initially unpleasant--not just painful to "them" (welfare cheats, big business, megatycoons) but to "me," the ordinary voter. But the aftermath of Gingrichism leaves me appreciating, grimly, how daunting this task actually is. In 1995 and '96 the public, although deeply disenchanted with government, conspired with Clinton and the Democrats to block what may have been the decade's best shot at reform. And reform was blocked, not because it was seen as mincing or half-hearted, but precisely because it was viewed as too ambitious or extreme.

No doubt Gingrich was partly to blame, for presenting himself as half Dennis the Menace and half Lenin. (The day the Republicans said they might allow the government to default on its debts, my father, no liberal, looked up from his paper and said of Gingrich, "That man is drunk with power.") But the deeper disappointment is that it was so easy for the lobbies and the Democrats to spook the public by screaming bloody murder. The public wants government to be leaner (though not meaner), but not at the expense of students, farmers, bankers, veterans, retirees, homeowners, artists, train-riders, or cats and dogs; and it cannot abide the ghoulish shrieks and moans that are heard the moment the scalpel comes out.

The African Queen has a scene where the protagonists' boat is hopelessly stuck in a marsh--only a few yards, it turns out, from open water. Today's government is in a similar plight. Dissatisfaction ought, by rights, to open a path to reform. But it does not. The African Queen was lifted out of her quagmire by the high tide. But in the case of the American government, the boat cannot be lifted out. It is, of its nature, inseparable and inalienable from the million commitments that it has made and the million interest groups that form its environment. It cannot simply rise above them.