@MattHodges @danielschuman @paulsmith @danhon @cydharrell @rklau @danachis @waldoj @krusynth @allafarce
Matt, when I said "govern well," I was thinking mostly of those Democrats focused on crafting either policies or legislation, not those whose task is to perform or deliver governmental services required by policy or legislation.
Thanks for the links!
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as long as we're being mere, I'll say that if you can't implement your policy effectively, it doesn't much matter how good it is on paper
@aaronsnow @cydharrell @allafarce @bobwyman @MattHodges @danielschuman @paulsmith @danhon @rklau @waldoj @krusynth
I love this discussion. First, what I'm about to say is from my own personal experience working on policy implementation. I am not speaking for any government or administration.
Let's take a couple of examples from the covid emergency: emergency rental assistance and pandemic unemployment benefits for gig workers and people on 1099s.
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It could be argued that these are "good" policies. People were clearly in need, and making money available to keep people in their homes and safely out of work situations that would expose them to a pandemic could prevent many harms to individuals and institutions.
So, yay! Billions of dollars into the economy to avert a disaster in an emergency.
But.
@aaronsnow @cydharrell @allafarce @bobwyman @MattHodges @danielschuman @paulsmith @danhon @rklau @waldoj @krusynth
Emergency rental assistance was put at Treasury by Congress. Treasury doesn't run programs, generally. Housing was new. A whole new program had to be stood up, staffed, and guidance issued.
In the meantime, ~700 grantees -- cities, counties, and states -- had to start implementing the program. With very few exceptions, none had rental assistance programs before this.
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Without guidance from the federal government, they started, anyway, leaning on their experience with housing programs and other locally-delivered, federally funded programs.
The variations on how the program was implemented are wide-ranging, because grantees had to made decisions about their policies within the policy to deliver on using the funding to keep people housed.
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Now the dynamic shifts from 'lets keep people housed' to 'how do we spend all this money before it gets clawed back by the federal government.' The funding was released in April / May. It was expected to be spent by September/October.
But in the best of cases, it took 8-12 weeks just to get infrastructure in place.
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In states like Michigan, programs had to wait for the legislature to actually allocate the money.
Then there were decisions like do we give money to the landlords or the tenants? How much can we tolerate self-attestation? What are we going to get audited for?
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Lots of things happened that were never intended by the legislation. Like New York decided they were not going to take claims from tenants at all, but would instead just send the funding to landlords, which actually harmed the landlords in the most need -- owners of smaller buildings with only one or a few units.
@aaronsnow @cydharrell @allafarce @bobwyman @MattHodges @danielschuman @paulsmith @danhon @rklau @waldoj @krusynth
Pandemic unemployment met with other dynamics. The unemployment program was never meant to serve people who didn't have W2 pay. That program, while imperfect was pretty functional in most states for normal times. But it couldn't scale from 4% unemployment to nearly 20% employment in a matter of a couple of months.
@aaronsnow @cydharrell @allafarce @bobwyman @MattHodges @danielschuman @paulsmith @danhon @rklau @waldoj @krusynth
Add to the regular UI program one where an unknown number of people would apply for benefits with no built-in way to verify wages or pay and no built-in way to verify identity, and you now have millions of people waiting for benefits that they probably deserve for MONTHS, and billions of dollars in fraud taken by opportunists exploiting weaknesses in the policy implementation.
@aaronsnow @cydharrell @allafarce @bobwyman @MattHodges @danielschuman @paulsmith @danhon @rklau @waldoj @krusynth
Bottom line: It's not as simple as "good" policy implemented "well," @bobwyman. It's not a straight line from what happens in a Congressional committee drafting session to benefits reaching people. And technology is a very small (but crucial) part of that service delivery.
Bob Wyman
Dave Guarino
Cyd Harrell
Aaron
a.nicole.wong
Dana