M
December 17, 2018
Subject: A MODEL FOR MOVING THE NATION FORWARD
Memorandum for: President Trump, Chief of Staff (designee) Mick Mulvaney, Kellyanne Conway
The working relationship between the Executive and Legislative Branches is, at best, tenuous. Additionally, within the congress extreme partisanship is the norm, often putting the nation at risk as critical national security issues get batted back and forth but not moved forward. These two assertions, if true,tell us Washington is not being-all-it-can-be when it comes to doing the peoples’ work. Furthermore, it appears the situation may deteriorate further during the 116thCongress.
In the annual Gallup poll that rates Americans’ confidence in institutions, the US military, as usual, finished first with 74% in the categories of “a great deal” and “quite a lot” of confidence.Also, as usual, congress was dead last with 11%. With those numbers, year after year, one would think the congressional leadership, if for no other reason than embarrassment, would look for ways to change. But they don’t and probably won’t. Dysfunction has become the accepted norm.
Can it be fixed? Yes, and there is a model for doing so.
In 2010 President Obama selected Erskin Bowles, a Democrat, and Alan Simpson, a Republican, to lead a study entitled,The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. It turned out to be a brilliant, six-month piece of work and was possibly the best bipartisan document produced in recent history. In fact, it was too good, too timely, too realistic and so comprehensive that President Obama and the congress put it in the too-hard box never to be acted on.
Undaunted, in 2013 Bowles and Simpson delivered a short paper to President Obama and congressional leaders reiterating the depth and breadth of the nation’s problems and the potential cataclysmic outcomes if they were to continue on their present path.
The Bowles-Simpson paper’s closing paragraph reads as follows: “The problems are real, the solutions are painful and there is no easy way out. What we are calling for is by no means perfect, but it could serve as a mark for real bipartisan negotiations on a plan to reduce the deficit and grow the economy. It is time for our country to put this ultra-partisanship aside and pull together, not apart. We must do it for our grand children, we must do it for ourselves and we must do it for our country.” Neither President Obama nor the Congress took any action.
Back to the question, what can we do about congressional dysfunction? The purpose of this memorandum is not to look at the Bowles-Simpson study results per se, but to look at how they went about doing their work. It could be the perfect model for getting more accomplished in Washington. Most importantly, the product has a decent chance of actually looking like a valid long-range strategic plan with a campaign to execute it.
If we put the model into action, it is a pretty simple process: President Trump would select a problem to be worked; for example, immigration, reduced spending, election reform, health care reform. He then selects two highly accomplished, prominent national leaders with opposing party affiliations who are no longer in government. The two commission leaders would then select a few subject matter experts as part of their temporary staff. President Trump would then invite the House and Senate leaders to appoint two House members, a Republican and a Democrat, and one Senator from each party to be part of the Commission team.
The final Commission product, PRODUCED IN SIX MONTHS OR LESS, would be proposed legislation the president could send to the congress for action. Upon arrival, the Bill would be co-sponsored in the House and Senate by the bipartisan congressional members who sat on the commission.
That’s the Bowles-Simpson model. The president could/should have multiple bipartisan commissions on-going simultaneously and thereby create a steady flow of important issues for congress to work on and pass into law.
The advantages of this model are:
One, the issues should be bipartisan on day-one and remain so for the duration of the process.
Secondly, there is still a lot of “swamp” to be drained in Washington. President Trump is THE leader of this nation and this model allows him to drive the agenda and the narrative, something congress seems incapable of doing.
Three, by carefully defining the scope of the study, up front, the president can make all of his on-going commissions “fit”into an overall campaign to move the nation forward.
Finally, and most importantly, from day-one the problems will be worked by proven leaders and the best minds available. What happens now is that the majority of bills are drafted by congressional committee staffers whose depth, experience and expertise may be questionable.
Proposed legislation that comes out of a committee is almost guaranteed to be politically biased, depending on which party chairs that particular committee. But the problem gets even worse; on big issues, health care for example,there may be multiple committee staffs simultaneously working on a draft bill on the same subject. What happens is, instead of selecting THE best plan, all the staffs’ products are likely to get mashed together. The result is utter chaos. The best example in our history is The Affordable Care Act that came out of multiple committees and when combined resulted in a 2200-page law that not a single member of congress had read prior to voting for it. But it gets worse, in order to make a 2200-page law “operational”, legions of bureaucrats then produced thousands of additional pages of implementing instructions.
Will the Boles/Simpson model work? It can. What we know for sure is that what the Executive and Legislative Branches are doing now is not working.
The bottom line: very rarely, with the exception of the Defense Department, do we see important issues executed from a completed, well thought out, long-range strategic plan. Executive Branch departments (other than DOD) and all of congress just do not have strategic planning expertise and the result is often chaos, lack of direction, dysfunction and grid lock.
Will the Bowles-Simpson model eradicate political polarization? Probably not, but it can provide a road map to systematically move the nation forward.
Marvin L. Covault, author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders.
Note: I now have a conduit to the White House and this memo is in the West Wing. However, I do not know if any of the addressees have read it.