Regs

Ten Thousand Commandments 2023 An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State  Clyde Wayne Crews 

 Although the Federal Register has always been the primary document for cataloging regulations, it has recently under Trump chronicled their partial reduction, although a look at the daily Federal Register may not have given that impression. Reducing regulations requires writing rules too, which can continue to expand the Federal Register. Shortcomings notwithstanding, it is worthwhile to track the Federal Register’s page counts, particularly because under the Biden administration, offsetting deregulatory rules are no longer part of the bulk.

Joe Biden has restored the 80,000-page Federal Register as the norm. On December 30, 2022, the Federal Register closed out at 80,756 pages (up 10 percent from 73,321 at the end of Biden’s first year), a figure that will adjust downward slightly by a few hundred pages in the final National Archives reckoning and be taken into account later.

 

Hatch Act

Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows argued that his case should go to federal court because he was acting in an official capacity.  They were not.  Claire O. Finkelstein at Slare:

[The] activities Meadows was engaging in were highly political in nature, and such activities are strictly forbidden under 5 U.S.C. § 7323(a)(1), otherwise known as the “Hatch Act.” This statute forbids executive branch employees from “us[ing] [their] official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.” It is designed to prohibit executive branch employees from using their official positions to engage in partisan political activities.

In August of 2020, Richard Painter and I filed a complaint against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for example, for the speech Pompeo gave at the Republican National Convention while on a diplomatic mission to Israel. This was a “personal capacity” speech delivered during an official business trip as secretary of state, while Pompeo was representing the United States in his official capacity—a clear Hatch Act violation. While the president and vice president are not subject to the Hatch Act, they are subject to a parallel criminal Hatch Act statute that makes it a crime to coerce political activity on the part of any federal executive branch official. Believing as we did that Trump was indeed attempting to pressure members of the executive branch into engaging in Hatch Act violations themselves, Richard Painter and I filed a criminal Hatch Act complaint under 18 U.S.C. §610 against Trump during the 2020 campaign, alleging that he was coercing political activity on the part of employees in the executive branch by attempting to “intimidate or coerce” them into supporting his aims.

In the Georgia indictment, the Hatch Act plays a critical role: The activities Meadows performed in the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building constituted a contribution to a partisan political effort to ensure that Trump was declared the winner of the 2020 election, despite having lost that election completely. Such naked political activities cannot be official duties for anyone who is a federal executive branch office holder. The entire Georgia campaign reads like one big Hatch Act violation—a civil Hatch Act violation for federal officeholders like Meadows and a criminal Hatch Act violation for Trump for pressuring his subordinates into civil Hatch Act violations.

It is striking how similar Trump’s behavior in Georgia in 2020 is to the criminal Hatch Act complaint we filed against Trump. The “perfect” phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump attempted to coerce Raffensperger into coming up with 11,780 votes in order to reverse the results of the election in Georgia was an attempt to intimidate state officers into supporting Trump’s personal political aims—conduct that is precisely what the criminal Hatch Act provision was meant to address in the case of federal officers. In this case, the officers just happened to be state officials for the most part, with the possible exception of Meadows and other federal officials Trump tried to rope into his campaign.

National Archives and Presidential Records

 

Jacqueline Alemany, Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey at WP:

For most of American history, presidents kept their own papers and their personal ownership had never been challenged, according to a 2006 article co-written by Stern, NARA’s general counsel since 1998.

When Nixon resigned, he made plans to destroy White House records, including the Oval Office tapes that had become central to the Watergate scandal. Congress stepped in and passed the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve all written communication related to a president’s official duties — memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes and other material — and turn it over to the Archives.

Disputes over the Nixon tapes continued into the 1990s, with lawsuits by former aides and Cabinet members seeking to block disclosure and from public-interest groups demanding access, according to the article. At the end of the Reagan administration, Stern, then with the American Civil Liberties Union, led a groundbreaking lawsuit seeking to preserve White House records related to the Iran-contra scandal.

People wait for a moving van after boxes were moved out of the Eisenhower Executive Office building inside the White House complex on Jan. 14, 2021. (Gerald Herbert/AP)

Research by presidential representatives have in the past raised security risks. In 2005, former Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger pleaded guilty to removing and destroying classified documents from the Archives related to the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. That case was overseen by Christopher A. Wray, then head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the Trump-appointed director of the FBI.

“This is not a sleepy agency — NARA staff are used to records-related controversies,” said Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at NARA. “This matter, however, is unique. No piece of paper that’s a presidential record should be at Mar-a-Lago. It is clear that NARA staff made extraordinary efforts to recover presidential records and was rebuffed on numerous occasions.”

Trump’s disdain and disregard for the presidential record-keeping system he was legally bound to adhere to is well-documented. And while advisers repeatedly warned him about needing to follow the Presidential Records Act early in his presidency, his chaotic handling of the documents prevailed.

NARA’s motto, Littera Scripta Manet, translates from Latin to “the written word remains.” But in Trump’s White House, the written word was often torn, destroyed, misplaced or hoarded.

Schedule F

 Jonathan Swan at Axios:

Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.

Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.

Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as “Schedule F” employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections.

New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.

An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life.

Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his “America First” agenda.

Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.

It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.

Thickening Government

 Paul Light at Brookings:

According to the online phonebooks published by Leadership Connect in 2020, Biden took control of 83 layers of presidential appointees and 5,000 jobs on Inauguration Day. Biden also inherited hundreds of lower-level “title-riders” who thicken the hierarchy with second titles such as “associate deputy assistant secretary,” “assistant deputy undersecretary,” “deputy associate assistant commissioner,” “associate principal deputy assistant secretary,” “deputy chief of staff,” and “assistant deputy chiefs of staff.” As Chart 5 shows, Biden inherited a government that has never had more layers of leaders nor more leaders per layer confirming Trump’s complaint that there were so many appointees in government that “it’s just people over people over people.”

Three Hundred Seventy-Six Officers Failed to Stop the Uvalde Massacre

Law enforcement in the United States is decentralized and fragmented.  Sometimes the system works well. During the Uvalde Massacre, it did not.

INVESTIGATIVE COMMITTEE ON THE ROBB ELEMENTARY SHOOTING TEXAS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, INTERIM REPORT 2022 

In total, 376 law enforcement officers responded to the tragedy at Robb Elementary School. The breakdown of responders, by agency, is as follows.

• 149 United States Border Patrol
• 91 Texas Department of Public Safety
• 25 Uvalde Police Department
• 16 San Antonio Police Department (SWAT)
• 16 Uvalde County Sheriff ’s Office
• 14 Department of Homeland Security – HIS
• 13 United States Marshals
• 8 Drug Enforcement Agency
• 7 Frio County Sheriff ’s Office
• 5 Kinney County Sheriff ’s Office
• 5 Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District
• 4 Dilley Police Department
• 4 Zavala County Sheriff ’s Office
• 3 Medina County Sheriff ’s Office
• 3 Sabinal Police Department
• 2 City of Uvalde Fire Marshals
• 2 Pearsall Police Department
• 2 Texas Parks and Wildlife
• 2 Uvalde County Constables
• 2 Val Verde County Sheriff ’s Office
• 1 Frio County Constables
• 1 Southwest Texas Junior College
• 1 Zavala County Constables 

Public Problems of the Secret Service

 David Graham at The Atlantic:

This week, an employee staffing Biden’s trip to Israel was sent home after a reported physical altercation with a woman there. (This isn’t the first time an employee has been shipped back to the States for bad behavior.) In April, the FBI alleged that two men impersonating federal agents had fooled the Secret Service. And earlier this month, Biden announced that the agency’s chief was leaving to join the social-media company Snap (where at least he won’t have to worry about preserving his messages).

These incidents are just part of a string of snafus dating back more than a decade. During the Obama administration, the Secret Service allowed people to fire shots at the White House, permitted an armed guard to ride an elevator with the president, got into trouble overseas, and had car accidents after drinking. Officials were repeatedly sacked—including one who was investigating agents visiting sex workers overseas, until he himself was arrested in a prositution investigation.

This sort of haplessness is entertaining when it’s the Keystone Kops doing it on celluloid. But when the issues involved are as serious as the life of the president or attempts to subvert an election, laughter doesn’t come so easily.

Atlas Shrugged at COVID Death

From the House the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis:

For the past two years, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has been investigating the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic to ensure the American people receive a full accounting of what went wrong and to determine what corrective steps are necessary to ensure our nation is better prepared for any future public health crisis.1 To those ends, the Select Subcommittee has conducted an exhaustive investigation into the extent to which senior Trump Administration officials undermined the federal public health response in an attempt to advance former President Donald Trump’s perceived political interests.

This report is the first installment of the Select Subcommittee’s findings showing that the Trump Administration’s political interference was rampant and degraded every major facet of the nation’s public health response during the first year of the pandemic. It is based on a series of transcribed interviews with senior officials involved in the federal government’s pandemic response, including White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir, and Special Advisor to the President Dr. Scott Atlas, as well as a review of thousands of pages of internal correspondence and other documents obtained by the Select Subcommittee.

This installment chronicles the Trump Administration’s embrace of a dangerous and discredited herd immunity via mass infection strategy as they failed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. New evidence obtained by the Select Subcommittee and released for the first time today reveals that support for this herd immunity strategy in the Trump White House was deeper and more wide-reaching than previously known. The embrace of this strategy enabled Trump Administration officials to convince themselves that they were right to do nothing to limit the spread of the virus in the second half of 2020 and likely resulted in many deaths that would have been prevented by an effective national mitigation strategy. 

... 

As the country was entering into the deadly fall and winter 2020 surge, Dr. Atlas continued to advocate against proven mitigation measures under the misguided premise that most regions of the country had already achieved sufficient disease-acquired herd immunity to prevent future surges.122 Despite an attempted intervention by multiple doctors on the White House Coronavirus Task Force with Vice President Pence’s office in November or December 2020 to warn about the deadly consequences if the Trump Administration did not take meaningful action to mitigate the virus’s spread, it appears that White House officials—after months of absorbing the “Atlas Dogma”—were largely unresponsive to these concerns. During the period from November 2020 through February 2021—as the deadly fall and winter surge swept across the country while the Trump Administration did little to curb its impact—the United States saw the most coronavirus deaths recorded in any four-month period throughout the entirety of the pandemic. 

The Trump Administration’s flagrant disregard for proven mitigation measures in those months resulted in a federal response that differed little from the implementation of a deliberate herd immunity strategy. Administration officials used the “Atlas Dogma” to justify their downplaying of the virus before the November presidential election and their continued deprioritization of the crisis as they worked to overturn the election results. The Administration’s embrace of this ill-advised approach not only impaired the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the pandemic at a critical juncture before the deployment of vaccines and widespread availability of effective treatments—it also helped to lay the foundation for a wide swath of the public to persistently reject other vital tools to combat the virus, including coronavirus vaccines.

Atlas predicted that COVID would take 10,000 lives.  He was off by a factor of 100.  The actual death toll has dropped one million and counting. 

Civil Society and Government Reform

Many posts have discussed public administration and public service.

Daniel Stid:

The civil society actors now responding to our present challenges are not doing so within the boundaries of one organization or network but in a wide-ranging and self-organizing pattern. Consider, for example, the work of the policy advocates, practitioners, and scholars from across the ideological spectrum participating in the Fix Congress cohort. A scan of the hearings of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress demonstrates how much its members have been relying on the cohort to advance their work. The Select Committee is something of a unicorn on Capitol Hill. Its scrupulously bipartisan proceedings, consensus-backed recommendations, practical agenda for institutional reform, and steady focus on implementation run counter to the standard narratives of a polarized, grandstanding, institutional-slashing, do-nothing Congress. But there it is, working away and making progress behind the scenes. The Fix Congress participants are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with committee members, informing their deliberations, serving as their sounding board, and helping others appreciate the importance of their work.

Additional nonprofits are stepping up to help legislators do better work at the federal and state levels. The Project on Government Oversight, the Lugar Center, and the Levin Center have been advising members and training congressional staff on how to conduct more effective and bipartisan oversight. The Levin Center is now rolling out resources and capacity-building assistance to support state legislators seeking to do likewise. Meanwhile, the Millennial Action Project has established bipartisan future caucuses of younger lawmakers in Congress and 30+ statehouses, helping them build networks and develop policy agendas they can pursue together.

When it comes to improving the federal executive branch, the Partnership for Public Service has been an indispensable organization for more than two decades. The Partnership highlights examples of excellence, innovation, and leadership among federal civil servants through its annual Service to America or Sammies awards. Its recurring assessments of federal employee engagement, organizational culture, and leadership (or the lack thereof) across agencies generate information that administration and cabinet leaders closely track and use. The Partnership conducts ongoing research to better understand and advance improvements in executive branch performance. Finally, it trains and coaches established and rising leaders throughout the federal workforce.

Multiple nonprofits work at all levels of government to build administrative capacity and results-driven implementation through the provision of technical assistance and training. This work is especially important in state and local agencies, where administrative resources and capabilities can be spotty. The Pew Trusts’ Results First Initiative has for a decade been an important resource for multiple states seeking to implement evidence-based policies. Results for America, the Kennedy School’s Government Performance Lab, and Third Sector have likewise teamed up with state and local government officials to help them identify and implement evidence-based solutions. Via their own growing teams and the public servants they are supporting, these nonprofits are steadily increasing the number of well-trained and dedicated people tackling our most vexing social problems.

Along similar lines, Code for America marshals technical assistance and resources to help government agencies harness technology and improve the delivery and citizen experience of public services. Drawing on their technological acumen and experience, Code for America has also articulated a vision of human-centered government that illuminates an appealing path forward in the digital age.

Another crucial line of work is inspiring and attracting talented people to serve in our governing institutions. This has been a longstanding emphasis of the Volcker Alliance, with its core belief that, “public service is a high calling, and it is critical to engage our most thoughtful and accomplished citizens in service to the public good.” The TechTalent Project has a similar but sharper focus on helping government at all levels recruit public servants with the technological skills agencies need to carry out their missions. TechCongress is working toward this same goal via fellowship programs that bring technologists into the first branch of the federal government. Their efforts are already paying off, as demonstrated by the growing sophistication of congressional hearings and legislative activities on technology issues.

The F in FDA

 Helena Bottemiller Evich at Politico:

Food is not a high priority at the Food and Drug Administration.

A monthslong POLITICO investigation — based on more than 50 interviews — found that drugs and other medical products dominate food at the agency, both in budget and bandwidth. Over the years, the food side of FDA has been so ignored and grown so dysfunctional that even former FDA commissioners readily acknowledged problems. There’s a long running joke among officials: The “F” in FDA is silent.

The dynamic has only been exacerbated during the pandemic. The FDA regulates nearly 80 percent of the American food supply, and each year — according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — more than 128,000 people are hospitalized and 3,000 people die from foodborne illnesses.

We published a deep dive into the agency’s structural failures, lack of action to prevent major produce outbreaks and slowness to try to make food healthier. We encourage you to bookmark it and read it in full.

In the meantime, here are four top-level takeaways. 

1. The food division has structural and leadership problems
2. Congress asked FDA to regulate water to keep deadly pathogens out of produce. 11 years later, it still hasn’t.
3. FDA made little progress on keeping toxic elements out of baby foods.
4. FDA has not taken timely action to help cut sodium consumption

Union Membership in 2021

 From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2021, the number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions continued to decline (-241,000) to 14.0 million, and the percent who were members of unions--the union membership rate--was 10.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The rate is down from 10.8 percent in 2020--when the rate increased due to a disproportionately large decline in the total number of nonunion workers compared with the decline in the number of union members. The 2021 unionization rate is the same as the 2019 rate of 10.3 percent. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.

Highlights from the 2021 data: 

• --The union membership rate of public-sector workers (33.9 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.1 percent). (See table 3.) 

• --The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training, and library occupations (34.6 percent) and protective service occupations (33.3 percent). (See table 3.)

• --Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.6 percent) than women (9.9 percent). The gap between union membership rates for men and women has narrowed considerably since 1983 (the earliest year for which comparable data are available), when rates for men and women were 24.7 percent and 14.6 percent, respectively. (See table 1.)

• --Black workers remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.) -

• -Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 83 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($975 versus $1,169). (The comparisons of earnings in this news release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.) (See table 2.)

• --Among states, Hawaii and New York continued to have the highest union membership rates (22.4 percent and 22.2 percent, respectively), while South Carolina and North Carolina continued to have the lowest (1.7 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively). (See table 5.)

 

The True Size of Government

 Paul Light at TheGovLab:

Presidents rarely miss an opportunity to celebrate the new jobs they create through contracts and grants, but seldom call a press conference to talk about the true size of the federal government’s blended workforce that the spending supports. A bigger government that delivers more services may be back in fashion at the White House, but the true size of government is largely hidden from review.

As Figure 3 shows, most year-to-year changes in the number of active-duty military, civil service, and Postal Service employees are relatively small, but the number of contractors and grantees can rise by thousands during economic crises. Even as the jobs provide desperately needed help to hard-hit communities, they can spark stories about federal handouts and provoke presidential promises to shrink the workforce lest a public interest group such as Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) name another Biden cabinet secretary as its “Porker of the Month.” (Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was named Porker of the Month in October.)

 

CDC and Other Agencies Lose Public Support

 Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

Americans' job evaluations of eight prominent federal government agencies have fallen by double digits since 2019. The largest drop is for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with 40% now saying it is doing an excellent or good job, down from 64% in 2019. None of the 13 agencies measured in both 2019 and 2021 showed an increase in positive job ratings.

Gallup periodically asks Americans to assess how some of the more newsmaking federal agencies and departments are doing. Gallup first asked about NASA in 1990, and then expanded the list to a larger number of agencies in 2003.

Fifteen agencies are included in Gallup's annual Governance survey this year, conducted Sept. 1-17. The prior measures are from April 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic and when the U.S. economy was generally strong.

The CDC's ratings have suffered the most as the nation has struggled to deal with the pandemic among other challenging issues. The leading health agency has been criticized for changing its messages about the best ways for Americans to protect themselves from the coronavirus, particularly regarding the use of face masks.

Consultants and COVID

Isaac Stanley-Becker at WP:

California wasn’t alone in using private contractors to manage the vaccination campaign. At least 25 states, along with federal agencies and many cities and counties, hired consulting firms, according to a Washington Post tally. The American vaccination drive came to rely on global behemoths such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), with downsized state and local health departments and even federal health agencies relying on the private sector to make vaccines available to their citizens, according to hundreds of pages of contract documents, emails and text messages obtained through public records requests.

McKinsey’s role extended beyond California to other states, including Ohio and New Jersey. Deloitte worked in 10 states. BCG received millions of dollars from the federal government to coordinate vaccine planning, while at least 11 states also worked with the company, in some cases paying it to address gaps in federal planning.

Consultants say they helped save lives by supporting overextended public servants with specialized expertise. “Our work helped state decision-makers quickly size up key factors impacting the effective distribution of vaccines,” said McKinsey spokesman Neil Grace. “All our work was based on state-defined priorities, and the data we analyzed was provided by state and local public health authorities.”

 But critics question whether such contracts improve government performance, arguing the arrangements are costly and difficult to oversee. Taxpayers have no way to know what precisely they are getting under no-bid contracts worth millions of dollars because the internal documents of private consultancies are not subject to public records laws.

...

In some instances, current and former health authorities said consultants gave elected leaders political cover while taking on few substantive tasks. But the deeper problem is when private firms are entrusted with too much, rather than contributing too little, said Robin Taylor Wilson, a former chair of the American Public Health Association’s epidemiology section and an associate professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.


“The contractors leave and we’re not retaining that expertise,” she said. “So the next time an emergency hits, we’re going to have another delayed reaction.”

Removals

 At AEI, Gary Schmitt and Joseph Bessette have a report titled "The First Congress Establishes the Unitary Executive."  Key points:

• Congress wrote the statutes establishing the new government’s Departments of Foreign Affairs, War, and Treasury, placing them under the president’s supervision and direction. Congress even gave the executive branch the lead in setting the country’s fiscal policies when it tasked the secretary of the Treasury with preparing plans pertaining to public revenue and credit.
• To ensure that the line of authority and responsibility went from department officials and their heads to the president and not (indirectly) to the Congress, Congress stipulated that the president had the authority to remove officials from their posts. Although this authority was not explicit in the Constitution, members argued it was implied in Article II’s vesting and take care clauses.
• Congress affirmed this removal power precisely because it believed it fully consonant with the Constitution’s language and logic. Some leading presidential scholars have argued that the majority of Congress viewed the placement of the removal authority as a matter of legislative discretion. However, a close examination indicates that a clear majority viewed the removal power as resting with the president.

Opinion of Federal Responsibilities

 From Pew:

As public trust in the federal government remains low, Americans continue to say the federal government has a responsibility to provide support and services for all Americans in a number of forms.

U.S. adults broadly agree that it is the federal government’s role to provide clean air and water (87%) and high-quality K-12 education (79%) for all Americans. More modest majorities say it is the government’s responsibility to provide health insurance (64%), adequate income in retirement (58%) and an adequate standard of living (56%).

Fewer than half – about four-in-ten – say it is a responsibility of the government to provide access to high-speed internet (43%) or a college education (39%).

A new Pew Research Center survey, conducted April 5-11 among a nationally representative sample of 5,109 adults who are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel, finds that public views about the federal government’s responsibilities are little changed since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak. One exception is that the share of Americans who say the government has a responsibility to provide access to high-speed internet has increased by 15 percentage points since September 2019 (from 28% to 43%)

US Policing: Decentralized and Mostly Small-Scale

At WP, Mark Berman reports that police reform is tough because policing is decentralized and most departments are small.

According to a federal survey in 2016, there are more than 12,200 local police departments nationwide, along with another 3,000 sheriff’s offices. And most of those don’t look like the New York Police Department, which employs more officers than Brooklyn Center, in suburban Minneapolis, has residents.

Nearly half of all local police departments have fewer than 10 officers. Three in 4 of the departments have no more than two dozen officers. And 9 in 10 employ fewer than 50 sworn officers. Brooklyn Center, which has 43 officers, and Windsor, which reported a seven-member force, fit comfortably in that majority.

Experts say that while smaller departments have their benefits, including being able to adapt to their communities and hire officers with local ties, these agencies also are typically able to avoid the accountability being sought as part of the national movement to restructure and improve policing. These departments’ often limited resources and the decentralized structure of American law enforcement complicate efforts to mandate widespread training and policy changes, experts say.

“You want to change American policing, figure out how to get to … the departments of 50 officers or less,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based group that works with police departments. “How do you reach them? How do you get to them? … That’s what the American people keep wondering.”

ATF

Glenn Thrush, Danny Hakim and Mike McIntire at NYT report on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms:

The gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, has for years systematically blocked plans to modernize the agency’s paper-based weapons-tracing system with a searchable database. As a result, records of gun sales going back decades are stored in boxes stacked seven high, waiting to be processed, against every wall.
...
Mr. Biden has ordered a ban on the homemade-firearm kits known as “ghost guns,” a prohibition the A.T.F. will have to enforce. To help set gun policy, he has charged the A.T.F. with undertaking the first comprehensive federal survey of weapons-trafficking patterns since 2000. And to lead the bureau into the future, Mr. Biden has nominated a fiery former A.T.F. agent and gun-control activist, David Chipman.

First, though, the bureau will have to overcome its past. In the 48 years since its mission shifted primarily to firearms enforcement, it has been weakened by relentless assaults from the N.R.A. that have, in the view of many, made the A.T.F. appear to be an agency engineered to fail.

At the N.R.A.’s instigation, Congress has limited the bureau’s budget. It has imposed crippling restrictions on the collection and use of gun-ownership data, including a ban on requiring basic inventories of weapons from gun dealers. It has limited unannounced inspections of gun dealers. Fifteen years ago, the N.R.A. successfully lobbied to make the director’s appointment subject to Senate confirmation — and has subsequently helped block all but one nominee from taking office.

...

The A.T.F. has also been hindered from within. The bureau’s culture, several people said, prioritizes high-visibility operations, like responding to episodes of violence at the racial-justice protests across the country last summer, over its more mundane core mission of inspecting and licensing gun dealers. That mission took a major step back in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, when annual inspections nose-dived by more than 50 percent even as gun sales surged to record levels.

To say the A.T.F. is outgunned is an understatement. Staffing levels have remained essentially flat for two decades, with the number of inspectors who are responsible for overseeing gun dealers actually decreasing by about 20 percent since 2001. The number of firearms sold over the same period has skyrocketed: over 23 million guns in 2020, shattering the previous record of 15.7 million in 2016.

Vaccine Distribution Problems

 

Margaret Harding McGill and Kim Hart at Axios:

[Last year] the federal government focused on vaccine production, but left it to the states to figure out how to actually get shots in arms.

• Local governments — dealing with significant budget and staff shortages — generally lack digital teams that can quickly stand up technology infrastructure.
• Tech-savvy public interest groups have offered assistance, but the services they can provide — and the government's willingness to accept them — has been limited.
• Government IT procurement processes failed to anticipate the needs for vaccine distribution or effectively vet vendors, leaving a fractured system.

.The big picture: "Actually delivering services means being tech-savvy today. And that piece is missing," Hana Schank, director of strategy for Public Interest Technology at New America, told Axios.

Early on in the pandemic, it was clear that vaccines would eventually arrive and that technology infrastructure would be needed for mass distribution. But local jurisdictions were preoccupied with contact tracing and securing personal protective equipment — two other areas where tech solutions fell short.

• "Contact tracing was the first big massive red flag for vaccines," said DJ Patil, former U.S. chief data scientist who is now Chief Technology Officer of Devoted Health, and worked directly on state COVID-19 response efforts in California. "People didn't see the opportunity that was coming and the chance to get it right."
• "You can have unbelievable amounts of technologists willing to show up, but we still don't know how to plug them in" to government processes, he said. "So they go with a vendor instead."

 Even when governments turned to tried-and-true vendors, problems arose.

...

Reality check: County health departments are often responsible for distributing vaccines — but their budgets have been gutted during the pandemic.In a survey conducted last June by the National Association of County and City Health Departments, more than 89% of local health departments said general COVID-19 response efforts had diverted resources away from immunizations.

The bottom line: Obtaining a vaccine will get easier, but that's mainly because vaccine supplies will continue to increase.

Results

 Ezra Klein at NYT:

“The wisdom from much of the political science research is that partisanship trumps everything,” says Amy Lerman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of “Good Enough for Government Work.” “But one of the insights from the policy feedback literature in particular is that when people experience policy, they don’t necessarily experience it as partisans. They experience it as a parent sending their child to school or a patient visiting a doctor, not as a Democrat or Republican. And because people are often thinking in nonpolitical terms during their day-to-day lives, they are much more open to having their views changed when they see the actual, tangible benefits of a policy in their lives. It’s a way of breaking through partisanship.”

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 In her book “Good Enough for Government Work,” Ms. Lerman argues that the U.S. government is caught in a reputation crisis where its poor performance is assumed, the public is attuned to its flaws and misses its virtues, and fed up citizens stop using public services, which further harms the quality of those services. The Trump years add another dimension to the analysis: Frustration with a government that doesn’t solve problems leads people to vote for demagogic outsiders who create further crises. But this is not an inevitability. Her titular phrase, she notes, “originated during World War II to describe the exacting standards and high quality required by government.” It was only in the 1960s and ’70s that it became a slur.