States Rights and Bureaucracy

 Reading Dr. Deborah Brix's "Silent Invasion", her memoir of her work in the pandemic. It's basically chronological, and I'm just about 2 weeks in.

She is trying to maneuver among the various camps in the Trump administration:

• economics interests such as Sec. Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, worried about economic impacts.
• politicos like Joe Grogan worried about political impacts.
• CDC scientists worried about science and being right.
• HHS bureaucrats who worry about implementation.
• Poli-scis, like Bob Redfield who's head of CDC and Tony Fauci, who's reluctant to get beyond the data.

Based on her experience in Pepfar--fighting HIV in Africa, she believes in the importance of data and worries about asymptomatic spread of virus.  She's also concerned about being a woman in a male world and an outsider/newcomer to the administration's effort.

Most of all she's concerned about maneuvering the players towards what she sees as important. 

A big hurdle is the lack of timely detailed data.  She explains that CDC did not require data from the states; indeed they were afraid of antagonizing state officials and had the history of coaxing them to cooperate.  I see this as fitting into a pet idea of mine--the fact that few federal government bureaucracies directly deal with citizens--FSA being one of the few. 

How to Build Infrastructure and State Capacity

 Ezra Klein has an essay on building government infrastructure. Some thoughts on the topic, most unrealistic in today's polity:

• review and revise the statistical infrastructure. As I've written before, my guess is that the various statistical agencies of the government are operating in the context of yesterday's world. Because statistics is a boring subject, it doesn't attract much controversy or oversight.  
• there's lots of real-time data out there, as we're reminded regularly in articles voicing concerns about consumer privacy.  Can the government tap that?
• concerns about privacy mean that the census and other reports anonymized--is there a better approach to this?
• what gaps in statistical coverage have developed as the economy has changed over the last 40 years? 
• Jimmy Carter had a vision for changing the federal personnel system with the Senior Executive Service, making it more like the UK system.  IMO it's not worked as it was supposed to. 
• Slowly slowly the government is moving towards more standardization with gov.id and the US Digital Service. Maybe over many years the US will approach the UK in the degree of uniformity in govt sites.
• Probably should be more interaction between the various associatons of state and local government entities and the federal govt.  I'm just vaguely aware that such associations exist--like state legislature, county govts, sheriffs, etc. Possibly there is some formal interface which I don't know about
• Trying to encourage more standardization of state and local government operations would help, as shown by the problems with the unemployment insurance systems during the pandemic recession.
• Maybe giving each legal resident a no-charge banking account and govt email account  would be good.
• 
  

The Dormant Commerce Clause

This Adler post at Volokh led me to this explanation of the dormant commerce clause.  The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. The question is whether that includes the ability to limit the ability of any particular state from legislating on interstate commerce. The current answer is yes, it does, in at least some instances. The next question is what instances?  Can California require Iowa hog farmers to abandon gestation crates and chicken farmers to provide x square feet per hen if they want to sell their ham and eggs in California? 

That's the issue I wrote about here. No answers here, but at least the question has a name.

Is Federalism Good or Bad?

 It's hard to tell, because it depends on whose ox is gored.

For example, California seems to be leading the way on animal welfare--imposing restrictions on how hogs are reared and how much space hens are provided. The state is being sued over this.

Texas is setting new restrictions on abortion, which may or may not be upheld by SCOTUS. Its being sued over that.

Obamacare originally provided for all states to expand Medicaid, but SCOTUS said that was going too far, so a bunch of states haven't done it.

I could go on and on.  The point is that most, perhaps all, people who have political views want the entire US to adopt their view. Historically that's not worked. So the question becomes a discussion of means to enforce uniformity. 

Can California set requirements for the ham bought into the state, How about the motor vehicles--can it set tougher standards than the national ones. Can Missouri set standards for what its women do outside of the state?  Can Texas restrict what comes in the mail (ie. the morning after pills)? 

Historians may remember that the Southern states were setting restrictions on anti-slavery material being mailed into the state, while officials in Northern states often resisted enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.

Can anyone come up with a neutral standard that reasonably navigates these issues?

COBOL and Our Government

 Interesting paper via Marginal Revolution--a scholar found that inefficiencies and delay in  states still using COBOL to run their unemployment insurance systems hurt GDP.  

I calculate that the failure to invest in updating UI benefit systems in COBOL states caused U.S. real GDP to fall by an extra $181 billion (in 2012 dollars) during this time period. Three primary mechanisms account for the effect I find: COBOL states could be characterized by (1) longer delays in processing claims, (2) longer delays in filing claims, or (3) a larger share of discouraged filers: individuals who do not file because they do not believe that they will be successful in receiving benefits if they file or individuals that believe that the cost to file is too high. 

I've good memories of COBOL; for one thing that's how I met my wife, in a COBOL class.  

While I understand why states haven't redone their unemployment insurance systems, I won't lose the chance to ponticate on the subject.  In an ideal world we'd have a national unemployment insurance program, not 50+ individual state ones.  In an ideal world we'd find the resources to redo software systems more often than every 50 years.  In an ideal world we wouldn't leave money (GDP) growth on the table. 

Our Decentralized Systems

John Phipps twitted about this piece, specifically this:

This industry, and in particular the few groups who control the narrative, need to actually just agree and make one darn file type used to transfer and create data.I know this has and is being tried and there are a plethora of ways to go about it. Also, there are legacy systems and what not. We are not going to progress much more unless this finally gets solved though. Let us “you know what” or get off the pot.

I commented, comparing this problem with the problem of incompatible data sets in the healthcare industry.  I think this is a general feature of American society and economy: with a federal system, the size of the country and its population, the market economy, and our history we don't have centralized systems comparable to those in France or in Estonia

Security Through Chaos

An Atlantic piece on how our political system is so chaotic there's no way to know how compromised our elections are.

That's the wisdom of our Founding Fathers--by giving us a federal system with elections administered at local and state levels they ensured it would be hard to get an overall view of the system, but it's also hard to subvert the whole system, simply because there isn't one.

Laboratories of Democracy: the Case of the US

Justice Brandeis praised states as "laboratories of democracy", considering federalism is a way for states to experiment with different programs and arrangements before we try them on the national level.  Think of how "Romneycare" in Massachusetts served as a test for Obamacare.  Liberals are reconsidering their belief in federalism as they oppose the Trump administration--it's great for California to lead the way on climate change.

I hadn't considered until I read this post at Jstor how the U.S. itself served as a laboratory for democracy, an example for Canada of what not to do as they constructed their government in 1867. Notably, they wanted to avoid the features of federalism which had cost their neighbor to the south over 600,000 dead.  They distrusted the 10th Amendment and the strong president (the dictator Lincoln).