Actually, Democrats do need a Project 2029

...although maybe different from what they're doing

I’m not one to poke my nose into other peoples’ business, but last year the New York Times was looking for someone willing to comment on what was going on with Trump’s executive orders, Project 2025, DOGE, and all that excitement, so I took the bait, resulting in the publication of an opinion piece: Democrats Need a Project 2029: Here’s a Start. Much has happened since then, to the point where the entire episode was beginning to fade from memory, until Matt Yglesias dredged it up again with his piece, Democrats Don’t Need a Project 2029.

Since Yglesias has more dogs in this fight than I do, I was tempted to leave it at that, but after having recently travelled through a few U.S. airports, I can’t help but circle back, because the situation with TSA workers in America going unpaid (and now getting paid through blatant usurpation of legislative power by the executive) is a good illustration of the point I was trying to make. Airport security is basically a government monopoly (with a few exceptions). The single most effective way to make people love the private sector and hate the public sector is for the government to impose a monopoly and then do a terrible job providing the service. (Familiar Canadian examples: banning private health insurance, but then allowing huge queues to develop in the public system; or persuading people to get rid of their private vehicles and ride mass transit, but then allowing the public transit system to be crippled by strikes.) This is why supporters of the welfare state should be, but typically are not, obsessively concerned about the quality of public services.

Democrats in the U.S. focus on the short-term game, of who gets blamed for a particular government shutdown, while neglecting the long game, which is completely stacked against them. Every time a funding crisis impairs delivery of government services, it reinforces the general impression that the state is not a reliable service provider. The conclusion that many people draw is that they should strive to organize their personal affairs so that they are not dependent on government. (The TSA situation led, entirely predictably, to discussions of privatization.) This is why Democrats need not only a set of tactics to win the next election, but also a strategy to reform governance in the U.S.

One clarification before getting further into the details. I never suggested that Democrats needed Project 2029 as an electoral platform. Much of Yglesias’ piece is focused on electoral strategy, as were many of the comments on my New York Times piece. People said “you cannot campaign on public service reform,” which was strange, because I never said anything about campaigning on anything. I had thought this would be obvious from the way the Republicans handled Project 2025. They didn’t run on it. When Trump was asked about it he said “I’ve never heard of it, I have no idea who these people are, the entire thing is fake news.” The purpose of the project was to work out a plan, before getting into office, to provide some coherent strategic direction. Once elected, Trump immediately appointed its principal architect, Russell Vought, to head the Office of Management and Budget. I wouldn’t recommend that Democrats be quite so cynical, but suffice it to say that the question of what they should campaign on is a completely separate question from what their long-term strategy to reform government should be.

Getting back to the TSA thing, this conflict provides an excellent illustration of why Democrats need more than just short-term tactics, but also a long-term strategy. Structurally, the TSA is quite similar to CATSA (which provides security in Canadian airports), in that both agencies are essentially self-funding, through a user fee imposed on airline tickets. So then why is the TSA vulnerable to shutdown? There is no easy answer to this question, because like everything in America, every simple problem can be traced back to a more complex structural problem. (Hence my fundamental principle of critical theory in America: “for every obvious problem, there is an obvious solution, which cannot be implemented because of a less obvious problem, which itself also has a solution, which cannot be implemented because of an even less obvious problem, and so on.”) Even though both agencies are funded through user fees, these fees get funnelled into general tax revenue and then given back to the relevant agencies by the government. So the TSA can be held hostage in a dispute over government funding because of a complex system of irrationalities in the U.S. system of congressional appropriations (which basically requires government operations to be voted on twice, with no guarantee of consistency between the votes).

The problem is that, no matter who “wins” a particular conflict over government funding, the long-run pattern of appropriations conflict and government shutdown is a race to the bottom (shutdowns are becoming more frequent and more long-lasting), which hurts the Democrats more than it does Republicans, because it undermines confidence in government. As a result, Democrats need both a short-term political strategy, but also a long-term strategy to fix the structural problems that are generating these unfavorable dynamics. (Lee Drutman has been on about this, and I couldn’t agree with him more, especially about electoral reform.) This long-term strategy — addressing the basic pathologies of governance in America — is what I was calling “Project 2029.”

The example that I gave at the time was civil service neutrality. Project 2025 included a plan to dramatically curtail the job protections available to many government employees, as a way of extending partisanship in the civil service (the so-called Schedule F plan). There was a great deal of tut-tutting about this, but practically no discussion of what the appropriate level of partisan appointment in the civil service should be. Democrats seemed to want to just preserve the status quo. But why? One of the reasons that public administration in the U.S. is so bad is that the prevailing system already has far too many partisan appointments. If civil service neutrality is such a good thing, shouldn’t Democrats be seeking to expand it? Shouldn’t there be at least a discussion, rather than just knee-jerk defence of the status quo? And yet my experience with Americans who follow these issues has been that, when you tell them they need to develop a more professional state bureaucracy, they just mumble something about the Pendleton Act and pretend like the problem was solved in the 19^th century.

As it turns out, Trump went on to blow the entire thing up, by strong-arming several branches of the federal bureaucracy into engaging in overtly partisan behaviour during the government shutdown last fall (e.g. posting messages on government websites condemning “Radical Left Democrats” for the shutdown, and so forth). This went far beyond what Project 2025 envisioned; it is “proof of concept” that the entire civil service can be ordered to engage in partisan activity and no one will intervene to stop it. Democrats cannot simply ignore that, or hope things will go back to normal after the midterms. (Similarly, Trump has shown that the U.S. military can be given clearly illegal orders – e.g. blowing up a boat and then killing the survivors in the wreckage – and they will do what they’re told. What is the plan for dealing with that after the next election? Court martials for all involved? That’s a good way to ensure that there will be no next election... But then what is the plan?)

These are just some of the dozens of points at which Trump has exposed massive holes in the American constitutional order. I do not understand how anyone could believe that the status quo ante will be restored after the next election. Imagine working at a software company. Hackers discover a massive security vulnerability in your product and unleash a piece of malware that exploits it. Your company assigns a security team to deal with the hack. A few days later they report back, claiming success, on the grounds that they have identified all instances of the malware and deleted it. This is self-evidently inadequate. It’s not enough just to get rid of the instances, you have to patch the system, to eliminate the vulnerability! The fact that the flaw has been sitting there, unexploited, for years is irrelevant, because once someone finds the hole, and shows how it can be used, it guarantees that others will come along and do the same.

At this point, the U.S. Constitution is looking like an original release version of Windows 95, sitting on an open public network, surrounded by an army of hackers. Saying that Democrats need a Project 2029 is like saying that someone should look into releasing a security patch, rather than just pleading with the hackers to go easy. To pick an example, almost at random, the inclusion of a pardon power for the President in the U.S. Constitution has long been an anachronism (a vestige of 18^th century monarchical power). As many have pointed out, it has been abused by Presidents from both major parties. And yet what Trump has done – essentially selling pardons – blows the entire thing apart. How can you turn back the clock on that? Once it’s been shown that a president can do this, without consequence, how could anyone believe that the status quo ante can be restored? It is either irrationality or wishful thinking to imagine that the rule of law can be restored in America without constitutional amendment.

As many commentators have observed, Trump’s “solution” to the recent TSA situation – ordering already-appropriated Homeland Security funding, intended for border control, to be redirected to payment of TSA officers – is unconstitutional in a way that crosses another bright line. Trump has now severed executive spending from legislative constraint. In the past, he had refused to spend money that had been appropriated for a specific purpose, now he is spending money that has not been appropriated for a particular purpose. One must go back to Charles I to find the relevant precedent in the British tradition. Again, how can you turn the clock back on this? Even if some court, several months from now, rules it illegal, that doesn’t change what has happened. Trump has demonstrated that the U.S. President can issue flagrantly unconstitutional spending orders, in order to avert present crises, and people will follow those orders. This exposes a massive vulnerability in the system. Now that the tactic has been shown to work, what are the chances that presidents will not keep doing it?

I want to jump up and down a bit on this point, because it is one of the most extraordinary political events to have occurred in my lifetime. After having spent decades listening to Americans go on and on about their constitution, about the wisdom of the founding fathers, about the genius of their system of checks and balances, it turns out that, when push comes to shove, the constitution does not really constrain the executive. Trump is not just acting in an unconstitutional manner, he is clowning on the U.S. constitution. The executive can move quickly, while courts move slowly, and can easily be obstructed or intimidated. And so if the executive simply does enough stuff, quickly enough, the courts cannot, or will not, keep up. The American system is thereby transformed, practically overnight, from a system of judicial supremacy to one of executive supremacy, ruled by prerogative.

The current moment, it seems to me, calls for some Federalist Papers-level debate on how the U.S. political system is to be restructured. Again, I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the American nation, and so there could be all sorts of people doing high-level work that I don’t know about. My impression, however, is that the left-wing brain trust in America, despite its hegemonic control of the universities, is failing to rise to the occasion. Just to be clear, I understand that Democrats are not in a position to fix any of the major problems anytime soon, even if they win the next election. But this is precisely why they need to engage in long-term thinking – they need to figure out how to create the conditions under which these problems can be fixed. Obviously, they also need to play the game of politics more effectively than they have been – I am entirely sympathetic to Yglesias on this point – but they need to pay more attention to the metagame, otherwise they are just going to keep on losing, and the U.S. government will continue to circle the drain.