Democratize the Federal Bureaucracy
[Originally published October 8, 2020 in Current Affairs. Read the full article here.]
It’s November 5, 2024. You have grudgingly accepted that you have to vote for the Harris/Buttigieg presidential ticket to stop Tucker Carlson’s fascist plan to build a moat with sharks on the Southern Border. You’ve even sort of convinced yourself that you are voting for the Democrats, and not just against the GOP, because they’ve promised (really this time!) to sign the public option into law. You’re struggling with student loans, low pay, and credit card debt, and you’re not exactly thrilled at the prospect of a Harris presidency. On the other hand, you don’t feel entirely hopeless, because look at some of the other great people on the ballot! There’s Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, running for Secretary of Labor! And Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, running for Secretary of Education! And Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, running for the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau!
Our way of selecting political appointees must change if we want bureaucracy to function stably and in the public interest. When it comes to exercising accountability over an administration’s political appointees, our current methods are fundamentally weak. The president who makes the nominations is chosen in a deeply flawed electoral system where a multitude of different issues unrelated to the bureaucracy (e.g. economic performance and judicial nominees) are in play, and where none of the viable candidates may actually share the majority of the public’s views on the specific topics that fall under various agencies’ areas of responsibility. Ranked choice voting or majority runoff elections would not solve the problem either: the president is one officeholder, and it is practically impossible for that one officeholder to represent the majority opinion on every issue. In other words, electoral reforms to our existing presidential elections, however desirable for other reasons, will not solve this specific problem.