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What
Obama’s Doing Right
As
the honeymoon wears off, many progressives have, rightly,
been starting to express their disappointments with the president—the
abandonment of the public option despite wide majority support,
how we’re still in Afghanistan, tepid wrist-slapping of BP—even
as we shake our heads at the far worse things the right is
doing and inventing to say about him.
It’s funny, in a way, that people worried that Obama was too
much of a politician and didn’t have enough experience with
the nitty-gritty of governing. Because from where I sit, it’s
the high-profile political battles where he often falters,
showing that strange Democratic weakness for trying to appease
people who only want to destroy you. But when it comes to
most of the technical details of running the government—all
those executive branch agencies that have a huge, huge effect
on our daily lives even though elections rarely rise and fall
on them—he’s doing unprecedentedly awesome things. Since I’ve
recently had the chance to paw through some of the more obscure
corners of the federal budget, I thought it would worth pointing
out a few of these hopeful trends:
(1) He’s streamlining government. I know that sounds like
a Republican/libertarian catch-phrase, but the thing is, they
say it, but they can’t actually do it, because you can’t make
something streamlined and efficient if you don’t believe it
should exist. In fact, the federal bureaucracy mushroomed
under Republican leadership, who add their own pet programs
on top of existing ones but don’t provide competent leadership
or expend any thought or resources on to how to make it work
all together.
Obviously, the Obama administration can’t make that all better
with one wave of a wand, but they are making strides in that
direction. A couple examples: In the Department of Education,
38 grant programs have been condensed to 11. At HUD, they
have embarked on a project to take 13 different rental assistance
programs, which have three separate field staffs, conflicting
eligibility requirements, and different geographical boundaries,
and condense them to one, with regional oversight. This not
only saves money, it’s fairer and easier for those assisted
(one waiting list to get on) and much more friendly to private
owners of assisted housing, who can practically feel the paperwork
burden rising off their shoulders.
(2) He’s making the right hand talk to the left. I don’t mean
ends of the political spectrum here, just the famously isolated
federal agencies who work on related problems but usually
with no coordination whatsoever. Traditionally, you’d have
transportation investments that were unconnected to housing
development, both of which were counterproductive to attempts
to support smart growth, clean water, or protected ecosystems.
Now you have the Sustainable Communities Initiative, through
which DOT, HUD, and EPA are working together to support regional
planning that looks at these issues (and economic development)
together and are also aligning their own work to support each
other. There are a number of other official cross-agency collaborations
like this, but even programs within one agency often have
the relevant other agencies or programs that they will coordinate
with or get advice from spelled out.
Going beyond strict agency turf issues, the structure of the
programs themselves—such as the community-based violence prevention
initiatives or Promise Neighborhoods, recognize the complexity
of systems and the need to approach questions such as reducing
gun violence or improving children’s school performance, in
a comprehensive way, looking at the whole environment and
committing to long-term interventions rather than one-shot
(or one-year) splashes.
(3) He’s interested in funding things that work. Competition
is another thing that conservatives like to praise in theory
but never practice. Most of the new programs that the administration
is supporting—Promise Neighborhoods, Choice Neighborhoods,
the Social Innovation Fund—are competitive grants, rather
than formula grants, with evaluation and measurement components
built in so that we will actually know how they turn out and
be able to replicate the best ones. And when it comes to sex
ed and preventing teen pregnancy, he’s making policy based
on effectiveness not ideology. Radical, huh?
(4) He’s investing in infrastructure. It’s not a national
infrastructure bank yet, which has disappointed some, but
the administration’s proposed $4 billion investment in transportation
infrastructure projects “of regional or national economic
significance” is a good start. So is the additional money
being directed toward things like drinking water infrastructure,
weatherization, and green jobs. All of these things will improve
the economic competitiveness of the country at the same time
as creating high-quality jobs that don’t require advanced
degrees. If anything, we need more of this, but at least it’s
on the radar.
(5) He’s moving the needs of real people and the places they
live back to center stage. USDA is focusing on nutrition,
regional food systems, renewable energy, and regional planning.
The Department of Justice civil rights and fair housing enforcement
divisions are rising from the dead.
Things like these don’t generally cause people to march on
Washington, spout lies on talk radio, or donate to political
campaigns. But when the dust settles, they are the kind of
things that make real differences in people’s lives. There’s
certainly a long way to go, but it would be a shame if the
hot-button fire fights keep the administration from being
able to see the good stuff through.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
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