[The Congressional oversight panel’s first report on the spending of the $700 billion of bailout money] is tough and it’s fast. And I think fast was important here too. An ordinary Congressional panel would’ve taken three months to get up and running and would’ve fooled around with hiring staff and deciding who had what tasks and setting up deadlines and timelines and so on. We didn’t do that. In 13 days, we produced a hard-biting document that pushes hard for some real answers. We don’t have a phone, we don’t have a photocopier, we don’t have a coffee maker yet, but we have a very strong report. And there’s another report coming in 30 days and another one 30 days after that and another one 30 days after that. And I think that sets the stage.
Elizabeth Warren, chair of the oversight panel, speaking on NPR about the committee’s recently issued first report. Why can’t government run like this more often? Why does it take a serious emergency to make us realize it’s a good idea to skip all the BS upfront stuff and get to something real?
Merle
on 17 Dec 08Gaahhhh!!! You are so young!
Kevin
on 17 Dec 08Such bailouts, including the auto industry bailout, will cripple our economy. Too many people, including the government, are spending money they do not have.
CJ Curtis
on 17 Dec 08Faster maybe, but typical government BS all the same…
Hand out billions of dollars to companies that have showed beyond any doubt that they don’t know how to manage their own money. Then when it mysteriously disappears and no one knows how it’s being spent, call the CEOs into Congressional hearings and yell at them about it.
On ABC News this morning, one of the lead stories was one of the financial companies using tax dollars to fund bonuses. BONUSES. Another company (or maybe the same one?) got $10 billion from the bailout despite actually turning a profit for the year.
This might not be a “politically correct” statement, but any homebuyer that sits in a banker’s office and entertains the idea of an ARM loan when they KNOW that they won’t be able to afford it in five years?? No one feels sorry for people when they run up $50,000 in credit card debt, so how is this different?
This economic mess we’re in was caused in no small part by simple financial irresponsibility on all sides…banking, government and citizen alike.
Walker Hamilton
on 17 Dec 08I think you’ll see quite a bit more of this in the next few months (years?).
change.gov
GeeIWonder
on 17 Dec 08Why does it take a serious emergency to make us realize it’s a good idea to skip all the BS upfront stuff and get to something real?
By design. Because the US is first and foremost, a Union of States.
Why? So that you don’t have a king, that’s why.
It’s no coincidence that ‘Serious Emergencies’, be they real or perceived, are how some of the most tyrannical rulers, since Caesar and certainly in the 20th century, tend to come to power.
Paul Smith
on 17 Dec 08CJ Curtis. I agree completely especially about the “politically incorrect” part. If you are stupid with your money, whether you’re a private citizen or a business you deserve whatever comes your way. Giving people money for being irresponsible is never a good thing.
Rich
on 17 Dec 08I am pretty damned shocked that bank lobbies couldn’t stop the regulations that had them making bad loans.
I see it either being a long road back or turning into a huge doomsday disaster. I just don’t sense the urgency nor the bi-partisan co-operation that something like this requires. I would bet that a nice phat percentage of these bailouts is going into some pockets that caused the problem in the first place.
I am Canadian, so I am rooting for y’all to sort it out, but your country spends money without consequence, not realizing who is holding the loans, China/Japan, who knows who the US is beholden to financially.
Paul Smith
on 17 Dec 08@GeelWonder That is an excellent point. I didn’t think of that until you posted it.
Joe Sheehan
on 17 Dec 08Yes it probably does take an emergency to get something real done.
However, I think thats a good thing. I agree with Jason that A Sense of Urgency is Poisonous. And I dont want our government always acting in that way.
jlarson
on 17 Dec 08I feel you. But don’t forget that one of the specific design points of the U.S. Constitution was to slow_things_down. Instead of a king who could get things done by commandment, we have a system that attempts to build consensus over time and is not supposed to allow too many radical changes to happen at once and without majority agreement. The Bush administration has tried in many ways to speed things up by grabbing power in various forms, and look what it’s gotten us.
I think it’s unwise to take the ‘getting real’ lessons that work so well on small development teams for applications and apply them to systems of a widely different scale, complexity and purpose such as a government. The government is like the operating system or development platform—some level of stability is required to allow the things built on top of it (businesses; computer applications) to thrive and have the confidence to take risks of rapid change.
So yeah, it is often wasteful and even harmful to wait for government to get it’s act together. But at the other end of the spectrum is a government that moves too quickly and creates an unpredictable environment for it’s citizens.
Caleb Mardini
on 17 Dec 08As other’s here have commented, sometimes moving fast is a bad thing. The government moved quick to give us this horrible T.A.R.P. and the average citizen is being harmed by it to benefit a few.
GeeIWonder
on 17 Dec 08@Paul:
Well it might be obvious, but then again when you like in a country that periodically suspends habeas corpus, and has just granted unprecedented, apparently indisputable power to people elected by nobody, it might not.
D. Lambert
on 17 Dec 08Why can’t the government run like this more often?
Partly, because the government works in an environment where they define their own deadlines and pressure, so they naturally take on a “measured” pace.
More than that, though, government is optimized to keep itself out of the news. Nine times out of ten, if a government agency ends up in the news, it’s because somebody screwed up, and when that happens, there’s a possibility that people might lose their jobs. Mere lack of performance won’t get you in the news unless it’s really bad.
So government agencies work very hard to be safe and decidedly un-newsworthy. As bad as this sounds, it’s not all bad, because fast-and-loose is dangerous. When it works well, it looks efficient as hell, but since there’s less time and infrastructure for review and debate, there’s a greater chance that someone is going to do the wrong thing.
History will show us, for example, whether TARP turns out to be brilliant or disastrous, but it’s clear that its rapid creation and implementation put us in a high-risk situation.
Andrew
on 17 Dec 08I think the more important questions are:
GeeIWonder
on 17 Dec 08There is no question more important. The White House is set to hand Paulson’s buddy Geithner the unions.
If he is granted, any [additional] leverage over which branch and which General gets which bases and which toys, it’s game over folks.
They’ve got the cheques. And the balance.
Now they need some check and balance.
TARP
on 17 Dec 08We got into this emergency situation partly because lenders thought it was a good idea to skip the BS and simplify, speed up, and automate mortgage approvals with No-Doc loans.
Banks and investment firms thought it was a good idea to default to trust instead of suspicion and remove burdensome oversight; ignoring the fact that many people are motivated by greed, opening the way for the Madoff’s of the world.
Ben Hamill
on 17 Dec 08I think the thing that differentiates a government from a business with respect to why Getting Real works for one and not the other is the kind of involvement of the constituents. If I work for a company that’s playing fast and loose and I feel like they’re jumping the wrong way at the wrong time, I can quit. Or, if it’s small, maybe speak up. In any case, it is trivial to remove myself from the situation compared to moving to Canada or Ireland or whatever, which is what it takes to quit citizenship (well, and paper work, etc). So not only didn’t I choose to be an employee of the US (read: citizen), it’s also really hard to get out if I’m smarter than the guy in charge.
This is why, even though consensus is usually dumber than individuals, a government should be run off of consensus. I mean—we all, I think, would love to live in a government run by a perfect, hyper-intelligent, benevolent dictator, but such a person doesn’t exist and would also have to be immortal, etc, etc.
Neat post.
neversummer
on 17 Dec 08I think the quick turnaround is more a reflection of the Chair (Elizabeth Warren) than it is driven by crisis. She has long been an financial advocate for consumers. It’s also a reflection of the kind of people the new administration seeks out and hires.
Really?
on 17 Dec 08I think you’re still a bit inebriated from election night.
Hope you aren't serious...
on 17 Dec 08Gov’t rarely shows having a clue on how to legislate or serve the people other than it’s own self-interests and power-brokering. Even the bailout amount and how they tried to come up with a meaningful figure was a complete joke…and of course the money hasn’t been applied in the manner it was supposed to be. Not all gov’t officials are bad, but the system is severely flawed and there is no accountability in gov’t anymore.
Andrew
on 18 Dec 08In other news today, the “Hope for Homeowners” program, meant to help those who are in upside down mortgages re-finance and avoid foreclosure, has been an abject failure in its first two months. According to NPR, the program was designed to help 400,000 people. To date, something like 300+ people have applied.
Yay tax dollars!
sigh
MT Heart
on 18 Dec 08It Just Doesn’t Matter, I trust the government to realize that It’s a Problem When It’s a Problem. Just invent Half, Not Half-Assed, solutions and Ignore Details Early On.
Start With No, Manage Debt and Lower Your Cost of Change. Otherwise, you’re going to Have an Enemy.
What’s Your Problem? The answer comes from the Three State Solution – Illinois, Delaware and New York. All come with Zero Training.
But remember, you’re going to Feel The Pain. So just Use Real Words, not some bloody mumbo jumbo. The media is going to Publicize Your Screwups anyway.
Go With the Flow and we’ll all Ride Out the Storm.
(with apologies)
Chris Carter
on 18 Dec 08At first I was going to post in outrage about how the government moving fast to spend 700 billion dollars was the epitomy of stupid…until I realized that this is the oversight committee for the 700 billion dollars – the ones who are accountable for watching where that money goes and these reports are the paper trail.
Given that, I say this IS what we need when it comes to government. I agree with the other posters that we should certainly have a slower government, but slower doesn’t mean add more costly and pathetic bureaucracy to clog things up, it just means a more deliberate path to consensus. Unfortunately thanks to corrupt congressmen and other political officials, we usually get the latter. Anyway, to see a faster path to accountability is a GOOD thing. People should be cheering on any attempt to add transparency or speed it up.
GeeIWonder
on 18 Dec 08@Chris:
The unfortunate thing is, there really is no accountability here. The oversight panel’s report has about as much teeth as a report you and I would write.
I f you didn’t know this, you could proabably tell by the language used in the parent quote. Heck, she’s adeptly shifting the question from ‘what’s the point of oversight if you’‘ve just enacted powers which, by definition, cannot be overseen” to a question about report-generating efficiency.
What those reports are actually efficiently being generated to do is the question—and the answer is certainly not clear to me.
IMHO, of course.
Nutheory
on 18 Dec 08Noam Chomsky needs to join obamas team. there i said it
Nutheory
on 18 Dec 08the distribution of this money is a crime. actually i have a political dream team idea. (better then the last 8 years atleast).
george lopez as president Dave chapelle as vice Sam Kineson as secretary of state Dennis Leary as secretary of defense George carlin as secretary of education bobby brown department of justice MC Hammer department of treasury amy winehouse department of energy heidi and spencer department of homeland security
JJN
on 18 Dec 08A note on this, from someone in the academy, which has many similarities to government.
“Why does it take a serious emergency to make us realize it’s a good idea to skip all the BS upfront stuff and get to something real?”I think that perceiving the work of gov’t as “BS” misses the point, which is that the goal is not making product, the goal is creating possibility.
In a well run government or institution, consensus building and consultation creates an environment where rapid production can occur and have good impacts; in a poorly run version, that turns to “BS” meetings and administrivia that builds frustrations until rogue operations spring up. Those may produce good products on their own terms, but are unsustainable and possibly irrelevant to the mission.
If you buy that, then it’s a bad idea to skip the “BS” because that’s where you have rights and input as a member of the public that an institution serves. The outgoing administration, for instance, regularly skipped the “BS” and went straight into production. That created many problems for the US.
That’s not meant as a gotcha, only to say that creating the right context in which to take rapid action is essential.
Martial
on 19 Dec 08I dig the website of the Congressional Oversight Panel. Spare and to the point and, to my eyes, beautifully done. The breadcrumbs are completely extraneous, however.
http://cop.senate.gov/
Jesse
on 22 Dec 08“Why can’t government run like this more often?”
Because they have no incentive to. Politicians / bureaucrats get paid the same regardless of whether they do a good job or bad job. So they usually do what is easiest (human nature and all).
Jesse
on 22 Dec 08Chris Carter, So the theft is not not an outrage as long they have a detailed report on who got the loot?
corporate welfare is okay as long it’s transparent and accountable?
This discussion is closed.