Empowering the Next President—and the Next Congress

“This is a trade-promotion authority not just for President Obama but for the next president as well.”

That is how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell explains his support for granting the president expedited authority to negotiate trade deals and fast-track through Congress a vote those deals. The authority would apply not only to an agreement negotiated by President Obama with several Pacific partners, but to agreements made through mid-2018 and potentially through mid-2021.

McConnell recognizes, at least in this case, that a president must have enough room to perform his executive duties. The Constitution provides the president with particular powers, including the negotiation of treaties. It makes no more sense for 535 members of Congress to negotiate treaties than it does for them to micromanage other tasks that should be left to the country’s chief executive.

I would like to extend McConnell’s thought beyond treaty making. Now is the ideal time to empower both the president and Congress to better perform their assigned functions: the president to execute and Congress to legislate.

Why? First—and obviously to even the casual observer—both branches of government have been weakened extraordinarily over recent decades by the politicization of every action and the growing influence of interest groups. Many impasses in both legislation and administration arise when one party thinks that it can diminish the other by imposing roadblocks. This thought is neither new nor unique to government; when an organization’s decisionmaking boundaries are ill defined and its members cross those boundaries to seek additional power, the organization often becomes dysfunctional.

Second, less than two years away from a presidential election with an uncertain outcome, elected officials more likely recognize, as Senator McConnell does, that maintaining roadblocks deters one’s own party’s likelihood of future success as much as that of one’s opponents.

Third, the last years of a presidency seldom focus on the changes that new power brings a political party. Yet it need not be a lame-duck period. It offers the opportunity to turn to those process reforms usually neglected when the political debate centers on bigger or smaller, rather than more effective, government. President, cabinet secretary, congressional leader, and committee chair alike should be examining their power and reorganizing both internally and across jurisdictions—or, quite bluntly, they are not doing their jobs.

Behind closed doors, almost every elected official will admit that many government systems are broken. Examples abound: Medicare continually out of balance, infrastructure and highways unfunded while bridges fall apart and trains crash, the inability to pass budgets or appropriations bills, a sequester requirement that must be overridden, and much more. These are process failures, not policy failures.

How might strengthening the hands of both the president and Congress improve the likelihood of solving such problems?

Medicare provides a good example. In the last presidential election, the candidates attacked each other for trying to constrain cost growth in what both knew was an unsustainable system. Governor Romney castigated the president for cutbacks that helped expand health insurance for the nonelderly, and the president attacked the governor for favoring a voucher-like approach put forward by then–House Budget Chair Paul Ryan.

In truth, all answers to the Medicare problem involve payment constraints. The program simply has to operate within a budget. Congress won’t create a budget for Medicare, but it won’t allow the president to use his executive power to do it either. Instead Congress passes the power of appropriating money onto our doctors and us as beneficiaries.

The fix is simpler than it seems. If the Democrats favor price controls for Medicare and the Republicans favor voucher-like approaches, then set up the general rules but let whoever attains executive power use it whenever spending starts to exceed a congressionally approved limit.

This method can work well in other arenas too. Congress can set guidelines for what it wants accomplished—certainly within a budget—but then it should allow the executive branch to fulfill those guidelines. If Congress over-constrains any particular function by demanding that more be done than allowed by the budget it sets, then the executive should be empowered to make changes necessary to restore balance. This is not rocket science, it is basic management theory.

In his acclaimed book The Rule of Nobody, Philip K. Howard similarly argues that the president must have executive powers restored, to be able to avoid wasteful duplication and unnecessary bureaucracy, to expedite important public works, to refuse to spend allocated funds when circumstances change and the expenditure becomes wasteful, and to reorganize executive agencies.

When Congress limits the president on executive matters, no matter how small, it isn’t empowering itself. Instead, it entangles itself in complex and contradictory legislation, attempting to appease every interest (no matter how small), while weakening itself as it spends less and less time tackling the big issues that it is elected to address.

All this does not let recent presidents off the hook. The constant expansion in political appointees and the centralization of power in the White House over several decades has led to even more roadblocks to progress. When every decision must go through several political layers, almost no good idea can filter through to the president. When so many public statements and decisions on millions of government actions must be fed through the White House, civil servants and even top political appointees can’t function well, and they often retreat to doing nothing risky and seldom attacking limitations or failures in their own programs. Among the further consequences, many excellent government officials retreat to the private sector. Who wants to work where you are not allowed to do your job?

Whether one agrees with the examples presented here matters less than recognizing the ripeness of this time for procedural reform. Senator McConnell is right. Let’s empower the next president—and the next Congress as well.