Philip K. Howard has an eye-opening series of examples in the Daily Beast of silly rules that make it impossible for government officials to take common-sense steps in their regular activities.  He presents the resulting incompetence — the title is “Government Has Made America Inept” — as if it results from a natural growth of policies and regulations, like a weed or tumor.

Howard has apparently written a book on the topic, but my impression from the brief article is that he lets government officials off too easily.  Consider:

Budgets are out of control because government executives lack flexibility to shave here and there to make ends meet. Soon after his election, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo thought he had found an easy way to save $50 million when he learned that a large juvenile detention center was empty, with no prospects of use anytime soon. There it was, sitting upstate, with several dozen employees—doing nothing but costing taxpayers millions of dollars. But no one had the authority to close it down, not even the governor. There’s a New York law that prohibits closing down any facility with union employees without at least one year’s notice. So $50 million of taxpayer revenue—that’s ten thousand families each paying $5,000 in state taxes—was wasted for no public purpose.

To say simply that “there’s a law” skirts the realities that the legislature can change the law and that there’s a reason the law was written.  An inevitable, organic growth isn’t what brought about the circumstance that Howard decries; it’s a deliberate design, meant intentionally to lock in privileges for some and to make things difficult to reform.

In those terms, even a governor who has no power to subvert the law ought to have incentive to work to change it.  In a functioning political system, there ought to be political payoff for a governor to push for common sense, and for legislators to abide by it.

Government’s just gotten so big and invasive that there’s no way the people can keep an eye on everything, and the media too often gets lured by circumstances into reissuing government press releases with a little bit of value-added commentary mixed in.