by Alec Ross
Andrés had landed in Puerto Rico five days after Hurricane Maria hit the island. His plane was only the second commercial flight to San Juan following the storm, and he arrived the same day that senior US government officials first visited the island. But while the officials flew back to Washington that night, Andrés booked a hotel room. He had an island to feed.
I first got to know Andrés in 2009 when I worked at the State Department and recruited him to get involved in our effort to help bring clean cookstoves to poor communities where people burn dung, wood, and charcoal in open fires to heat their living spaces and cook their food. Some of our initial work focused on Haiti, which was hit by a massive earthquake right around the launch of the cookstove initiative.
José Andrés is a force of nature. When he first came to the State Department to visit with me, he was wearing dirty chef’s whites and sweating profusely. He seemed like a crazy man with blazing blue eyes, manically thumbing a Blackberry phone and talking about his excitement about the naturalization process (a native of Spain, he would become an American citizen four years later). He threw himself into the clean cookstove work in Haiti and made an emotional connection to the people there. After an earthquake hit the island a handful of months later, he began an effort to bring nutritious food to a starving island. This evolved into World Central Kitchen, his nonprofit that sought to heal disaster-stricken communities one hot meal at a time. Seven years later, the organization had only three full-time staff. But it would not stay that way for long.
After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Andrés called up Nate Mook, a documentary filmmaker who had produced a TV special on his work in Haiti. Soon, the two were in San Juan brainstorming a plan to bring hot meals to the people of Puerto Rico. The next morning, they secured fuel and ingredients from a local supplier, assembled a group of local chefs and restaurateurs, and churned out 2,500 meals in a restaurant parking lot. The next day, they prepared 4,000 meals. More volunteers and nearby restaurants quickly joined the effort, which Andrés had started calling “#ChefsForPuertoRico.” Within a week, he and his team were cooking 20,000 meals per day. The group tapped into the local economy, using food trucks as mobile kitchens to deliver hot meals to remote parts of the island. They secured a government contract but it soon ran out. When Andrés tried to get a longer contract that allowed the group to expand its efforts, FEMA turned him down. The agency later admitted that bureaucratic red tape kept officials from extending the offer. Even so, Andrés found another way. Within a few weeks of the disaster, World Central Kitchen transformed the kitchen of San Juan’s Choliseo—Puerto Rico’s largest indoor arena—into its base of operations. A month in, the group was churning out more than 146,000 meals per day, using sixteen different kitchens spread across the island.
World Central Kitchen was able to quickly scale up its efforts and deliver real food, tapping into the island’s preexisting networks and businesses. Meanwhile, FEMA was floundering and failing to distribute even the MREs it had at its disposal.
In the past, the US government ran the most effective logistics network on the planet. Today, that is simply not the case. The very idea that a nonprofit led by a chef would outperform a federal agency with a $20 billion budget and fourteen thousand employees is just bizarre. But in the case of Maria that is what we saw.
Credit goes to Andrés, Mook, and World Central Kitchen; they represent social entrepreneurship at its scrappiest and most effective. But the contrast also shows government at its most bumbling and ineffective. The consequences of its failure—at all levels of government, from Washington to San Juan—were deadly. For nearly a year after Hurricane Maria, the Puerto Rican government maintained that 64 people died in the storm, but in August 2018 it raised the official death toll to 2,975. The actual number may be even higher: researchers at Harvard estimated as many as 8,000 people may have died. Even so, the official figure cements Hurricane Maria as one of the deadliest disasters in US history, on par with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in terms of body count. The vast majority of those deaths resulted not from the storm itself, but from the inadequate access to health care, electricity, and clean water in the months that followed. Had the government acted faster and more effectively, countless lives would have been saved.
In the aftermath of the 2017 hurricane season, FEMA officials acknowledged that they dropped the ball in their response to Maria. They made recommendations to improve their future response plans. But they also set a worrying precedent. They urged people to lower their expectations for the federal government.
José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen stepped up, but they could do only so much. They were never going to be enough to fill the void left if a government agency with a $20 billion budget, fourteen thousand employees, and the actual responsibility for emergency response decides to step back.
Yet the weakening of FEMA is part of a worrying decades-long trend, a steady decline in the effectiveness of governmental power in the United States and around much of the rest of the world. Just as shareholder capitalism boomed, the effectiveness of the governments of too many nations slumped. And we need to understand that downslope in clear detail. Where inspiration and leadership came from the United States after World War II, we should now also look to additional countries whose models of governance are outperforming the American model.
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TODAY’S REALITY IS that, on issues ranging from privacy and sustainability to workers’ rights and diversity, billions of people around the world are now governed more by companies than by governments.
We are guided through our days by the noiseless algorithms of technology giants that have gathered more data points on individuals around the world than any government. Forty years of efforts to address global warming have been more thoroughly defined by a handful of oil companies than by the 196 sovereign nation states and masses of citizens advocating for action. Our tax, trade, and labor laws are more likely to be drafted by the government affairs department of a multinational corporation than in the offices of a democratically elected legislature. As of this writing, the choices made by the twenty biggest CEOs on the global stage have more impact on my family’s life than the decisions made by the twenty world leaders at the G-20.
As the private sector has grown in power, we have seen it expand into domains where once the government would have taken the reins. We have seen that in the stories of Walmart and Patagonia in relation to the environment, Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion commitment to battling climate change, and Bill Gates’s work on public health. But the examples we have covered so far do not just shine a light on the rise of corporate power throughout the last half century; they also cast a shadow on the corresponding fall in the power of governments to enact real change. Even for something as basic as minimum wage, where government has been a crucial regulator for over a century, there’s now a power vacuum. In the United States, the federal minimum wage has not risen from $7.25 since 2009. Activists and employees who directly petitioned Amazon to raise its minimum wage to $15.00—a bar the company met—put change into motion faster than years’ worth of appeals to Congress. Private actors are filling a perplexing void—doing what they can in an era where government seems to have lost the ability to act.
Yet there is a danger in relegating such responsibilities solely to the largesse of individual or corporate actors. It is not just that their efforts come piecemeal, and not just that they are beholden to their shareholders. The danger cuts to the very question of what government is for.
The social contract that allowed stable democracies to emerge was a historic innovation. It cracked an ever-present problem—that those who gained power were likely to abuse it. Through democracy, it became possible for individuals to come together and use their collective power to make life better for the whole, while guarding against the rampant abuse that is always possible when power ends up in the hands of a small number of people or those merely anointed at birth. Representative go
vernments, particularly democracies, are some of the most remarkable creations that humans have ever invented.
On the one hand, this is very basic. But on the other, it has been too easily forgotten over the years. From the Reagan era to the present, one of the prevailing ideas in Western governments has been that governments should know when to get out of the way: governments were too big, too clunky, too poorly run—and whenever possible, responsibility should be handed over to the private sector, where market forces would make it run more efficiently. This idea spread like wildfire in the 1980s and 1990s—fueled by the Friedman doctrine and then the fall of the Soviet Union. And there are certainly scenarios where market forces can work wonders. Among the many examples is the creation of the consumer internet, which transitioned from a military project to a multi-stakeholder system with business at its core.
But the triumph of capitalism over communism led to it becoming accepted wisdom that all problems were best left to the market to solve. The result was that many functions of government were either gutted or handed over to the private sector in the name of “efficiency.” Yet while there are distinct ways in which checks and balances can become inefficient, there was a clear loss in all of this, and that loss created a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you constantly batter government as ineffective, defund its institutions, and cripple its impact, people lose confidence in these institutions and vote for less of them, even though they are what the people need most.
There are simply some realms where there is no better tool for the job than government. When it comes to developing public infrastructure and transportation, or ensuring that all citizens have access to affordable health care, the public sector is able to lead in ways that businesses cannot. The market can come up with solutions to these problems, but it cannot fix them without excluding the hundreds of millions of people who are not “attractive” to the market (usually meaning they are low-income). Yet these are the people who need access to services like public transportation and health care the most. So when government steps up, it can provide the rare solution that helps the people as a whole.
On top of that, once government power starts to fade and corporations or wealthy individuals fill the void, you start to lose democracy’s most hard-won victory: the ability of people to influence their own fates. You end up with corporate autocracy. You end up losing meaningful accountability, and with it the egalitarian ideal of democracy. A good government is beholden to all citizens, not just customers or shareholders. It rules by law, not by a product’s terms of service. This is what makes effective disaster relief or universal health care or universal mail service so deeply powerful when they are put into action. They provide a foundation—a set of standards and opportunities available to all. Unlike business, the charge of government is to serve those it might be profitable to ignore.
In this respect, government is not just important in the 21st century as a check on corporate power. It is, crucially, the social backstop that remains when other parties vanish. In a world of chaotic shifts and global risks, this is the bedrock for a life that’s livable and enjoyable, rather than a step away from ruin at all times.
But what has happened to this idea? Why is an organization like FEMA stepping back instead of stepping up as disasters grow more prevalent? Why are national bodies, in developed and developing countries around the world, so gridlocked and immobile?
What happened to government?
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REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS inefficient by design. Political leaders move in and out of power. Policy goals change. Public opinion ebbs and flows. Checks and balances are designed to keep any one branch of government from moving too quickly. If you wanted to optimize the government for agility, it would not be elected every few years by citizens. However, if the goal is to execute the will of the people, democracy is the best option. Policy makers work to steer the country in the direction that best serves the common good. If not, they are voted out of office. Through the democratic process, countries move slowly and deliberately toward a future defined by their citizens.
Of course, this is much messier in reality. Throughout history, we have seen racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups co-opt the democratic system to serve their own interests. Democratically elected leaders have enacted authoritarian policies to undermine the democratic system. Other times, the wheels of government stop turning altogether. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were both democratically elected before destroying their countries’ systems of democracy. In countries across the continent of Africa, democratic elections have too often resulted in the de facto election of autocrats.
Today, many Western governments—perhaps none more noticeably than the United States—are in a moment of stagnation and inflection. Governments are growing larger, but they seem less equipped to take on the grand challenges we face in the 2020s and beyond.
If we delve into much of the US government’s paralysis, we can see several key factors at play—from polarization, kludgeocracy, and weakened institutions, to brain drain and the capture of government by industry.
Let’s start with political polarization and its by-product vetocracy.
The divisions between the two major American political parties are deeper today than they have been at any point in the last hundred years. Some experts think we need to look back to the Civil War to find examples of similar division in America. This political division has made governing the country a nearly impossible task.
Political parties have been a feature of American government since the birth of the nation. However, for most of our history the ideological lines between parties were blurrier than they are today. There were conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans, and moderates of many shades in both parties. This ideological overlap allowed lawmakers to negotiate and legislate across party lines. As recently as the early 1990s, it was not uncommon for Democrats and Republicans to vote with the other side, especially on foreign policy issues. Most voters today may look down on this sort of political horse trading, but it kept the wheels of democracy turning for decades.
That changed with the end of the Cold War. The United States lost the existential challenge that forced it to unify, and in the aftermath, a variety of geographic, demographic, and ideological trends drew the parties further apart. Voters now tend to judge lawmakers more on their ideological purity than their bargaining skills. At the same time, both parties have become more evenly matched in congressional seats and public support. In the past, a single party more frequently had governing majorities across the executive and legislative branches, but in recent years Democrats and Republicans have won their majorities by small margins. This makes it easier for the minority party to stonewall legislation. And with each election hotly contested, the costs of working across the aisle began to outweigh the benefits.
Given the US government’s complex system of checks and balances, this “us-versus-them” mentality makes it difficult to get anything done. For the federal government to enact a policy that lasts, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the president must all sign off. It must also hold up to challenges in the courts. These numerous “veto points” bias the US government toward inaction—it requires a significant amount of buy-in and momentum to get anything done. Unless the same political party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress, the opposition can stop the legislative process in its tracks.
Between 2010 and 2020, that was the case for only two years—2017 and 2018—and Republicans used their control to enact what amounted to a $2 trillion tax cut for mostly large corporations and wealthy individuals. Not one of the 237 Democrats in Congress voted for the bill. Today, Democrats and Republicans disagree not just on taxes, but also on climate change, health care, immigration, foreign policy, economic regulation, and nearly every issue in between. Over the last decade, we have seen each party obstruct the other, preventing meaningful legislation on these issues from passing.
To describe this realit
y, where obstruction becomes the dominant mode of governance, political scientist Francis Fukuyama coined the term vetocracy.
“The delegation of powers to different political actors enables them to block action by the whole body. The U.S. political system has far more of these checks and balances, or what political scientists call ‘veto points,’ than other contemporary democracies, raising the costs of collective action and in some cases make it impossible altogether,” Fukuyama wrote. “In earlier periods of U.S. history, when one party or another was dominant, this system served to moderate the will of the majority and force it to pay greater attention to minorities than it otherwise might have. But in the more evenly balanced, highly competitive party system that has arisen since the 1980s, it has become a formula for gridlock.”
Vetocracy not only prevents Congress from passing effective legislation, it also makes it harder to get rid of redundant or out-of-date regulations and government programs. Eliminating an old policy becomes just as hard as enacting a new one. As a result, new laws often get glommed onto old ones. This leads to a second problem: kludgeocracy.
As policies overlap and intertwine, they become more difficult for government agencies to administer. Political scientist Steven Teles coined the term kludgeocracy, likening the legal clutter to “kludge,” the clumsy patches that programmers use to temporarily fix a piece of software.
An example can be seen in America’s inability to undertake major infrastructure problems like the municipal system that provides the water for my coffeepot. It is not that we know less now about how to build and manage a water system than we did a hundred years ago, it is that the process for doing so has become so overburdened by a thousand administrative layers and expenses that doing so has become near-impossible.
