Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate

by Newt Gingrich

  Around the same time, the Post reported on the troubles of a California raisin farmer who owes the federal government $650,000 in fines and 1.2 million pounds of raisins for refusing to hand over large portions of his annual harvest to the national raisin reserve, “a farm program created to solve a problem during the Truman administration, and never turned off.”56

  Much of modern bureaucracy developed in response to favoritism and corruption. If you wanted uniform rules applied professionally and impartially, the thinking went, you needed a bureaucracy.

  But bureaucracies are not impersonal, mathematical systems operating with geometric precision. They are organisms that grow and evolve over time.

  Seeking to exercise and expand its power, the federal bureaucracy has produced more and more rules of greater and greater specificity, often disconnected from common sense and the real world. These rules give bureaucrats a tremendous amount of discretionary power. They can always find ways that individuals, businesses, and organizations are not in compliance with their regulations.

  Former congresswoman Nancy Johnson of Connecticut used to describe how inspectors came to the nursing homes in her district to measure the distance of fire extinguishers from the floor. A few inches too high or too low, and the nursing home would be fined.

  This type of behavior occurs naturally within bureaucracies. Most agencies recruit people who are interested in the fields they regulate. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency tends to hire people who are passionate about the environment. New bureaucrats then learn the rules and culture of the agency. Those who support the goals and principles of the environmentalists who run the EPA get promoted. Those who raise commonsense questions about cost and practicality, on the other hand, find their careers sidetracked.

  The key bureaucrats in most federal agencies live in the Washington area. Many of them have worked in one of those large downtown office buildings for twenty or thirty years. They get their information from the Washington media. They often carpool to work together. Their children may go to the same schools. They have lunch together in the agency cafeteria. Some of them even vacation together.

  Over time, these officials come to believe they are more important than the “ignorant” and “uninformed” people outside Washington. But in fact, the opposite is true. The Washington bureaucrats are too insulated to understand how their regulations work in the real world.

  It was bureaucrats like these at the EPA who seriously considered regulating dust in rural America. A paper-pusher in an air-conditioned Washington office building can come to think that a regulation on dust makes sense. A farmer or a rancher knows it’s insane. At a meeting in Arizona, one man said to me, “Do these bureaucrats understand Arizona is largely desert? Do they have any idea why we call one of our weather phenomena ‘dust storms’?” The whole group roared with laughter.

  In Iowa, farmers were simply incredulous that any bureaucracy could propose the kind of rules they were hearing about. They pointed out that dust routinely went back and forth and was irrelevant. As practical farmers, they didn’t care. The idea of turning dust from a practical reality into pollution struck them as a sign of Washington insanity. Fortunately, their senator Chuck Grassley got word of the dust regulation and was able to derail it.

  We do not have to tolerate the growth of a fourth branch of government called the bureaucracy with powers in many ways greater than those of Congress or the president. Lord Acton’s warning that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” applies to bureaucrats as well as to elected officials. Their power has to be reviewed, trimmed, and at times eliminated.

  Finding a commonsense balance between a lack of rules, which leads to cronyism and corruption, and an overabundance of rigid rules, which leads to the same, is an urgent task for citizens and elected officials.

  As great a danger as regulatory overreach is, however, it is not the most perilous breakdown we face.

  The Breakdown of the Rule of Law

  The most frightening breakdown in government in our generation is the breakdown of the rule of law.

  America was founded on the rule of law. The Founding Fathers understood that only the rule of law guarantees justice and opportunity for every citizen. They regarded the king’s violation of the rule of law as the chief justification for the American Revolution.

  The rule of law is essential to freedom because it’s what stands between us and a capricious government that rewards its friends and hurts its enemies. It protects the powerful from the weak, the minority from the majority, the poor from the wealthy, and the little guy from the insider who can call on his contacts for special treatment. The rule of law provides the framework of certainty and fairness in which we plan our lives and our economic activities. It makes freedom and free enterprise possible.

  The sense that we are protected by the rule of law, that Americans of every background enjoy a fair playing field with fair rules, has run deep in our civic culture for most of our history. It has been crucial to our success.

  Indeed, in 1974, the commitment to the rule of law was deep enough that President Richard Nixon was forced out of office just two years after winning one of the biggest electoral victories in history. Americans understood then that using the Internal Revenue Service to go after your opponents is a fundamental violation of the rule of law. Using the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hide rather than to investigate crimes and lying under oath threaten the very fabric of the law because they prevent the people from getting to the truth.

  Forty years later our culture tolerates or endures violations that would have been considered outrageous, impeachable offenses in Nixon’s day.

  Consider President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service scandal. IRS officials targeted conservative, Tea Party, and patriotic groups, preventing them from getting the tax-exempt status they needed to raise money and demanding lists of their donors, the amount of each donation, and a host of details about their activities. Some liberal groups were slow to be approved, as well, skeptics have suggested. These left-wing groups, however, endured nothing close to the same level of scrutiny. The IRS officials investigated the Tea Party breakfasts hosted by an eighty-three-year-old grandmother who had been held in an internment camp during World War II, and they required that a pro-life organization divulge “the content of the members’…prayers.”57 In fact, not a single group identified with the Tea Party was approved for twenty-seven months after February 2010.58 When caught, senior IRS officials lied about the behavior.

  There are two possible explanations for using the IRS to harass conservative organizations. Both are chilling.

  In the Watergate-style scenario, the president’s top aides would encourage the Internal Revenue Service to go after the president’s opponents. That would be illegal and dangerous, but it would at least have a clear cause-and-effect pattern. But the administration offers a different explanation: lower-level bureaucrats decided on their own that they would break the law and discriminate against conservative activists. That explanation is in some ways even more frightening. Has the rule of law deteriorated to the point that any bureaucrat can decide that his own values should define the law—that he can pick the winners and the losers?

  James Bovard, writing in the Wall Street Journal, cites alarming evidence of a culture of corruption that has infected the IRS for some time: “A 1991 survey of 800 IRS executives and managers by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics revealed that three out of four respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie when testifying before a congressional committee.”59 The study is old, but has IRS culture changed? Recent reports suggest it has not.

  Other examples of this breakdown have piled up in the last few years. EPA officials released personal information about thousands of farmers to environmental activist groups.60 Similarly, the IRS released confidential information about conservative organizations to a competing liberal group.61 The secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has
been shaking down private healthcare companies for funds to implement Obamacare after Congress denied her budget request.62 The Justice Department has trampled the First Amendment by conducting criminal investigations of journalists who reported classified information, while the administration overlooked (and maybe even encouraged) serious national security leaks that burnished the president’s image.

  If the rule of law has indeed broken down so badly that every bureaucrat begins to think he can bend or break the rules to fit his own prejudices, then we are entering a dangerous world. And the Obama administration, it must be said, has led the way. The president has suspended parts of the duly enacted Obamacare law on his own. He has suspended the enforcement of immigration law on his own. He has asserted the authority to waive the requirements of welfare law on his own. In short, the president has undermined the fundamental principle of the rule of law.

  Government is at the heart of the prison guards’ ability to impose the status quo on the American people. Not all prison guards are part of the government, but virtually all rely on its power to preserve their privileges. Even as the old order uses government to defend the past, however, we are seeing a historic breakdown in the capacity of government to function. This has become a gigantic barrier to an American breakout.

  The widespread breakdown in government is now obvious to Americans of both parties. The failures are becoming a problem of daily life. Citizens across the country are looking for some way to break out of this obsolete mess that is serving the people so poorly.

  It is clear that minor tinkering will fail. We need extensive and extraordinary change to replace, not to reform, the broken-down parts of government. We need breakthroughs so large they can bring down the bureaucratic state, as light bulbs made candles obsolete.

  Many of the pioneers we have just met are developing breakthroughs on that scale, breakthroughs that can make the failing bureaucracies in education, in health, in energy, and in transportation not only obsolete but irrelevant, by eliminating the problems that justify their existence. Part of the breakout for America will be a breakout from this dysfunctional bureaucracy that is holding us back.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BREAKOUT IN GOVERNMENT

  The advanced breakdown in government that we’re seeing today is something new, and it is forcing Americans across the political spectrum to recognize that our current approach to government is failing. Ever-expanding and unaccountable bureaucracy, conspicuous waste of taxpayers’ money, and widespread corruption are a fundamentally wrong model. That’s how old European monarchies treated their subjects, not how the self-governing citizens of the American republic are to be treated.

  A French visitor to the United States famously remarked on Americans’ new and inventive way of managing their affairs, noting how different it was from anything he had seen in the old world. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”1 Citizenship, Tocqueville observed, was more than voting and complaining about the president. It was a novel way of life: do-it-yourself government.

  Benjamin Franklin was the model of this new citizen-activist. He helped found the Junto, a group that met to discuss issues and ideas, when he was twenty-one. At twenty-five he helped found a library that was housed in Independence Hall for a number of years. At thirty he helped found a volunteer fire department. At thirty-seven Franklin proposed the Academy and College of Philadelphia. Over a six-year period, he helped launch the school, which became the University of Pennsylvania. The same year that he proposed the college, 1743, he also helped found the American Philosophical Society, which became the center of an astonishing range of scientific observations and inventions. In 1751, he helped found the first hospital in the American colonies. When you remember that Franklin was earning a good living, writing constantly, engaging in world-renowned scientific research, and playing a leading role in Pennsylvania and American politics and diplomacy, you can see why he has been called the “first American.”

  This is the ethos that produced the innovations and breakouts of earlier generations. It is an irony of history that the very modernity that the decentralized American culture made possible soon became a threat to that culture. In the nineteenth century, intellectuals became confident that they could understand economic and social forces well enough to manipulate them, much as they thought they had mastered the physical sciences.

  The new complexity of the world seemed to demand centralization and professionalization. In his second inaugural address, President Franklin Roosevelt theorized that “as intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them also must increase.”2 Bureaucracy was the answer to that challenge, a modern marvel—a vast administrative machine that could fine-tune society with the tools of science.

  The new model of a centralized administrative state managed by a professional bureaucracy appealed to intellectuals eager to exercise enlightened authority over their fellow citizens. These intellectual Brahmins—a caste epitomized by FDR’s celebrated “brain trust”—would be the architects and governors of a brave new world based on their values and their interests.

  Roosevelt’s New Deal created thirty new federal agencies for this task.3 Foremost among them was the National Recovery Administration, or NRA, which had sweeping power to direct the economy. As Amity Shlaes recounts in The Forgotten Man, “NRA code determined the precise components of macaroni; it determined what tailors could and could not sew. In the poultry industry the…code had barred consumers from picking their own chickens. Customers had to take the run of the coop, a rule known as ‘straight killing.’ The idea was to increase efficiency.”4

  Eventually the Supreme Court found the NRA itself unconstitutional, but the expansive new regulatory bureaucracy remained, growing throughout the twentieth century regardless of who was in the White House or who controlled Congress. The public servants became the public masters. That is the legacy we are stuck with today—a central bureaucracy built in the 1930s trying to control a country of 315 million citizens. You might as well try to run the internet through a 1950s mainframe computer. The apparatus that once seemed scientific and modern is broken down beyond usefulness.

  Computing overcame the limitations of cumbersome mainframes by distributing power among thousands of smaller computers in a decentralized network—the internet. That same technology can enable us for the first time to overcome the failure of centralized bureaucracy by replacing it with a network of connected citizens. Distributed government in the iPhone age should permit citizens to work together, voluntarily, on a scale that has never been possible before.

  Citizenville

  Gavin Newsom isn’t the type of person you expect to find theorizing about how to dismantle vast government bureaucracies. A Democrat and the lieutenant governor of California, Newsom is the second-highest elected official in one of the nation’s bluest states—one famous for its commitment to “big government” and for its particularly powerful public employee unions. (It was in California, after all, that the prison guard was making more than $200,000 a year.)

  There’s no question that Newsom is firmly on the left of the political spectrum. In his former office, mayor of San Francisco, he became one of the first officials in the country to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples back in 2004. Later, with more controversy, he made San Francisco a sanctuary city from federal immigration law.

  But Newsom has also had some experience dealing with bureaucracy, both as a small businessman and then as a public official. As lieutenant governor, he has been outspoken about the need to re
think government for the digital age. His book Citizenville is full of ideas about how Americans could use technology to break out of the outmoded bureaucracy that built the sidewalks to nowhere in Oklahoma.

  “Citizenville” is Newsom’s play on the title of the wildly popular Facebook game FarmVille, in which players tend a virtual farm, plowing land, planting and watering crops, and raising animals, for which they are awarded points. This might not sound like the most stimulating activity, but apparently a lot of people find it entertaining. FarmVille has been one of the top games on Facebook for years, with tens of millions of people spending hours a week tending to their digital fields. According to the game’s publisher, Zynga, forty million people in more than 180 countries play FarmVille each month. Every day, thirty million people “visit” with fellow farmers within the game. In Turkey, one out of eight persons is on the game. Many players even buy virtual ornaments and accessories for their virtual farms using real money. Someone in Denmark purchased 3,700 pink flamingos at once to decorate what must be the most colorful agricultural scene ever envisioned.5

  With so many people spending so much time and even money playing FarmVille to acquire worthless points, Newsom wondered if we could direct that energy into something more useful. What if we could turn government—or at least some important parts of it—into a game? What if players, instead of competing over harvests in FarmVille, could compete over real contributions in Citizenville? Newsom describes how it might work: “The way to ‘win’ Citizenville is to amass points by doing real-life good. If a player contacts the city to report a pothole and get it fixed, he gets one hundred points. If another player organizes a community cleanup in the local park, she gets two hundred points. If another player landscapes the median on his street, that’s three hundred points. Whenever people make a real-life improvement, they report it to the Citizenville Website, which has a continuously updating scoreboard.”6