How do you cut the red tape out of government? Use common sense, panelists say

Before she joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili worked in various federal government positions.

While she had hoped the work she was tasked with would make a difference, it didn’t always appear that way.

Murtazashvili called her work with the U.S. Agency for International Development the job of a lifetime, but she also became disillusioned with the bureaucracy of government.

Now she encourages students to “get their hands dirty” by working for non-government agencies instead.

“The way people can actually make a difference isn’t in lower-rung levels in the federal government,” Murtazashvili said.

A 90-minute virtual forum, hosted Thursday by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets and the bipartisan Campaign for Common Good, featured experts in the field who talked about how to reform government so it serves people better.

Neither Trump nor Biden addressing

Neither presidential candidate has been addressing the topic, but it was the subject of an Aug. 19 piece in Newsweek, “The Huge Voter Issue Democrats are Ignoring,” written by two of the participants in the forum.

Philip Howard is chairman of the Campaign for Common Good and Donald Kettl is a professor at the University of Texas. They authored the piece and were joined Thursday by Pitt public affairs professor Gary Hollibaugh and Murtazashvili.

“The issue of governance reform is not quite getting enough attention,” Murtazashvili said. “We don’t see it being discussed by our public leaders.”

The issue isn’t about “the swamp” that President Donald Trump has promised to drain, but how government workers can better serve people who need help, they said.

“The answer isn’t to get rid of government, but to make it work properly,” Howard said. “My pitch here is: Let’s go back to letting people be Americans again.”

Goal: Government efficiency …

That means having local, state and federal agencies follow common sense instead of giving people a runaround, he said.

“Common sense is anathema to the way in which we operate,” Kettl said. “People don’t care about which agency is in charge of what. They want the problem solved.”

If people weren’t referred from office to office to fill out various forms to do something simple, people’s trust in government would improve, Kettl said.

“People are looking for government to work better. The challenge is to figure out how we go about doing it,” he said.

… Needed for vaccinations

It’s something that neither Trump nor Biden is talking about, he said, although it’s an issue that’s especially important as leaders work to develop a way to vaccinate Americans against covid-19.

How to quickly and fairly distribute a vaccine is a “monumental task” that will require people at all levels of government to work together, Kettl said.

He pointed to seemingly unlearned lessons from the management of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in which the federal response was heavily criticized.

The pandemic impacts every community in the country, not just the Gulf Coast that was devastated by the 2005 storm.

“What we have now is Katrina a thousand times over,” Kettl said.

They weren’t hopeful that reforms can be made, but said it’s something leaders should take up if they want to restore people’s faith in government.

“The villain is a bureaucratic blob that has disempowered everyone and is kept in place … by all these interest groups that feed it,” Howard said. “We need to replace it with something that’s actually responsive to real people in a democratic system of governance.”