By Carter Bundy
The president of the
But when we elect a president, we’re not just electing one guy. We’re electing the person who will be the executive in charge of a four-million-person organization that enforces our laws, carries out over a trillion dollars worth of direct activity every year and oversees and/or regulates trillions of dollars of private economic activity.
Pooh-poohing policy
For almost six years now, high-ranking appointed officials have left the Bush administration in droves, with many criticizing the administration for one common theme: placing ideology and politics over good government.
The first high-ranking Bush official to leave and publicly excoriate the administration was John Dilulio,
While praising President Bush for being, in his opinion, a man of “enormous personal decency,” Dilulio was positively disgusted by the reign of politics and thorough disregard for any policy in the White House.
As telling as anything was this paragraph by Dilulio:
“In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis… Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking — discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.”
What labor laws?
This week, we saw yet another example of the importance of electing a president who actually knows and cares about government policy. The Government Accountability Office released a scathing report about the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division’s neglect and disregard for enforcing — get this — wage and hour laws.
W and the Republican Congress had no qualms about exploding the size of government, rushing into wars for war’s sake and signing off on all kinds of pork and corporate goodies like Medicare D’s price-fixing clause. But at the same time, they actually reduced the number of people charged with investigating violations against the most vulnerable Americans — those whose livelihoods, mortgages and families depend on compliance with minimum-wage and overtime laws.
The second Clinton term saw the number of Wage and Hour Division investigators hover in a narrow range between 938 and 946 — remarkable consistency and commitment to law enforcement. By contrast, the number of investigators has fallen each and every year in the Bush administration, from 945 at the end of FY ’01 to 732 at the end of FY ’07. That’s a 22.5 percent drop in enforcement personnel. Those numbers matter.
For example, the GAO cites one case where a truck driver wasn’t being paid overtime. Wage and Hour didn’t assign an investigator for 17 months, and, according to the New York Times’ account of the testimony, the investigator dropped the case six months later “after doing virtually no investigating — having concluded that the two-year statute of limitations was about to expire.”
Partially as a result of the personnel cuts, the Wage and Hour Division initiated only 7,210 enforcement actions in FY ’07, compared to 16,502 as recently as 1999.
Laws don’t exist in a vacuum. True, there is some intrinsic value to passing laws as statements of our hopes, values and aspirations, but the reality is the only laws that really matter are the ones that are enforced.
From the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Department of Labor, we’ve endured over seven years of political appointments and disdain for the important jobs that only government — and often, only our federal government — can do. And the results have hurt millions of Americans.
Leadership matters
One major criterion for choosing a president, after the debacle of the W years, should be whether a candidate is interested in taking the apparatus in front of him and making it work.
Who is curious about domestic policy and concerned about enforcement of all of our laws against any criminals, not just enforcing laws relating to drugs and violence? Who will go after corporate crooks who cheat workers out of even meager wages of $5.15 per hour? Who is independent from corporate
Government is not always the solution to our economic or other problems. But it has a role, sometimes an irreplaceable role. The sheer disdain with which today’s national Republican Party, including President Bush and Sen. McCain, views government, means that most federal government action will be guaranteed to be incompetent.
This week’s GAO report on wage enforcement shows that millions of Americans can’t afford more of the same incompetent law enforcement for the next four years.
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in