Killing a Tiny, Wasteful Federal Program
From the 2004 archive. Even the dumbest public programs generate a few supporters. I learned this the hard way in 1993.
As he took office, Bill Clinton and his Labor Secretary Bob Reich gave me the extraordinary opportunity to launch a new federal agency. The Office of the American Workplace was devoted to helping companies build better workplaces much as the Agricultural Extension Service was devoted to helping farmers with research and best practices. This was 1993 and in addition to building a federal agency from scratch, we were busy introducing an exciting new technology called email to the United States Department of Labor. Oops. (Fun fact: in eight years as President Bill Clinton sent precisely two emails — mainly to encourage everyone else to use email).
Some of my colleagues at the Labor Department generously contributed resources to my new enterprise by transferring to my benevolent care assorted federal detritus they no longer wished to deal with. One such program was known simply as 13(c) because a small team enforced Section 13(c) of the Urban Mass Transportation Act. The program had a total of thirteen employees — who turned out to be smart, dedicated people.
Section 13(c) is a relic of a statute much favored by federal transit union workers. It requires the Labor Department to certify that no mass transit employee is ever disadvantaged by the spending of mass transit funds. Seriously. The US Transportation Department cannot spend a nickel until the folks at 13(c) certify that the spending will in no way disadvantage a single current mass transit worker. (Check it out here. It is now called 49 U.S.C. § 5333(b)).
I paid no attention to 13(c) until January 17, 1994. At 4:30am that morning in California, a thrust fault ruptured in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. It was more bomb than quake, producing the highest ground acceleration ever recorded by seismic instruments. Thirty people were killed immediately and another thirty died in the hours and days that followed. More than 9,000 people were injured. The Northridge quake destroyed parts of Interstate 5, California’s aorta, as well as the Antelope Valley Freeway. Within 24 hours, Clinton and several of his cabinet secretaries, including Reich, were on their way to Southern California to provide tangible federal support for rescue and reconstruction.
Suddenly, federal transportation funds were not an abstraction. The Deputy Labor Secretary called and advised me that the White House had learned that they could not release emergency transit funds because “something called Section 13(c) approvals” were still pending. These funds were now needed to pay for hundreds of busses and vans to create new transit arrangements. To quote the DOL website (which, like most websites, did not exist in 1994):
“This Federal statute requires that employee protections, commonly referred to as “protective arrangements” or “Section 13(c) arrangements” must be certified by the Department of Labor and in place, before Federal transit funds can be released to a mass transit provider.”
Fortunately the woman who ran 13(c) was a solid, experienced federal professional.
“How much transit money are we holding for Southern California?”
“We don’t know”
“How can we find out?”
“We have no way to find out. That’s not how we are organized.”
“OK, let’s gather the files on every federal transit program in Southern California.”
“We can’t do that. The files are not organized that way.”
“Then we need to go through every single file and pull all projects that take place in Southern California. I’ll help you pull them, but we need to release those funds.”
“You can’t do that”
“Why not?”
“Because we have not certified that these projects meet the necessary protective arrangements”
“True. So I’ll certify them today. All of them. LA needs the money, so we really need those files.”
“We cannot get started until morning”
“Absolutely not. This team stays in this building until we are no longer blocking emergency funds. All night is no problem. I’ll get pizza and will come up and help.”
By 10pm, the team had gathered the files. A zillion signatures later and tens of millions of dollars were available for Los Angeles. Even better, 13(c) stayed out of the newspapers (something it is fairly good at). Not a single worker or union ever complained – indeed rebuilding LA created hundreds of good transit jobs.
None of this would matter except that early in his new administration, Bill Clinton put Al Gore in charge of Reinventing Government. The Vice President led what was, by some counts anyway, the eleventh such federal task force in the twentieth century devoted to eliminating needless federal spending and programs.
Gore created the Hammer Award to recognize government efficiency. He would send a $6 hammer, a striped ribbon and an aluminum-framed note to recipients who came up with costs that could be eliminated. The award parodied the Pentagon’s infamous $436 hammer.
Since Gore was in search of needless federal programs to kill, I nominated 13(c). In no other part of government do we protect workers by withholding federal funds. Not for the military, for health care, for agriculture, or for any of the zillions other federal expenses. Why impede transit spending this way? This program was very small and we could easily redeploy the staff to more productive programs. It was unbelievably rigid and added months and sometimes years to the funding of federal transit projects. The Department of Transportation and every transit official in the country hated it. The program had only one supporter — a tiny, politically irrelevant transit union. Plus 13(c) had recently endangered a federal emergency response. Killing it was a no-brainer.
To my surprise, Al Gore knew all about the program (the level of detail about obscure federal programs commanded by professional politicians is astonishing). He wanted to make sure that Congress would support killing it. “You need to make sure Norm Mineta is on board“.
Made sense. Mineta chaired the House Committee on Transportation. By accident, he was from San Jose and I had worked on his campaign when he was my Congressman. Conveniently, we flew the same red-eye from San Francisco to DC each week.
Mineta: “13(c) is a relic. Love to kill it. Tell Secretary Reich and Gore that I’m fine letting it go. But you should probably check with Leon Panetta at OMB.”
Panetta was a former Northern California Congressman that I remembered from when he was a Republican. He lived in Carmel and most Sunday nights was on the same flight. He agreed that 13(c) was useless (not his term) and was surprised that it was still around. He had no problem killing it.
We were ready to go. The combined powers of the executive and legislative branches of a powerful government would soon rid itself of this pimple on the body politic. Maybe I would get a Hammer Award!
It never happened. The United States Department of Labor still enforces section 13(c) of the Federal Transit Law, (now located at Section 5333(b) of Title 49 of the U.S. Code). It is a tiny, trivial program — but it delays hundreds of millions of transit dollars each year and adds millions of dollars of cost to these programs — and no value.
Years after Clinton, Obama had a team designed to ferret out and kill needless programs. So did Trump, who put Jared Kushner in charge of a White House office of “American Innovation”.
Each of these presidents learned that democracies are much better at starting things than ending them. (When they are serious about killing things, legislatures often resort to extra-legislative processes like military base closure commissions or the various Sunset Commissions.)
Whether conservative or liberal, the political work for any public official to terminate even small, useless programs is enormous — and the payoff is tiny. This political calculus has not changed in the five hundred years since Machiavelli advised his Prince on these dangers:
“…there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order…”