Setting National Priorities, Revised Version

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Again, the inspiration is an old Brookings Institution series, called Setting National Priorities. The idea is to create a web document, with a lot of cross-references, that works top-down from a few high-level objectives down to specific administrative/regulatory and legislative changes. Schematically, it might be:

  1. Ultimate Objective I
    1. Intermediate Objective IA
      1. Administrative/regulatory initiatives
        1. Administrative/regulatory initiative ARIA1
        2. Administrative/regulatory initiative ARIA2
      2. Legislative initatives
        1. Legislative initiative LIA1
        2. Legislative initiative LIA2
    2. Intermediate Objective IB
    3. …
  2. Ultimate Objective II
    1. Intermediate Objective IIA
    2. …

At each level in the outline, there would be a single member of the Administration who is the “owner” responsible for execution. That is, there must be an organization chart corresponding to the outline. I will have more to say about the organization chart in future posts.

Here is a more specific example of a high-level objective and the lower breakdown.

  1. Increase the employment/population ratio by three percentage points. This objective will be owned by the chief of domestic government operations.
    1. Reduce for businesses the cost of compensation by 20 percent for workers earning less than $30,000 per year. This objective will be owned by the project manager for reducing the cost of compensation.
      1. Regulatory Changes
        1. Rewrite regulation X to say ____. This initiative will be owned by the head of the agency responsible for regulation X.
      2. Legislative Changes
        1. Pass legislation modifying employer-paid payroll tax rules to _____. This initiative will be owned by the project manager for the payroll tax legislative package.
    2. Reform safety-net programs and tax code in order to limit the total of implicit and explicit marginal tax rates for workers earning less than $80,000 per year to no more than 35 percent.
      1. Regulatory changes
        1. Rewrite eligibility rule Y to say ____. This initiative will be owned by the head of the agency responsible for eligibility rule Y.
      2. Legislative changes
        1. Enact legislation to change safety-net program Z to ____. This initiative will be owned by the project manager for the safety-net reform program legislative package.
        2. Enact legislation modifying employee-paid payroll tax rules to ____. This initiative will be owned by the project manager for the payroll tax legislative package.
    3. Replace anti-competitive occupational licensing rules with sensible consumer protection in health care and other services…[regulatory and legislative changes]

This is still very sketchy, but I hope it gives readers a better idea of the sort of thing I have in mind.

6 thoughts on “Setting National Priorities, Revised Version”

  1. Missing: What is to engender the motivations of the “Managers” who are “assigned” responsibilities for functions?

    What should we expect those motivations to produce? Nomenklatura?

  2. It seems that this idea would improve if you included key Senate and congressional players in those ownership positions. Especially the legislative ones…

  3. Where would one likely see structural reforms/changes that wouldn’t directly address the problem, but would be supposed to improve the decision-making framework in a manner that positively addresses the problem?

    For instance, let’s say we’re talking about improving competition in the consumer credit industry in the pre-Dodd-Frank days. One might argue that you need to create a CFPB-like entity to help consumers make informed choices. Post-Dodd-Frank, the other side might say that you need to eliminate or reform the CFPB to have a commission-like structure so that competition in the industry isn’t damaged by subsequent rules.

    Would those structural changes appear in “legislative changes” section, and, if so, how might you distinguish these second-order reforms from first-order reforms (like a direct call to establish a consumer complain database or reform Truth in Lending regulations)? Does someone else own these institutional changes?

  4. Central unplanning at its best. We need the opinion of the official anti-planner.

  5. When the government starts by setting measurable goals for our society instead of setting objectives for its own operations, it already has a broken planning mechanism.

  6. It’s a utopian model, because at any given time there are next to zero achievable unambigous objectives. The system is always near Pareto-optimal. This means that 99% of government actors are redundant under this framework.

    In above example the process will fail at 1-A-ii-a stage. You can’t “plan” legislative outcomes. They are a bargaining process.

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