October 1, 2025 • 26 mins
Newt talks with Philip K. Howard about his new book, “Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America.” Howard discusses the pervasive issue of bureaucratic red tape that has stifled common sense and effective governance since the 1960s. He argues that the legal system has become overly complex, with 150 million words in federal law and regulation, compared to the 7,500 words of the U.S. Constitution. Howard advocates for a multi-year effort to replace these cumbersome bureaucracies with simpler codes that empower individuals to use their judgment. He highlights the inefficiencies in current systems, such as the lengthy and costly processes for infrastructure projects and healthcare administration and calls for a movement led by American citizens to push for practical regulatory reform.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of news World. In his new book
Saving Can Do, best selling author Philip K. Howard unlocks
the quandary of populist resentment and broken government. Nothing works
as it should because red tape has strangled common sense.
What's required is a multi year effort to replace these massive,
(00:27):
failed bureaucracies with simper codes that are activated by people
using their judgment. Here to discuss his new book, I'm
really pleased to welcome the guest Philip K.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Howard.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
He is a leader of government and legal reform in America.
He is share of common good and a best selling author.
He's advised both parties on meeting reforms, and I must say,
every time I've talked with him, I've come off deeply
impressed with his wisdom and his common sense. Welcome and
(01:09):
thank you for joining me the mutual.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
It's an honor to be with you again.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Let me talk with your book, because you really go
to the heart of what I think is one of
the biggest challenges that we face. And you talk about
the red tape problem really beginning in the nineteen sixties.
Why did that happen?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
We woke up to all these problems that needed fixing
racism and pollution and unsafe cars and such. And the
legal geniuses at the time not only thought we should
change our values, which we did with civil rights laws,
for example, but they thought that we should turn governing
into a kind of a software program where no one
(01:50):
could ever have bad values again. And so they got
the idea that law shouldn't set goals and principles and guide.
It should tell people how to make choices during the day.
And then if there was a decision that had to
be made, like for example, whether to give a permit
or not, that should be decided by objective proof after
(02:15):
a neutral proceeding. And so now we have this ridiculous
situation where we're getting a permit for a transmission line
can take a decade or longer. The most offensive part
of this was that we change the idea of individual
rights from being rights against state authority, you know, like
(02:35):
the First Amendment. Government can't tell you what to say
and such to rights by any individual to use state
authority to challenge decisions by other free people that they
don't like. You can't fire me that violates my rights,
or you can't help me accountable that violates my rights. Well,
wait a minute, what about my rights as their supervisor
(02:57):
or whatever. So we created this crazy system designed to
preempt human judgment, and we've been building it for fifty years.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
And do you think that was a reaction to a
sense that the kind of judgments that were being made
by decentralized in local authorities and had been since seventeen
eighty nine, and somehow those were inappropriate and therefore had
to be centrally defined.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah. I mean it was basically an effort to avoid
all authority by local officials, by federal officials, you know,
by anyone. And you know, again, it would be sort
of governing, would be automatic, just comply with the rules,
just follow the process. And of course it doesn't work
(03:53):
that way. People end up gaining the process to get
their own way, and it's you gradually intruded into people's
daily lives. Have a whole thing with wokeness and dei
with telling people how to talk to each other. Well,
that's not a free society. Freedom doesn't require me to
be polite to someone. Freedom allows me to be rude,
(04:15):
and it allows you to judge me for being rude.
Americans feel suffocated by it, and they.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Are I think your book should frankly be a handbook
for every person in the Trump administration and every member
of Congress and the staff as they rethink this whole
current government mess. You make the point that the Constitution
is seventy five hundred words, and we currently have one
hundred and fifty million words in federal law and regulation.
(04:44):
One hundred and fifty million. That's almost incomprehensible.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Well, it is incomprehensible, and by the way, even artificial
intelligence can't fix it because those one hundred and fifty
million words are internal inconsistent. It's not like some kind
of you know, elaborate cross for a puzzle. It's just
a bunch of mandates stacked on top of each other.
(05:09):
There's this whole thing called the abundance movement where liberals
are trying to persuade the Democrats to want to build
more instead of just have a lot of process. And
we can all generally agree with that, but those people
seem to think that you can build more if you
(05:29):
just prune this regulatory jungle. And you can't prune it
because what's left over is mandatory. No, the way it's
written is you must do this and you must do that.
So you can cut out eight must dos and you're
still going to have eight hundred other must dos that
(05:51):
somebody can complain about. So you really have to go
back to a framework that's more like the Constitution, where
they have principles like no unreasonable search and seizures, and
the courts interpret the principles. The system we built up
has to be replaced.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Us the example, which I want to get to in
a minute, of the eyes an hour interstate highway system.
And I have to say I recently went back because
I'm trying to think about doing things in space, big
infrastructure projects. So you can actually google and pull up
the eighteen sixty two Pacific Railroad Act, and when you
(06:27):
look at how simple and direct it is and how
much it delegates decision making out of a government of
the people who will actually build the railroad, it's an
amazing variation on the way we currently do things. And
I think what you describe with Eisenhower is very similar.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Let's just have a thought experiment for a second. What
are the odds that you could get permission to build
a railroad line across the Rocky Mountains today? The odds
are zero. It has environmental impact well guess what. Every
project has environmental impact. The point is whether the benefits
(07:07):
outweigh the environmental impact. But that's not how current law.
So Eisenhower, for a number of reasons, including national defense,
thought we needed a more integrated highway system. So the
Interstate Highway Act was passed in nineteen fifty six. It
was twenty nine pages long. Within a decade, twenty one
(07:30):
thousand miles of interstate highway been built.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
The last Transportation Act is about one thousand basis long,
implemented by thousands of paces of regulations, and it would
take more than a decade just to get permission to
begin building part of a highway.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Do you see this also in this effort to lengthen
the New York Subway, which I think is about a
two point one mile project and which is currently estimated
will cost ten times as much as a would it
was being done in Paris. All of that's just additional,
unnecessary cost.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Right, And so the New York Times EZRA client that's
one of the abundance guys, tells the story of a
public toilet built a couple of years ago to San Francisco.
The public toilet itself costs, you know, it's a installed
toilet would cost about two hundred thousand dollars. It costs
the city of San Francisco one point seven million dollars
(08:28):
to put it in because of all the legal costs
and the process costs. I've been trying to explore why
quote affordable housing costs so much. So a small affordable
housing apartment in Los Angeles costs, with subsidized interest in everything,
three quarters of a million dollars. We're talking about a
(08:51):
one bedroom apartment three quarters a million US, so, so
how can that be? It's just standard stuff right market rate?
Are departments in Dallas cost one third that amount. And
the reason is because there's so much red tape that
the lawyers costs of just complying and then complying again.
(09:13):
And then there are four or five sources of financing.
They all require different lawyers to certify the same thing.
So you have this crazy system of governance in this
country where we have multiple levels of approval and paper
forms to fill out and Florence to check, and then
(09:35):
people to check the forums that are being checked. It
was killing our budgets. I mean healthcare. For example, thirty
percent of American health care costs is administration. That's a
trillion and a half dollars a year, ten thousand dollars
per American family, just in healthcare red tape. Now, couldn't
(09:57):
that money be better used somewhere else?
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Let me focus in on one of the things you mentioned,
which is the whole environmental review thing. I know that
Lee Zelden at the Environmental text Agency has begun a
pretty dramatic deregulation process. But in your mind, how would
you measure what is and is not appropriate in terms
(10:37):
of establishing a system of environmental review that actually had
a bias in favor of construction.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
So I think reform needs to happen in two dimensions.
The first dimension, which liberals and conservatives fight about, is
how much should be regulated. You know the scope of regulation,
how many inspectors there are, all that kind of stuff.
You know what the standards are for clean water. The
second dimension, which no one is talking about, or almost
(11:07):
no one except me, is how decisions get made. So
for infrastructure, which I've done a lot of work on
and testified for Congress on such for infrastructure that requires
giving an official, let's say, someone who reports to the
White House, the authority to make a judgment about what's
(11:29):
important to study with environmental review instead of having a
three thousand or ten thousand page environmental review statement that
takes five or ten years to do. Most projects probably
have three or four big impacts. They could be studied
in a matter of months in an environmental review statement
that's fifty or one hundred pages long. But that requires
(11:53):
an official to make that judgment. And so you need
to give officials the adjudgment to decide all these matters
involving trade offs, what's important and what's not. And then
for the ultimate decision, the official has to have the
authority and again accountable to the White House or some
other official. Official has to have the authority to say,
(12:15):
I believe that the trade off of building the transmission
line this way is worth the harm of building it
through a pristine forest. That's not a legal question, that's
a political question, and someone needs to have that authority. Today,
no one has that authority. Remember in two thousand and nine,
(12:41):
when Obama came to office, he got a stimulus from
Congress and they were going to use it to rebuild infrastructure.
Right that was sold, We're going to stimulate the economy.
After this banking crisis by rebuilding infrastructure. Months later, Obama
stood up and said, well, I guess we can't do that,
because there's no such thing. Is a shovel ready project
(13:02):
A famous phrase, Well, what would you have done if
you were President Newton Gangerish would have said, Hey, wait
a minute, that's crazy. We're trying to stimulate the economy.
Everybody wants infrastructure. Here's at one page law that gives
me the authority to give permits on these terms right away.
(13:22):
But President Obama thought that the legal system was like
a state of nature, like a Himalayan range or something
that you can't move, And so he's just accepted failure.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
To sort of paraphrase your work, which I've also seen
in other books you've done, we have invented a system
that grew up in a series of silos, with none
of the silos really coordinated in such a way that
we have now become muscle bound by the inability to
actually act and instead or caught up waiting endlessly for studies,
(13:56):
for approvals, and as a result, we are falling behind.
It is impossible in the current American system to build
the infrastructure we need.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Right That's absolutely correct. And g and Ping and Putin
are just sitting over there laughing at the paralytic democracy
that we've created in the name of the rule of law.
It's actually the opposite of the rule of law. Law
is supposed to empower human judgment, not preclude human judgment.
But we've created this crazy system. And so you know,
(14:32):
my goal this year, with your help, I hope, is
to build a new reform narrative that's based on re
empowering human judgment at every level of responsibility in society.
Let the teachers run the classroom, Let the principles run
the school. Let the official decide whether we give a
(14:53):
permit and be accountable to the White House or some
politically you know accountable figure. This current system is failing
because it's designed to fail.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Is designed to successfully achieve stasis.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Well that's another way to say, right.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
As a result of which practical activity tells you know.
One of the areas I'm current at writing is a
paper calling for deregulation of NASA because in the sixty
years since John F. Kennedy proposed going to the Moon, NASA,
like all good bureaucracies, has built up these layers of
bureaucratic rules and regulations, which now makes it extraordinarily harder
(15:35):
to innovate and to get into space And my theory
is that the administration should be able to go in
and just literally take apart most of the regulatory overhang
and recognize that they all represent a bureaucratic effort at
risk avoidance and at minimizing responsibility. And as a result,
places like SpaceX are making extraordinarily leaps, but they literally
(16:01):
are crippled by the complexity of the NASA regulatory structure.
It's a perfect example of the sort of thing you're
talking about, exactly right. There's a book called re Entry
about SpaceX where the guy used to work for it
goes into the details about how decisions are made in
(16:21):
SpaceX to try different things compared to how the Lockheed
Boeing procurement contract overseen by NASA works. We're talking about
one hundred x less efficient for NASA. The lucky Boeing
bureaucracy takes the life of its own. Every time there's
(16:42):
a requirement, there's got to be a person to check
the requirement, and then a person to check the person
who's checking the requirement, and pretty soon you have this
Amazonian jungle of red tape to open the door or whatever.
So truly, this system of governm it certainly needs a
spring cleaning.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
And the way to do that is have is just
a bunch of commissions in every area, NASA everybody and
just say let's reboot this. But it also needs a
new operating philosophy. If people don't have the authority to
cut through the BS, then the BS will just multiply.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
So let me ask you about two different practical applications. One,
if you are the president, what would you do to
transition the executive branch to a can do philosophy.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
I would take a variety of areas, let's say anything,
but you can take transmission lines or whatever. And I
would by executive order or try it, or maybe you
go to chiris. But the order or the law would say,
notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, the approval process
(18:12):
for transmission lines or whatever it is will be for
the next five years, will be this, and have a
five line approval process that locates the authority to make
trade off jesdgements. It's like the Allies sailing around the
Japanese in South Pacific and World War Two. The way
(18:32):
you can get around one hundred and fifty million words
of law is simply to ignore it. All. You say,
notwithstanding any other law of the contrary. You do it
this way, and I would do that in one area
after another, and without room for reasonable doubt, every area
would work better.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Is there sort of a checklist or a training program
for these new commissions?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yeah? Absolutely. The checklist would be re state everything is
needed and discard the rest as a recommendation. Create decision
making structures with authority to make trade off judgments, including
about the need for expedited decisions and all of that,
so that you never get bound up in the paralytic
(19:19):
sort of bolics of somebody claiming you didn't comply with
this or that, because you have authority to make trade
off judgments between this and that, and you do that
area by area. The biggest area financially is health care costs.
And I'm talking with people, I'm sure you know Mark McClellan,
former head of CMS, some healthcare economists at Stanford about
(19:44):
what a simplified regulatory framework would look like for health care.
So for most Americans, the growth of bureaucracy is a
migraine headache for people in health care. It's like the
denial of human existence. I mean, they spend half the
day filling out forms and a lot of these requirements, like,
(20:06):
for example, the idea of privacy laws in health care, Well,
privacy is a good idea, but the point of health
care is to take care of people, not to be private,
and so privacy should be a principle, not an obsessive
regulatory regime that costs one hundred billion dollars a year.
And it shouldn't authorize the Office of Civil Rights to
(20:28):
attack hospital systems like Johns Hopkins because of footfalls in
the way they administer privacy regulations. Who cares. You need
to make judgments about what's really important in healthcare and
not waste all this money. Again, we're talking about hundreds
of billions of dollars in things that are marginal significance,
(20:52):
and a special commission run by you and me could
do that on healthcare and it wouldn't take as very
many months to do it.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
That's the sort of thing that Memodizes at the Center
for Medicare and Medicaid Services would actually resonate with. And
then he's smart enough, he understands the problems and frankly,
we probably can save more money on the administrative side
than on the medical care side, without.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Any question, and also just spring cleaning the kind of
unnecessary regulatory oversight and such. I mean, you want doctors
and nurses to focus on the patient, not focus on
compliance with the law. I mean I would love to
work with coms and run a kind of an outside
committee that comes up with a simplified model of healthcare administration.
(21:44):
It would liberate so many hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
I have a passion for getting back to a balanced budget,
and you cannot even begin to think about it until
you confront healthcare. Because it's eighteen percent of the gross
to miss product and the largest single costs sector of
the federal government. It just literally cannot solve our core
problems until we get through a better model for healthcare.
(22:10):
And I think you're right, a major major problem is
the regulatory paperwork. But let me ask about one of
the part of this. Don't the trial lawyers and their
desire to use all these regulations. Don't they become among
your most ferocious opponents.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Yes, there are a lot of people invested in the
status quo, but the most pernicious of them are the
trial lawyers who like the idea of suing people and
collecting forty percent of it keeping you food self, especially
in healthcare and the public unions. So with the public
(22:47):
unions A raised some money. I wrote a book called
not Accountable a few years ago arguing that public union
controls should be unconstitutional because they've removed the authority of mayors,
for example, to fulfill their constitutional responsibility. They come in,
they're supposed to be in charge of the school system,
and they have no authority. That was the view of
(23:09):
Franklin Roosevelt, absolutely right. So we are most of the
way through organizing a constitutional challenge, which we're hoping that
the Trump administration will bring against a couple of states
to invalidate public union collective bargaining laws as an ut
(23:30):
constitutional delegation of governing authority to a private group. So
that's the way we're going to deal with that. Trial
lawyers have a similar, I think constitutional problem. You know,
we've got a crazy system of justice where we let
anybodysoo for anything, and there's no law setting limits on
who can zee for what. Well, every other country has
(23:50):
law setting limits on who can see for what not America,
So that has to be solved as well. When Obama
was president, not for profit Common Good had a joint
feesher with the Harvard School of Public Health to design
a system of expert health courts that you supported, I remember,
and we got everybody in healthcare, every legitimate interest to
(24:11):
sign on, the patient rights groups, everybody, because it was
going to be better for health care quality and reduce
health care costs by a lot. We got President Obama
to agree to it. They had a provision and the
Affordable Care Act to do pilot projects for expert health courts,
and the day before the vote, Harry Reid had the
(24:34):
provision taken out. At the bidding of the Travellers.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
I think they are relatively invisible and amazingly powerful.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
They give buckets of money. I mean some of these
guys are billionaires. There's just extortion. It's an extortion racket,
that's right the.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Way our current system structure. It has nothing to do
with justice and is essentially just a method of making
the money. It's really pretty staggering.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's a kind of Queen for a day. Things that
have a set of getting a washing machine and you
get twenty million dollars because of some human tragedy and
the lawyer keeps half of it.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
I want to thank you for joining me. I think
your new book Saving can Do How to Revive the
Spirit of America is really important. I'm going to do
everything I can to get it known in the Congress
and the executive branch. It's available now on Amazon and
have bookstows everywhere, and I want to let our listeners
know they can find out more about the work you're
(25:28):
doing by visiting your website at Philip Khoward dot com.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Or Common Good dot org or Common.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Good dot org. We'll make sure both are on our showpage.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Pray, I'll look forward to continue to working with you
on this news. Outside leadership by American leading citizens is
what's going to make this happen. Politicians are too scared
to take the lead until there's a movement going. So
we need to start a movement to overhaul this system
to make it work again.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Thank you to my guest Philip K.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Howard.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
You can get a link to buy his new book,
Saving Cando How to Revive the Spirit of America on
our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtworld is produced
by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is
Guernsey Sloan and our researchers Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show was created by Steve Penley Special thanks to
(26:22):
the team at Gingers three sixty. If you can enjoy
newts World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and
both rate us with five stars and give us a
review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now,
listeners of newts World can sign up for my three
free weekly columns at gingerstree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
I'm new Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
On this episode of news World. In his new book
Saving Can Do, best selling author Philip K. Howard unlocks
the quandary of populist resentment and broken government. Nothing works
as it should because red tape has strangled common sense.
What's required is a multi year effort to replace these massive,
(00:27):
failed bureaucracies with simper codes that are activated by people
using their judgment. Here to discuss his new book, I'm
really pleased to welcome the guest Philip K.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Howard.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
He is a leader of government and legal reform in America.
He is share of common good and a best selling author.
He's advised both parties on meeting reforms, and I must say,
every time I've talked with him, I've come off deeply
impressed with his wisdom and his common sense. Welcome and
(01:09):
thank you for joining me the mutual.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
It's an honor to be with you again.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Let me talk with your book, because you really go
to the heart of what I think is one of
the biggest challenges that we face. And you talk about
the red tape problem really beginning in the nineteen sixties.
Why did that happen?
Speaker 2 (01:28):
We woke up to all these problems that needed fixing
racism and pollution and unsafe cars and such. And the
legal geniuses at the time not only thought we should
change our values, which we did with civil rights laws,
for example, but they thought that we should turn governing
into a kind of a software program where no one
(01:50):
could ever have bad values again. And so they got
the idea that law shouldn't set goals and principles and guide.
It should tell people how to make choices during the day.
And then if there was a decision that had to
be made, like for example, whether to give a permit
or not, that should be decided by objective proof after
(02:15):
a neutral proceeding. And so now we have this ridiculous
situation where we're getting a permit for a transmission line
can take a decade or longer. The most offensive part
of this was that we change the idea of individual
rights from being rights against state authority, you know, like
(02:35):
the First Amendment. Government can't tell you what to say
and such to rights by any individual to use state
authority to challenge decisions by other free people that they
don't like. You can't fire me that violates my rights,
or you can't help me accountable that violates my rights. Well,
wait a minute, what about my rights as their supervisor
(02:57):
or whatever. So we created this crazy system designed to
preempt human judgment, and we've been building it for fifty years.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
And do you think that was a reaction to a
sense that the kind of judgments that were being made
by decentralized in local authorities and had been since seventeen
eighty nine, and somehow those were inappropriate and therefore had
to be centrally defined.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah. I mean it was basically an effort to avoid
all authority by local officials, by federal officials, you know,
by anyone. And you know, again, it would be sort
of governing, would be automatic, just comply with the rules,
just follow the process. And of course it doesn't work
(03:53):
that way. People end up gaining the process to get
their own way, and it's you gradually intruded into people's
daily lives. Have a whole thing with wokeness and dei
with telling people how to talk to each other. Well,
that's not a free society. Freedom doesn't require me to
be polite to someone. Freedom allows me to be rude,
(04:15):
and it allows you to judge me for being rude.
Americans feel suffocated by it, and they.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Are I think your book should frankly be a handbook
for every person in the Trump administration and every member
of Congress and the staff as they rethink this whole
current government mess. You make the point that the Constitution
is seventy five hundred words, and we currently have one
hundred and fifty million words in federal law and regulation.
(04:44):
One hundred and fifty million. That's almost incomprehensible.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Well, it is incomprehensible, and by the way, even artificial
intelligence can't fix it because those one hundred and fifty
million words are internal inconsistent. It's not like some kind
of you know, elaborate cross for a puzzle. It's just
a bunch of mandates stacked on top of each other.
(05:09):
There's this whole thing called the abundance movement where liberals
are trying to persuade the Democrats to want to build
more instead of just have a lot of process. And
we can all generally agree with that, but those people
seem to think that you can build more if you
(05:29):
just prune this regulatory jungle. And you can't prune it
because what's left over is mandatory. No, the way it's
written is you must do this and you must do that.
So you can cut out eight must dos and you're
still going to have eight hundred other must dos that
(05:51):
somebody can complain about. So you really have to go
back to a framework that's more like the Constitution, where
they have principles like no unreasonable search and seizures, and
the courts interpret the principles. The system we built up
has to be replaced.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Us the example, which I want to get to in
a minute, of the eyes an hour interstate highway system.
And I have to say I recently went back because
I'm trying to think about doing things in space, big
infrastructure projects. So you can actually google and pull up
the eighteen sixty two Pacific Railroad Act, and when you
(06:27):
look at how simple and direct it is and how
much it delegates decision making out of a government of
the people who will actually build the railroad, it's an
amazing variation on the way we currently do things. And
I think what you describe with Eisenhower is very similar.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Let's just have a thought experiment for a second. What
are the odds that you could get permission to build
a railroad line across the Rocky Mountains today? The odds
are zero. It has environmental impact well guess what. Every
project has environmental impact. The point is whether the benefits
(07:07):
outweigh the environmental impact. But that's not how current law.
So Eisenhower, for a number of reasons, including national defense,
thought we needed a more integrated highway system. So the
Interstate Highway Act was passed in nineteen fifty six. It
was twenty nine pages long. Within a decade, twenty one
(07:30):
thousand miles of interstate highway been built.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
The last Transportation Act is about one thousand basis long,
implemented by thousands of paces of regulations, and it would
take more than a decade just to get permission to
begin building part of a highway.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Do you see this also in this effort to lengthen
the New York Subway, which I think is about a
two point one mile project and which is currently estimated
will cost ten times as much as a would it
was being done in Paris. All of that's just additional,
unnecessary cost.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Right, And so the New York Times EZRA client that's
one of the abundance guys, tells the story of a
public toilet built a couple of years ago to San Francisco.
The public toilet itself costs, you know, it's a installed
toilet would cost about two hundred thousand dollars. It costs
the city of San Francisco one point seven million dollars
(08:28):
to put it in because of all the legal costs
and the process costs. I've been trying to explore why
quote affordable housing costs so much. So a small affordable
housing apartment in Los Angeles costs, with subsidized interest in everything,
three quarters of a million dollars. We're talking about a
(08:51):
one bedroom apartment three quarters a million US, so, so
how can that be? It's just standard stuff right market rate?
Are departments in Dallas cost one third that amount. And
the reason is because there's so much red tape that
the lawyers costs of just complying and then complying again.
(09:13):
And then there are four or five sources of financing.
They all require different lawyers to certify the same thing.
So you have this crazy system of governance in this
country where we have multiple levels of approval and paper
forms to fill out and Florence to check, and then
(09:35):
people to check the forums that are being checked. It
was killing our budgets. I mean healthcare. For example, thirty
percent of American health care costs is administration. That's a
trillion and a half dollars a year, ten thousand dollars
per American family, just in healthcare red tape. Now, couldn't
(09:57):
that money be better used somewhere else?
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Let me focus in on one of the things you mentioned,
which is the whole environmental review thing. I know that
Lee Zelden at the Environmental text Agency has begun a
pretty dramatic deregulation process. But in your mind, how would
you measure what is and is not appropriate in terms
(10:37):
of establishing a system of environmental review that actually had
a bias in favor of construction.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
So I think reform needs to happen in two dimensions.
The first dimension, which liberals and conservatives fight about, is
how much should be regulated. You know the scope of regulation,
how many inspectors there are, all that kind of stuff.
You know what the standards are for clean water. The
second dimension, which no one is talking about, or almost
(11:07):
no one except me, is how decisions get made. So
for infrastructure, which I've done a lot of work on
and testified for Congress on such for infrastructure that requires
giving an official, let's say, someone who reports to the
White House, the authority to make a judgment about what's
(11:29):
important to study with environmental review instead of having a
three thousand or ten thousand page environmental review statement that
takes five or ten years to do. Most projects probably
have three or four big impacts. They could be studied
in a matter of months in an environmental review statement
that's fifty or one hundred pages long. But that requires
(11:53):
an official to make that judgment. And so you need
to give officials the adjudgment to decide all these matters
involving trade offs, what's important and what's not. And then
for the ultimate decision, the official has to have the
authority and again accountable to the White House or some
other official. Official has to have the authority to say,
(12:15):
I believe that the trade off of building the transmission
line this way is worth the harm of building it
through a pristine forest. That's not a legal question, that's
a political question, and someone needs to have that authority. Today,
no one has that authority. Remember in two thousand and nine,
(12:41):
when Obama came to office, he got a stimulus from
Congress and they were going to use it to rebuild infrastructure.
Right that was sold, We're going to stimulate the economy.
After this banking crisis by rebuilding infrastructure. Months later, Obama
stood up and said, well, I guess we can't do that,
because there's no such thing. Is a shovel ready project
(13:02):
A famous phrase, Well, what would you have done if
you were President Newton Gangerish would have said, Hey, wait
a minute, that's crazy. We're trying to stimulate the economy.
Everybody wants infrastructure. Here's at one page law that gives
me the authority to give permits on these terms right away.
(13:22):
But President Obama thought that the legal system was like
a state of nature, like a Himalayan range or something
that you can't move, And so he's just accepted failure.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
To sort of paraphrase your work, which I've also seen
in other books you've done, we have invented a system
that grew up in a series of silos, with none
of the silos really coordinated in such a way that
we have now become muscle bound by the inability to
actually act and instead or caught up waiting endlessly for studies,
(13:56):
for approvals, and as a result, we are falling behind.
It is impossible in the current American system to build
the infrastructure we need.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Right That's absolutely correct. And g and Ping and Putin
are just sitting over there laughing at the paralytic democracy
that we've created in the name of the rule of law.
It's actually the opposite of the rule of law. Law
is supposed to empower human judgment, not preclude human judgment.
But we've created this crazy system. And so you know,
(14:32):
my goal this year, with your help, I hope, is
to build a new reform narrative that's based on re
empowering human judgment at every level of responsibility in society.
Let the teachers run the classroom, Let the principles run
the school. Let the official decide whether we give a
(14:53):
permit and be accountable to the White House or some
politically you know accountable figure. This current system is failing
because it's designed to fail.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Is designed to successfully achieve stasis.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Well that's another way to say, right.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
As a result of which practical activity tells you know.
One of the areas I'm current at writing is a
paper calling for deregulation of NASA because in the sixty
years since John F. Kennedy proposed going to the Moon, NASA,
like all good bureaucracies, has built up these layers of
bureaucratic rules and regulations, which now makes it extraordinarily harder
(15:35):
to innovate and to get into space And my theory
is that the administration should be able to go in
and just literally take apart most of the regulatory overhang
and recognize that they all represent a bureaucratic effort at
risk avoidance and at minimizing responsibility. And as a result,
places like SpaceX are making extraordinarily leaps, but they literally
(16:01):
are crippled by the complexity of the NASA regulatory structure.
It's a perfect example of the sort of thing you're
talking about, exactly right. There's a book called re Entry
about SpaceX where the guy used to work for it
goes into the details about how decisions are made in
(16:21):
SpaceX to try different things compared to how the Lockheed
Boeing procurement contract overseen by NASA works. We're talking about
one hundred x less efficient for NASA. The lucky Boeing
bureaucracy takes the life of its own. Every time there's
(16:42):
a requirement, there's got to be a person to check
the requirement, and then a person to check the person
who's checking the requirement, and pretty soon you have this
Amazonian jungle of red tape to open the door or whatever.
So truly, this system of governm it certainly needs a
spring cleaning.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
And the way to do that is have is just
a bunch of commissions in every area, NASA everybody and
just say let's reboot this. But it also needs a
new operating philosophy. If people don't have the authority to
cut through the BS, then the BS will just multiply.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
So let me ask you about two different practical applications. One,
if you are the president, what would you do to
transition the executive branch to a can do philosophy.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
I would take a variety of areas, let's say anything,
but you can take transmission lines or whatever. And I
would by executive order or try it, or maybe you
go to chiris. But the order or the law would say,
notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, the approval process
(18:12):
for transmission lines or whatever it is will be for
the next five years, will be this, and have a
five line approval process that locates the authority to make
trade off jesdgements. It's like the Allies sailing around the
Japanese in South Pacific and World War Two. The way
(18:32):
you can get around one hundred and fifty million words
of law is simply to ignore it. All. You say,
notwithstanding any other law of the contrary. You do it
this way, and I would do that in one area
after another, and without room for reasonable doubt, every area
would work better.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Is there sort of a checklist or a training program
for these new commissions?
Speaker 2 (18:56):
Yeah? Absolutely. The checklist would be re state everything is
needed and discard the rest as a recommendation. Create decision
making structures with authority to make trade off judgments, including
about the need for expedited decisions and all of that,
so that you never get bound up in the paralytic
(19:19):
sort of bolics of somebody claiming you didn't comply with
this or that, because you have authority to make trade
off judgments between this and that, and you do that
area by area. The biggest area financially is health care costs.
And I'm talking with people, I'm sure you know Mark McClellan,
former head of CMS, some healthcare economists at Stanford about
(19:44):
what a simplified regulatory framework would look like for health care.
So for most Americans, the growth of bureaucracy is a
migraine headache for people in health care. It's like the
denial of human existence. I mean, they spend half the
day filling out forms and a lot of these requirements, like,
(20:06):
for example, the idea of privacy laws in health care, Well,
privacy is a good idea, but the point of health
care is to take care of people, not to be private,
and so privacy should be a principle, not an obsessive
regulatory regime that costs one hundred billion dollars a year.
And it shouldn't authorize the Office of Civil Rights to
(20:28):
attack hospital systems like Johns Hopkins because of footfalls in
the way they administer privacy regulations. Who cares. You need
to make judgments about what's really important in healthcare and
not waste all this money. Again, we're talking about hundreds
of billions of dollars in things that are marginal significance,
(20:52):
and a special commission run by you and me could
do that on healthcare and it wouldn't take as very
many months to do it.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
That's the sort of thing that Memodizes at the Center
for Medicare and Medicaid Services would actually resonate with. And
then he's smart enough, he understands the problems and frankly,
we probably can save more money on the administrative side
than on the medical care side, without.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
Any question, and also just spring cleaning the kind of
unnecessary regulatory oversight and such. I mean, you want doctors
and nurses to focus on the patient, not focus on
compliance with the law. I mean I would love to
work with coms and run a kind of an outside
committee that comes up with a simplified model of healthcare administration.
(21:44):
It would liberate so many hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
I have a passion for getting back to a balanced budget,
and you cannot even begin to think about it until
you confront healthcare. Because it's eighteen percent of the gross
to miss product and the largest single costs sector of
the federal government. It just literally cannot solve our core
problems until we get through a better model for healthcare.
(22:10):
And I think you're right, a major major problem is
the regulatory paperwork. But let me ask about one of
the part of this. Don't the trial lawyers and their
desire to use all these regulations. Don't they become among
your most ferocious opponents.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Yes, there are a lot of people invested in the
status quo, but the most pernicious of them are the
trial lawyers who like the idea of suing people and
collecting forty percent of it keeping you food self, especially
in healthcare and the public unions. So with the public
(22:47):
unions A raised some money. I wrote a book called
not Accountable a few years ago arguing that public union
controls should be unconstitutional because they've removed the authority of mayors,
for example, to fulfill their constitutional responsibility. They come in,
they're supposed to be in charge of the school system,
and they have no authority. That was the view of
(23:09):
Franklin Roosevelt, absolutely right. So we are most of the
way through organizing a constitutional challenge, which we're hoping that
the Trump administration will bring against a couple of states
to invalidate public union collective bargaining laws as an ut
(23:30):
constitutional delegation of governing authority to a private group. So
that's the way we're going to deal with that. Trial
lawyers have a similar, I think constitutional problem. You know,
we've got a crazy system of justice where we let
anybodysoo for anything, and there's no law setting limits on
who can zee for what. Well, every other country has
(23:50):
law setting limits on who can see for what not America,
So that has to be solved as well. When Obama
was president, not for profit Common Good had a joint
feesher with the Harvard School of Public Health to design
a system of expert health courts that you supported, I remember,
and we got everybody in healthcare, every legitimate interest to
(24:11):
sign on, the patient rights groups, everybody, because it was
going to be better for health care quality and reduce
health care costs by a lot. We got President Obama
to agree to it. They had a provision and the
Affordable Care Act to do pilot projects for expert health courts,
and the day before the vote, Harry Reid had the
(24:34):
provision taken out. At the bidding of the Travellers.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
I think they are relatively invisible and amazingly powerful.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
They give buckets of money. I mean some of these
guys are billionaires. There's just extortion. It's an extortion racket,
that's right the.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Way our current system structure. It has nothing to do
with justice and is essentially just a method of making
the money. It's really pretty staggering.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's a kind of Queen for a day. Things that
have a set of getting a washing machine and you
get twenty million dollars because of some human tragedy and
the lawyer keeps half of it.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
I want to thank you for joining me. I think
your new book Saving can Do How to Revive the
Spirit of America is really important. I'm going to do
everything I can to get it known in the Congress
and the executive branch. It's available now on Amazon and
have bookstows everywhere, and I want to let our listeners
know they can find out more about the work you're
(25:28):
doing by visiting your website at Philip Khoward dot com.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Or Common Good dot org or Common.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Good dot org. We'll make sure both are on our showpage.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
Pray, I'll look forward to continue to working with you
on this news. Outside leadership by American leading citizens is
what's going to make this happen. Politicians are too scared
to take the lead until there's a movement going. So
we need to start a movement to overhaul this system
to make it work again.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Thank you to my guest Philip K.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Howard.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
You can get a link to buy his new book,
Saving Cando How to Revive the Spirit of America on
our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtworld is produced
by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is
Guernsey Sloan and our researchers Rachel Peterson. The artwork for
the show was created by Steve Penley Special thanks to
(26:22):
the team at Gingers three sixty. If you can enjoy
newts World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and
both rate us with five stars and give us a
review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now,
listeners of newts World can sign up for my three
free weekly columns at gingerstree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
I'm new Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
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