Prize-Winning Lessons on Explaining Government

What the new book from Michael Lewis can remind us

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

Tonight, a series of stories published last October in the opinion pages of the Washington Post will receive the first-ever Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting. The stories, including two from the brilliant Michael Lewis, and others from stellar writers such as my former colleague Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers and Sarah Vowell, were published a couple of weeks ago in book form, with the same title, “Who is Government?” I urge you to read them.

I was a judge for the contest, and I can safely report that the prize jury was quick to a unanimous decision that these pieces were the best explanatory reporting we saw from last year. But that is not why I am writing about this project now.

Instead, the work of Lewis et al. can remind us, as Elon Musk seeks to take a chain saw to the tree of state, about how we can and should better serve readers, listeners and viewers in explaining why government does and doesn’t work. This subject is timely, to be sure, but it is not a new one. In fact, Who is Government? is not even Lewis’s first book on the subject. If you have not read his The Fifth Risk from 2018, I commend it to you as well. (The fifth of five risks to a federal agency’s success, according to one of Lewis’s sources, was plain old poor management.)

To begin, I think we in the press need to accept some degree of responsibility for the havoc Musk and Trump have been able to wreak. Too often, we have left readers, listeners and viewers with the impression that government is riddled with corruption when corruption is actually the exception. Beyond that, yes, government is inefficient and often cumbersome, but there are reasons we set it up that way, and we in journalism have done too little to explain that.

Limits by design

Here, in brief, are some ways that we hobble government, and why, historically, we have done so:

Requirements to purchase from the lowest bidder. When you buy things in your personal life, you sometimes choose the product or service with the lowest price, but sometimes you choose to pay more, for what you think is purely subjective higher quality, or greater convenience, or even just brand affinity. We don’t generally permit government to do this.

John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, who had by then already been a federal employee for 20 years, famously recalled, "As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind-- every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.” We insist on that to stave off corruption: better the lowest bidder than a crony of some politician who cares more about his buddy than about either the federal fisc or the rocket’s safety.

Regulations surrounding government services and contracting. Yes, doing business with the government is bureaucratic, and often slower than with private industry. It’s also subject to all sorts of disclosure. Again, that’s by design, as a way to head off corruption and insider dealing, and to insist on various kinds of equity we may, as a society, think is important. Some people may think the equity considerations should include race or gender (the current Supreme Court seems to disagree, but for more than 40 years the Court felt otherwise), while others may think we should spread government largess around to smaller companies or on the basis of geographic diversity or by giving preference to veterans. Most of us think those sorts of costs are worth incurring.

Insistence on openness and democratic control. Private business is mostly conducted in secret—you don’t get to see most big company contracts (even if you own stock in them) or to know their terms. Those companies govern themselves, looking only to maximize their long-term profits, no matter the effects on society, or even, if they choose, on their own employees. But we decided long ago that we didn’t want the government to run that way. We wanted most of its business done in the open, and all of it to be subject to the active oversight of the people’s elected representatives. There are costs to be paid for this, but also benefits in terms of public confidence, democratic accountability and, again, assurance against corruption.

Failure to align goals and resources. It’s also true that government frequently falls short of the goals that it sets for itself. Sometimes this is because it simply does not deliver what it could. But often, likely more often, it falls short because it is denied the resources—usually the funding, by the legislature—to do its job. So, for instance, if you starve the IRS, you can’t legitimately be surprised if tax compliance declines, and if you refuse to stock public health stockpiles, or stop collecting early warning data, or fire the responsible staff, you can’t expect to be prepared for a pandemic.

How we got here

Until recently, and for almost a century and half, this way of running (and not running) government had been largely agreed in theory, even as we argued constantly about how particular situations should play out in fact. But it was not always so. In fact, as a recent book reminds us, it took no less than a presidential assassination (James Garfield’s in 1881) to trigger the creation of a modern civil service in this country. And it took a president as selfless and bull-headed as Jimmy Carter to modernize that system, elevating expertise and upgrading the workforce.

Who is Government? eloquently relates outstanding stories of the kind of genuine public service that results. We learn of the determined, sometimes courageous individuals who have been critical to improving mine safety, upholding our commitment to veterans, ferreting out tax fraud and money laundering, preserving the integrity of federal data on which so many depend, developing cures to rare diseases, even searching for extra-terrestrial life. These stories are the best answer to Musk’s nihilism, and to his and Trump’s symbiotic corruption.

What to learn

For the press, I hope the lessons are already clear, but let me try to spell a few of them out.

When we report about the things that do and should frustrate us about government, we need also to remind readers why they are occurring, including the elements that may be part of the design, or the onus of which should fall on parsimonious legislators. Likewise, when we discuss proposed efficiencies, we should also report on the costs, including increased potential for cronyism and self-dealing, as well as the shattering of expectations on which we have come to rely, expectations like food or consumer products or workplaces that have been inspected for safety, or information on which we can base crucial business decisions that is accurate, even when the people currently in power wish the numbers were rosier.

When we report about job losses in the government, we should do so with the same empathy we usually try to bring to similar losses in the private sector. A corporate CEO, zonked out and brandishing a chain saw while bragging about eliminating jobs, would rightly be seen as a monster. The monstrosity is no less if the people losing their jobs are public employees.

None of this should be taken to sugggest that we need to stop reporting about how and when the government falls short. We need that work more than ever, particularly when efforts ostensibly undertaken to streamline public services may actuallly be crippling them, and when leveraging public office for private gain is celebrated at the highest levels.

But if the American people have come to have a cartoonish view of their government, and of the millions of mostly very decent and honorable people who staff it, we need in the press to accept some responsibility for the inaccuracy of the picture in their heads— and to do our part to set it right.

Second Rough Draft will likely be off for the next week or two.