Episode 9
Political Gridlock: Why the U.S. Government Moves So Slowly
Summary
Political gridlock in the United States partly stems from constitutional design: the American government divides power, making major change difficult. Institutions built for deliberation now operate alongside rapid technological and economic change, concentrated private influence, and intense polarization. The result is more than delay. Multiple veto points give organized interests disproportionate opportunities to block action while government struggles to keep pace with emerging problems.
Political gridlock raises a question larger than whether Congress can pass a particular bill. It asks whether institutions designed to move slowly can still govern effectively when the world moves much faster.
That question connects directly to the show's broader examination of executive power and institutional capacity in Project 2025 and the Post-Constitutional Presidency.
Key Takeaways
- The American constitutional system deliberately creates friction by distributing political authority across institutions.
- Francis Fukuyama uses the term “vetocracy” to describe a political system with so many opportunities to block collective action that organized minorities can impede change.
- Gary Marchant and other scholars describe a “pacing problem” in which technological development outpaces conventional lawmaking and regulation.
- Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff argue that lobbying can function as a legislative subsidy, supplying research and policy labor to lawmakers facing limits on staff, expertise and time.
- Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page's analysis of nearly 1,800 policy issues found that economic elites and organized business interests had substantial independent associations with U.S. policy outcomes, while average citizens had little or no independent influence in their model.
Why Political Gridlock is More Than Partisan Disagreement
The American political system was not designed for speed. Its constitutional architecture divides authority among branches and institutions, forcing political action through multiple decision points. This friction serves an important purpose by preventing temporary political majorities or individual officials from exercising power without meaningful constraints.
But those safeguards also create veto points.
A major policy change can encounter congressional committees, chamber leadership, procedural rules, separate House and Senate majorities, presidential action, and potential judicial review. Reformers must succeed repeatedly, while opponents need to stop the process only once.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama describes the broader condition as vetocracy: the accumulation of checks and veto opportunities can make collective action increasingly difficult, particularly when polarization and organized interests exploit those mechanisms.
That helps distinguish ordinary political disagreement from systemic government gridlock.
The problem isn’t that Americans disagree; they do. It is that institutional structure can determine which disagreements become policy and which produce prolonged inaction.
Political Gridlock and Democratic Responsiveness
That distinction becomes more significant when political influence is unevenly distributed.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page examined nearly 1,800 policy issues to compare government outcomes with the preferences of average citizens, affluent Americans and organized interest groups.
Their statistical analysis found that economic elites and organized business interests had substantial independent associations with policy outcomes. Average citizens had little or no independent influence once the preferences of other groups were taken into account.
The finding does not mean public opinion never matters or that wealthy interests control every government decision. It raises a precise question about political gridlock: Who benefits when the default outcome of a difficult political process is no change?
When maintaining existing policy requires blocking action at only one stage, resources devoted to influencing individual veto points matter most.
The research on political gridlock raises a broader question about who is best positioned to navigate a system with many institutional barriers. As explored in Elite Theory and the Drift of Democracy, disparities in wealth, organization, and political access give some interests greater influence over policymaking, especially when blocking change requires prevailing at only one of many veto points.
Congressional Gridlock Meets the Pacing Problem
Institutional friction becomes more consequential when the environment changes faster than government itself.
Gary Marchant, Braden Allenby and Joseph Herkert describe this as the pacing problem: scientific and technological development can advance more rapidly than traditional legal and regulatory institutions can respond.
Artificial intelligence offers an obvious contemporary example, but the problem is broader. Biotechnology, digital platforms and other emerging technologies can evolve while lawmakers are still gathering expertise, negotiating legislation or implementing earlier rules.
The consequence is regulatory lag, a widening interval between innovation and effective public oversight.
Congress faces an additional problem: its own capacity. Casey Burgat's Brookings analysis describes congressional offices dealing with staffing limitations, turnover, compensation challenges, and outdated technology. Marci Harris divides Congress' pacing problem into external, interbranch, and internal dimensions.
These constraints explain why congressional gridlock cannot always be reduced to legislators refusing to compromise. Institutions also need sufficient expertise, staff, information, and technical capacity to understand what they govern.
When Lobbyists Supply the Missing Capacity
Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff provide another piece of the explanation. Their research describes lobbying as a legislative subsidy. Instead of viewing lobbying only as an attempt to change lawmakers' minds, they examine how organized groups help legislators who already share their objectives by supplying information, research, and policy labor.
That matters when Congress lacks sufficient internal resources. A sophisticated organization can arrive with subject-matter expertise and policy analysis that an understaffed legislative office might struggle to produce independently.
The issue is not that every lobbying relationship amounts to capture. The structural concern is unequal capacity: organizations with extensive resources are better positioned to provide subsidies than interests without similar money, staff, or access.
That creates a feedback problem. Government moves slowly because it lacks capacity, increasing its reliance on private organizations that help navigate complex policy.
This imbalance becomes more consequential when political influence is reinforced by disparities in wealth and access. As explored in Economic Inequality in the United States: The New Price of the American Dream, concentrated economic resources shape who has the time, expertise, and institutional access to participate effectively in policymaking. In a system with numerous veto points, those disparities affect not only which policies advance but also which proposals never make it through the process.
Does Political Gridlock Protect Democracy or Weaken It?
The difficult part is that institutional friction has multiple effects. Checks and balances prevent the concentration of power. Procedural barriers force deliberation. Independent institutions protect political minorities against temporary majorities. But updated research raises a different question: At what point does restraint become incapacity?
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that democratic systems depend not only on formal rules but also on informal norms, including mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. When political actors use every legal power available to obstruct opponents, mechanisms intended to constrain power can themselves become instruments of political escalation.
Vanessa Williamson's analysis of democratic decline similarly focuses on institutions that can weaken electoral responsiveness, while Thomas Carothers connects domestic political dysfunction and democratic erosion with America's ability to exercise power effectively abroad.
These arguments do not suggest that faster government is inherently better. Instead, they reveal a fundamental tension in democratic governance. Institutions must be strong enough to restrain abuses of power without becoming so constrained that they cannot respond effectively to public needs. Modern political gridlock tests that balance, raising the question of whether the United States can preserve meaningful checks on power while maintaining the capacity to govern.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1: What is political gridlock?
Political gridlock occurs when disagreement, institutional rules or divided authority make government action difficult. In the United States, the number of decision points built into the federal system can make major policy changes particularly difficult.
Q2: What are veto points in government?
Veto points are stages in the policymaking process at which an actor or institution can block or substantially alter a proposal. Congress' committee structure, separate House and Senate processes, presidential authority and judicial review can all create such decision points in appropriate circumstances.
Q3: What does “vetocracy” mean?
Francis Fukuyama uses the term to describe a political system in which numerous actors have enough blocking power to make collective action exceptionally difficult. He connects the problem to America's institutional structure, polarization and organized interests.
Q4: What is regulatory lag?
Regulatory lag is the delay between technological, economic or social change and government's ability to create or update rules governing it. Research on the “pacing problem” examines why traditional regulatory processes can struggle to keep up with rapidly developing technologies.
Q5: Is political gridlock always bad?
Institutional friction can restrain concentrated power and force additional deliberation. The central issue explored in this episode is when those safeguards become persistent barriers to government responding to emerging problems or public demands.
Related Episodes
- Economic Inequality in the United States: The New Price of the American Dream – https://cypressandstar.net/episode/economic-inequality-in-the-united-states-the-new-price-of-the-american-dream
- Elite Theory and the Drift of Democracy – https://cypressandstar.net/episode/elite-theory-and-the-drift-of-democracy
- Project 2025 and the Post-Constitutional Presidency – https://cypressandstar.net/episode/project-2025-and-the-post-constitutional-presidency
Sources & Further Reading
- American Federation of Teachers / American Educator – https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2020/levitsky_ziblatt
- Brookings Institution – https://www.brookings.edu/articles/congress-has-a-capacity-problem/
- Brookings Institution – https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/06/the-effects-of-us-democratic-backsliding-on-us-power
- Cambridge University Press – https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
- Foreign Affairs – https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/america-decay
- Governance in the 21st Century / Medium – https://medium.com/g21c/congress-vs-the-pacing-problem-s-a887e3ca953f
- Ideas/RePEc / American Political Science Review – https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v100y2006i01p69-84_06.html
- New York Times – https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-francis-fukuyama.html
- Reddit / r/changemyview – https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/om0fk5/cmv_democracy_in_its_current_format_does_not/
- Springer – https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-007-1356-7
- Yale University / Bright Line Watch – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mps4RM04J9U
Transcript
1
::You know, I bet you've had this exact thought while watching, like a congressional hearing
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::on artificial intelligence or data privacy.
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::Oh, I think I know where you're going with this.
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::Right.
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::You have these lawmakers.
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::The people tasked with steering the most powerful country on earth.
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::And they're asking tech executives questions that reveal they don't really understand how
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::a smartphone works.
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::Let alone like complex machine learning.
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::Yeah.
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::Yeah.
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::Exactly.
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::It's honestly kind of jarring.
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::Inside world and it's operating on these exponential technological curves, but the government
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::seems to be functioning on dial-up.
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::I mean, it creates this deep sense of cognitive dissonance, right?
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::We see a society innovating at light speed, but the mechanisms we actually rely on to manage
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::those innovations to protect the public, they seem completely frozen.
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::In that freezing, that profound inability to just get things done is basically the core
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::of what we're pulling apart today in this deep dive.
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::Yeah.
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::It's a huge topic.
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::We're taking a stack of political science research, institutional data, some podcast
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::analyses, and even public Reddit debates to understand the real mechanics of government
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::gridlock.
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::And look, the goal here isn't to just complain about politicians.
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::Right.
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::That's too easy.
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::Yeah.
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::We want to look under the hood at the structural reality of the US government.
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::We're trying to figure out where the tension lies between useful constitutional friction and
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::just absolute dysfunctional delay.
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::Because it's not a simple binary.
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::Exactly.
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::So as we get into this, I want you, the listener, to keep a question in mind.
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::Would you rather have a government that acts incredibly fast, but maybe makes massive
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::unchecked mistakes, or one that is safe, but maddeningly slow?
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::That is the ultimate trade-off.
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::And to start unpacking that, I think we have to look at the foundational architecture
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::of the system.
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::Right.
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::Because the frustration people feel isn't necessarily a bug, is it?
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::No, not at all.
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::In many ways, it's the system working exactly as designed.
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::So we're talking about the whole concept of veto points here.
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::Exactly.
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::The founders were basically terrified of concentrated power.
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::So they intentionally diffused it.
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::Francis Fukuyama's work on this is really illuminating.
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::Oh, yeah.
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::Fukuyama.
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::What's his main argument there?
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::Well, he compares the US to a Westminster parliamentary system.
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::In a parliamentary system, a majority party can essentially form a government and just
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::pass its agenda immediately, with very little friction.
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::They just get it done.
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::Right.
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::But the US looks more like an obstacle course.
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::Powers scattered across two distinct legislative chambers, an independent executive, a separate
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::judiciary, and then pushed even further down to state and local federalism.
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::So every single one of those nodes is a veto point?
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::Exactly.
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::It's a place where a piece of legislation can be stalled, watered down, or just completely
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::killed.
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::So essentially, they built a car with 10 brake pedals and only one gas pedal.
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::That's a great way to put it, yeah.
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::It requires this massive amount of coordinated energy to move forward, but literally anyone
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::can step on a brake and stop the whole thing.
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::And for a long time, that forced compromise.
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::If you wanted to get anything done, you had to build broad coalitions.
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::You had to negotiate.
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::Which sounds healthy, right?
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::It was.
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::But Fukuyama argues we've crossed a threshold now.
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::We've moved from that Madisonian system of healthy friction into what he calls a
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::vitocracy.
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::A vitocracy.
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::So, meaning the veto points aren't just safety mechanisms anymore; they're the defining
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::feature.
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::Right.
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::But exactly how does that shift happen mechanically?
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::Because the constitution itself hasn't changed its fundamental structure, but the output
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::feels dramatically different today.
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::It really comes down to the interaction between that rigid structure and modern partisan polarization.
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::And the parties are hyper polarized, those veto points just get weaponized.
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::Ah, I see.
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::Yeah, it becomes infinitely cheaper and politically safer for a minority faction to simply block
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::action that it is for a majority to build a consensus.
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::Because in a vitocracy, you don't actually need to win the argument to stop a bill.
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::Exactly.
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::You don't need a better solution.
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::You just need to hold down one of those brake pedals.
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::And the result is this perpetual state of congressional gridlock where even basic, necessary
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::maintenance of the state just doesn't happen.
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::Which brings us to a major collision course.
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::If the government is basically built to default to an action, what happens when it encounters
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::a world that requires rapid adaptation?
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::Right.
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::The outside world isn't hitting the brakes.
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::Not at all.
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::And this is where we look at Gary Marchant's research on what's called the pacing problem.
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::The pacing problem is fascinating.
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::It's essentially the gap between the speed of innovation and the speed of oversight.
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::Like we said earlier, science and technology are evolving exponentially.
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::But our legal frameworks, hampered by that vitocracy, are evolving linearly at best.
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::At absolute best.
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::Often, they just remain completely stagnant.
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::And that gap, that growing distance between tech and the law, is known as regulatory lag.
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::Okay.
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::But let me push back on that for a second.
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::If government rushes to regulate something brand new, like AI or synthetic biology, won't
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::they just get it completely wrong?
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::That's a valid concern for sure.
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::Because we could crush an industry before it even gets off the ground.
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::Isn't there some value in waiting to see how a technology actually develops?
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::The research definitely acknowledges that tension.
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::But it points to a much more dangerous consequence of waiting, which is the lock-in effect.
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::The lock-in effect.
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::Yeah.
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::When regulatory lag stretches on for too long, a new technology doesn't just sit in a vacuum
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::waiting for rules.
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::It becomes deeply embedded in our economic and social infrastructure.
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::Oh, right.
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::Companies build massive business models around it; supply chains adapt; consumers get
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::dependent.
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::Exactly.
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::So by the time Congress finally gets around to holding a hearing, the cement has already
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::dried.
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::So once it's structurally integrated, making any meaningful safety or ethical interventions
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::is nearly impossible without causing massive disruption.
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::The financial and political costs of changing the rules just become too high.
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::So the technology essentially regulates itself by default, simply because it moved faster
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::than the veto points allowed the government to move.
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::Marchant’s research actually breaks this regulatory lag down into three distinct layers, which
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::I think is crucial.
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::So there's the external pacing problem, the law failing to keep up with society.
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::Right.
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::That's the big picture one.
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::But the second layer is internal to the government itself, which is the inter-branch pacing
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::problem.
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::This is a huge issue.
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::This is where we see a dangerous imbalance of expertise.
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::Congress is falling drastically behind the executive branch.
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::Because executive agencies have been modernizing, right?
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::Exactly.
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::As a couple of decades, agencies have hired data scientists; they use advanced analytics,
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::they adapt to newer workflows.
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::Congress, on the other hand, has not kept pace.
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::And isn't that mostly their own fault?
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::Since Congress controls its own budget and cutting their own resources is always politically
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::popular back home.
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::That's exactly it.
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::They have systematically hollowed out their own internal expertise.
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::They reduce committee staff, slash the budgets for non-partisan research arms.
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::They effectively blinded themselves.
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::So when generalist politicians try to oversee these highly complex executive agencies, which
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::is their constitutional duty; they are operating at a massive informational disadvantage.
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::Right.
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::They don't have the staff necessary to bridge that gap, which naturally leads to the third
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::layer of lag, the internal pacing problem.
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::Which is basically Congress relying on archaic workflows to manage 21st-century crises.
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::Yeah.
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::The institutional reports in our sources paint a picture of an organization still deeply
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::reliant on like manual data entry, paper-based processes, and just terribly outdated software.
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::So we aren't just talking about a failure to regulate high-tech.
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::We are talking about a failure to utilize basic modern tech just to process information.
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::Precisely.
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::And to really drive that home, we have some incredible data from the Brookings Institution.
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::They actually surveyed senior congressional staffers.
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::The people in the engine room.
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::Right.
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::The folks actually drafting the memos and organizing the hearings.
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::When asked if members of Congress have, quote, adequate time and resources to understand,
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::consider, and deliberate policy, the staffers reported a net negative 38 percent satisfaction
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::rate.
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::A net negative 38 percent.
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::I mean, that is a staggering admission of institutional failure from the inside.
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::And when they were asked about the technological infrastructure they have to do their jobs,
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::it was a net negative 23 percent.
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::So when you look at those numbers, the whole narrative around government gridlock shifts,
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::doesn't it?
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::It really does.
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::It's not just politicians hating each other.
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::Right.
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::It isn't just ideological warfare.
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::It is a physical, mechanical lack of capacity.
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::You have a staff that is underpaid, facing incredibly high turnover, overwhelmed by the volume
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::of modern policy issues, and working with inadequate tools.
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::They literally do not have the bandwidth to process the complexity of the world they're
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::supposed to govern.
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::No, they don't.
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::But wait, so if the most powerful legislative body in the world doesn't have the time or
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::resources to research and write the laws; who does?
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::Because the laws are still getting written.
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::That is the million-dollar question.
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::Because a vacuum that large doesn't just stay empty.
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::Right.
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::It gets filled by the people who actually have the resources to do the homework.
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::And this brings us to a really fascinating re-evaluation of lobbying.
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::Based on the work of political scientists Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff.
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::Because we normally think of lobbying as transactional, right?
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::Like buying votes, twisting arms, that whole smoky backroom model.
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::Yeah, the whole vote for my tax break and I'll fund your reelection idea.
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::But Hall and Deardorff argue that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern influence works.
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::They model lobbying not as vote-buying, but as a legislative subsidy.
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::Like matching funds, but for political labor?
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::Exactly.
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::Think back to that under-resourced, overwhelmed congressional staffer we were just talking
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::about.
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::They are assigned to write a complex piece of tech legislation.
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::And they don't have the time to do a deep dive into the economic impacts.
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::Right.
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::And they certainly don't have a team of lawyers to draft a 400-page bill.
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::So a lobbyist walks into their office.
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::But the lobbyist isn't there to change the politician's mind.
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::Oh, they're already allies.
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::Exactly.
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::The lobbyist knows the politician generally supports their industry.
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::So the lobbyist says, hey, we know you are stretching them.
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::So we did the work for you.
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::Here's a fully drafted piece of legislation.
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::Here is a 50-page, highly credible white paper outlining all the data you need.
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::And here is a list of talking points for your next committee hearing.
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::Wow.
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::They are literally subsidizing the lawmaker's time and effort.
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::They're lowering the cost of legislating.
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::But only for the specific policies that the lobbying group once passed.
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::And in a vitocracy, where getting anything through those 10 break pedals requires an immense
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::amount of energy, providing that subsidy is incredibly powerful.
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::You weren't bribing someone.
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::You were just making it exceptionally easy for your natural allies to get things done.
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::While leaving your opponents starved for resources.
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::Exactly.
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::So it's less about cartoon villains handing over bags of cash and more about structural
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::inequality.
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::Leads simply have the resources to subsidize the legislative process and regular citizens
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::don't.
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::That's the core of elite theory.
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::Regular citizens cannot afford to write a 400-page bill and hire a firm to walk it through
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::Congress.
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::And the data on this is honestly pretty sobering.
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::We looked at Martin Gehlens and Benjamin Page's research.
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::Yeah, that study is famous in political science.
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::They looked at decades of policy outcomes to see whose preferences actually translate
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::into law.
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::And they found that when you isolate the preferences of average citizens and compare them against
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::economic elites and business groups, the average citizen has virtually zero independent
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::impact on U.S. policy.
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::Zero.
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::It's a striking finding.
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::The preferences of the majority only seem to become law when they happen to align with
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::what the elites already want.
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::And Larry Bartell's research on the U.S. Senate reinforces us too, right?
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::He analyzed roll call votes and found that senators were statistically completely unresponsive
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::to the policy preferences of the bottom third of their constituents.
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::Unresponsive, meaning no correlation at all between what lower-income constituents wanted
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::and how the Senator voted.
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::None.
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::Meanwhile, the views of the upper third received significantly more weight.
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::This is the structural reality of economic inequality bleeding directly into political
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::inequality.
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::Because the friction in the system demands resources to overcome.
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::Right.
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::Those with resources navigate the vetoocracy.
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::Those without are effectively locked out, which, as you can imagine, creates a very specific
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::kind of societal pressure or absolutely.
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::You have an electorate watching the world change rapidly.
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::They see their preferences consistently ignored.
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::They see a Congress completely immobilized by capacity issues.
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::The natural result is just profound systemic frustration, which spills over into public discourse
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::constantly.
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::Yeah.
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::We actually looked at a fascinating public debate on the Reddit community r/changemyview
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::where people were arguing over whether the current democratic format can even support
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::long-term planning anymore.
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::The arguments there really highlight the psychological toll of this gridlock.
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::One of the main threads was about the short election cycles, the fact that the House is
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::up every two years.
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::Right.
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::Participants were arguing that this forces politicians into a state of permanent campaigning.
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::They can't focus on long-term infrastructure or climate strategies because they need immediate
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::performative wins to survive the next primary.
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::The argument is that the system actively punishes long-term foresight.
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::But the counterargument in that same Reddit thread is that those frequent elections are
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::basically the only remaining safeguard we have.
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::Yeah.
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::If you lengthen terms or insulate politicians from the voters, you might get more long-term
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::planning, but you remove accountability.
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::And if the system is already captured by elites, giving them longer terms without facing
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::the voters sound like a recipe for deep corruption.
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::That's a brutal catch-22.
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::The public is desperate for functional governance, but deeply distrustful of the people governing.
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::And when the legislature is seen as broken, it opens the door to a very dangerous temptation
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::bypassing the legislature entirely.
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::The rise of executive power.
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::Right.
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::If Congress won't act or simply can't act, the pressure on the presidency to just bypass
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::the veto points and rule by decree becomes immense.
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::And we've seen this escalating over the last several administrations.
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::This facing a vetocracy turned to executive orders, administrative memorandums, national
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::emergencies, the force policy through.
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::But it's moving beyond just ad hoc responses, isn't it?
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::Yes.
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::What is alarming to institutional scholars is how this is shifting into a formalized
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::theory of governance, which is where discussions around initiatives like Project 2025 come
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::into play.
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::And to be clear, our sources look at this as a structural argument about where power resides,
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::regardless of the specific partisan politics involved.
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::Exactly.
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::The structural analysis of Project 2025 shows it essentially advocates for a profound centralization
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::of power within the executive branch.
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::Key component is the proposal to reinstate Schedule F.
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::Right.
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::Schedule F.
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::What does that actually do mechanically?
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::It's an executive mechanism that would strip civil service protections from tens of thousands
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::of career federal employees.
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::The idea is to reclassify them so they can be fired and replaced by political appointees
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::directly loyal to the president's agenda.
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::The argument being that the career bureaucracy, the so-called administrative state, is just
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::another veto point slowing things down.
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::Right.
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::If you want a government that moves at the speed of the modern world, the theory goes,
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::you need an executive who has total control over the machinery without pushback from career
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::experts.
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::But analysts refer to this as the blueprint for a post-constitutional presidency, right?
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::Yeah, because it relies on a concept called constitutional hardball.
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::For decades, the US system functioned not just on written laws, but on unwritten norms.
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::And the most important of those was forbearance.
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::Forbearance.
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::Meaning just because you have the legal authority to do something doesn't mean you should.
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::Institutional self-restraint.
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::Exactly.
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::I mean, a president could legally pardon any ally who commits a crime for them.
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::Congress could technically refuse to confirm any judge nominated by an opposing party, leaving
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::the courts entirely vacant.
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::The mechanisms exist to completely break the government legally.
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::Right.
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::Forbearance is the collective agreement not to use those nuclear options for the sake of
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::the system's survival.
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::So constitutional hardball is the abandonment of forbearance?
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::It's the decision to exploit every single procedural loophole to achieve a political victory, regardless
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::of the long-term institutional damage.
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::And when one side plays hardball, the other side is forced to do the same.
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::Leading to a rapid erosion of democratic norms.
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::But let me play devil's advocate for a second.
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::If we look at this from the perspective of a frustrated voter, if Congress is chronically
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::understaffed, technologically incompetent, captured by elite subsidies and utterly incapable
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::of keeping pace with modern technology, shouldn't we want a strong executive?
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::It's tempting, isn't it?
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::Yeah, why shouldn't we want someone who can cut through the vitocracy and just deliver
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::results?
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::It is literally the oldest temptation in politics, trading institutional friction for efficiency.
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::But the research, like the reports from the Carnegie Endowment, points out the catastrophic
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::blind spots of unilateral action.
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::Like what?
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::Well, when you remove the veto points, when you cut Congress and independent career experts
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::out of the loop, you don't just eliminate delay.
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::You eliminate the friction that stress-tests ideas.
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::Oh, so you get unvetted executive action?
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::And that routinely leads to disastrous, poorly planned outcomes.
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::You see chaotic roll-outs of domestic policies that are immediately struck down by courts,
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::because they were sloppily drafted.
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::Or impulsive foreign policy decisions that haven't been reviewed by diplomatic professionals.
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::Exactly.
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::Dictatorships and highly centralized systems might move fast, but they are incredibly
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::brittle.
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::They made massive, unchecked mistakes because there was no mechanism left in the system
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::to tell the leader they are wrong.
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::So the friction, as maddening as it is, forces a second look.
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::It forces someone to ask, wait, how is this actually going to work in practice?
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::Yes.
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::And when you strip out the career civil servants through something like Schedule F, you
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::are removing the institutional memory of the government.
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::You're replacing people who know how to manage a nuclear grid or a pandemic response with
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::people whose primary qualification is just ideological loyalty.
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::And that doesn't make the government faster or more efficient.
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::It makes it dangerously incompetent.
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::Wow.
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::So we are caught in this incredible bind.
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::The system is operating exactly as designed, slowing things down, demanding consensus, but
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::in a highly polarized environment that design mutated into a vitocracy.
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::Which creates massive regulatory lag, leaving us incredibly vulnerable to the pacing problem
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::of new technologies.
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::And because Congress has basically refused to invest in its own capacity, it outsources
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::the intellectual labor of governing to elite lobbyists.
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::Meaning the friction of the system disproportionately filters out the voices of average citizens.
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::Which then feeds the public demand for a strong man, an executive who will just bypass the whole
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::messy legislative process, risking the entire democratic structure in exchange for the promise
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::of getting things done.
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::That is the central existential tension we are facing today.
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::Democratic institutions absolutely must be capable of restraining abuses of power.
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::The veto points have to exist to prevent tyranny and ensure policies are vetted.
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::But.
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::But those same institutions absolutely must retain enough operational capacity to solve
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::complex modern problems.
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::Right.
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::If they fail to restrain power, you lose democracy.
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::And if they fail to solve problems, the public will eventually demand the dismantling of
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::the democracy in favor of someone who promises efficiency.
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::So the defining question for the US moving forward isn't really about whether one political
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::faction triumphs over another.
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::No, the real question is whether the United States can preserve meaningful checks on power,
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::while simultaneously rebuilding the capacity to govern effectively in the 21st century.
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::Man, it fundamentally changes how you look at the gridlock on C-SPAN.
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::It's not just bickering; it's a structural crisis of capacity.
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::It really is.
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::We've covered a lot of ground today, from the pacing problem to legislative subsidies,
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::and I want to leave you, our listener, with a final thought to mull over.
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::It's a good one.
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::We talked about how the legislative system naturally caters to those who can afford to subsidize
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::the work of an overworked Congress, handing them the research, the data, and the drafted
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::bills.
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::Right.
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::If that is the reality of how policy gets made in a capacity-staff system, how can ordinary
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::citizens pool their own resources to subsidize the causes they care about without needing
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::a billion-dollar lobbying firm to do it?
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::How do we build public subsidies for the public good?
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::That's the challenge ahead.
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::Keep asking the hard questions, keep looking at the structures beneath the headlines, and
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::we'll catch you on the next deep dive.
