Does the COVID crisis cap 25 years of government blunders?

A quarter-century pattern of failure by the federal government in efforts to respond to national crises tells the story of how we’ve arrived at this moment in American history, argues Paul C. Light.

“Our federal government suffers from pervasive complacency.”

A longtime student of the US federal bureaucracy, Light, a professor of public service at New York University’s Wagner School, has been busy examining the factor that led to rising COVID-19 cases, widespread unemployment, and police brutality over the past months.

Each devastating blow the US public has been dealt this year, he says, has something in common with the more than 200 other crises faced by this country over the past decades: namely, a poorly performing federal bureaucracy.

“Our federal government suffers from pervasive complacency,” explains Light, whose research has catalogued what he describes as a “cascade” of US government breakdowns since the mid-1980s and who is the author of 25 books on Congress, the executive branch, and the nonprofit sector, most recently The Government-Industrial Complex: Tracking the True Size of Government, 1984-2019 (Oxford University Press, 2019). Light was previously a director at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Light’s research began after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986 when he began tracking public interest in major government events. This data revealed a growing inventory of highly visible stories about federal government failures that Light has culled for patterns in the underlying causes of failure. His work continues to be based on inventories of significant events, but now focuses on understanding the underlying triggers that signal a potential breakdown.

There have been various attempts to streamline the government bureaucracy, dating back to the Reagan administration and followed up by the Clinton administration, but these and others were far from comprehensive or impactful, according to Light.

“And the question we are now, once again, facing is: What went wrong? The answer is: Almost everything went wrong, and almost everything that did go wrong had been foretold,” he says.

Here, Light explains his efforts to shed light on the federal government’s repeated blunders:

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