When the Democrats started their campaign for a congressional majority in 2006, at the center of their platform was a simple promise: competence. The party of government was going to make government work again. Coming a year after Hurricane Katrina and amid U.S. attorney purges and military contractor scandals in Iraq, it was no small claim.
Now the party of government is the Party Of Government. President Barack Obama is rolling out major policy programs in response to the financial crisis, the recession, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress is overhauling the health-care system, putting together a landmark energy bill, and composing the most comprehensive financial regulatory reform since the Great Depression.
But to prove their claims of competence, Democrats will need to prove that their policies work. The challenge now facing Democrats is determining how to measure success. In Washington's fraught political environment, it can be hard to balance the need for recognizing and overcoming early challenges to a program with the demands of partisan politics and public opinion. Transparency and accountability have been watchwords for the administration, but it already faces questions over whether it is measuring the right things -- and, if its measurements are right, whether it needs to change or redouble its efforts.
"All these numbers inevitably have political implications if they have any kind of meaning to them at all," says Donald Kettl, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. "Then it's a matter of trying to figure out how the analysis and the politics collide, or don't, who wins, who loses, once these kind of numbers have been put together ... are people better off, and can you find a way to demonstrate that?"
Consider the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus legislation that is the crowning achievement of the president's term thus far. ARRA promises to "save or create" some 6 million jobs, a claim that has come under attack from the right as too vague: How do you know if a job is "saved"? Conceptually, it's easy: If a firm did not have to fire a worker because of recovery funding, that is a saved job. Empirically, it can be hard to prove, and as data trickles in, administration officials have been forced to rely mainly on economic projections to prove the legislation's value.
More problematic is the fact that the economic outlook has worsened since the government made its initial projections and that unemployment is rising. That doesn't mean the ARRA isn't working; rather it's akin to having a doctor prescribing weak medication before realizing your illness has worsened. But it does leave the administration open to criticism, especially now that current conditions suggest another stimulus effort would be beneficial for the economy -- even as the numbers give the administration's political foes the ammunition to say the current stimulus isn't working.
Or we can look at Making Home Affordable, the administration's plan to mitigate foreclosures. The primary mechanism is a set of incentives for lenders to modify the terms of loans for some 3 million borrowers in danger of default so they can stay in their homes. Thus far, bureaucratic hang-ups have made it difficult for loan servicers to handle the volume of people seeking assistance, and anecdotal reports have cast doubt on the program's efficacy even as the government is still assembling detailed statistics about its accomplishments.
Spokespeople at the Treasury, which runs the program, say over 240,000 modifications have been offered to borrowers. But push a little more, and you'll learn that in its first several months of operation, the program has provided just over 50,000 successful loan adjustments. The difference between the two figures is offers that have been refused or are ineffective -- roughly 190,000 borrowers are still figuring out how to make their payments on the new loans, if at all.
"The anecdotal evidence is clearly that more needs to be done, and I think that's consistent with our expectations," says Seth Wheeler, a senior adviser at the Treasury Department. "Reporting is absolutely key in the sense that every new layer of data we get, the better we'll be able to understand. Even given the level of reporting that we have now, the challenges and successes are very clear."
If expectations of 4 million to 8 million foreclosures in the coming years prove accurate, the government will have to do much more than it has so far. Wheeler says Treasury is encouraging private loan servicers to develop the staff and training to perform more loan modifications. It hopes to offer 20,000 modifications a week by the end of this August. Here, the administration strikes a balance between good policy and good politics: Spin the larger offers figure, but acknowledge that the real problem will only be addressed by dramatically increasing the capacity of the program. But that raises another question that still lacks an answer: When do officials decide that loan modifications, a relatively roundabout policy tool, aren't fixing the foreclosure problem and try more direct measures like a moratorium on foreclosures or allowing defaulting borrowers to stay in their homes and pay rent?
Sometimes changing the measurements of success changes policy. Consider the war in Afghanistan, where conditions have been deteriorating since 2008 due, in part, to a greater U.S. focus on Iraq. President Obama promised increased attention to the conflict, sending some 20,000 additional troops there and replacing the previous commander with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is set to import a version of the population-focused, counterinsurgency strategy pioneered in Iraq under now-Central Command Chief Gen. David Petraeus. This involves a shift not just in tactics but in measurement: Instead of focusing on counting enemy forces killed, or miles of roads built, the administration has said it will look at results: McChrystal told a Senate hearing that "the number of Afghans shielded from violence" will be the most important metric going forward.
"It's more a focus on our end goals and what we'd like to achieve than on what the tools are, which is a shift from the past," says an administration official familiar with the National Security Council's ongoing effort to determine specific ways to benchmark the conflict.
Those benchmarks are going to be important going forward because many Democrats in Congress are uncomfortable with continuing to fund the war in Afghanistan, especially without a clear idea of the United States' strategic interest in the country beyond preventing the re-creation of an al-Qaeda safe haven. Several members of Congress have suggested publicly that the administration has only a year to demonstrate progress in the country and a clear shift in momentum; now the military and civilian officials in the administration must demonstrate the merits of their strategy using these new metrics.
All three of these cases demonstrate the challenge of translating simple policy goals -- fight the recession, prevent foreclosures, and win a war -- into complex government programs. The fact that solving these public problems is difficult doesn't mean they shouldn't be tackled; the government is the only institution capable of tackling them. But walking the fine line between measures that mean something and numbers that mean votes can be a difficult one. If the president and Democrats in Congress want to keep being the Party of Government and not just the party that likes government, they need to figure out how to be good executives as well as good legislators, and prove it.
