In our highly specialized and complex world, all real political power needs to move to specialized committees

Could specific reforms of the political process, such as reforms of the committee system, improve the functioning of government?

We live in a complex world in which the division of labor has advanced to a high degree. No one can know everything. One of the great challenges of our era, both in business and in government, is how to make use of people who are useful for the depth but dangerous for their lack of breadth. We rely on people who spend 20 years narrowly focused on learning one topic: medicine, computer programming, law, chemistry, biology, etc. And each of those disciplines has multiple sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines. This isn’t the 1700s, no one can just study “medicine” any more. In the modern era, one can only learn a tiny fraction of any of these subjects. Likewise in government, there is no one person who can oversee all that the government does: no one is an expert on military affairs, foreign policy, the environment, water pollution, and how to teach young children. Everyone is a specialist.

As the divisions in labor multiply, often the processes that connect those specialists together also need to be redesigned. A successful large business is one that is agile in the redeployment of its resources. But our national government is slow to reorganize, and at the highest levels its potential reorganization is limited by the Constitution.

Why can't the government push forward with necessary reforms? Many explanations have been offered: maybe oligarchy is corrupting the policy making process, or maybe the mainstream media is guilty of spreading disinformation which has confused the public, or maybe the educational system has failed such that poorly informed voters are electing unusually stupid politicians, or perhaps there has been an increase in personal selfishness, a loss of community ties, too much consumption, too much status seeking, or too many people read Ayn Rand and became libertarians, or perhaps the problem is Fox News or the extremism of the Republicans?

I'd like to suggest something different, a contributing factor that has slowly built up over the last 5 or 6 decades.

The USA used to be the world's leading innovator in developing new forms of government. We were the first to have a written constitution that was fully put into effect. We were the first to have a constitutional court (the high court in Britain has only slowly moved towards being a constitutional court). We were the first to specify the division of responsibilities between the national and regional governments (unlike most nations, where the regional governments existed at the pleasure of the central government). During the 1800s, we were the first to begin developing specialized committees to deal with the increasing complexity of society.

Let's focus on this last bit, and figure out what it means.

In the 1700s the Western democracies established nominally omnicompetant, unspecialized legislatures.

In the late 1800s, given the increasing specialization of knowledge, the first committees were established. At first this process was ad-hoc, one-off, disorganized, and often viewed as temporary. No one person could understand all of agriculture, or crop rotation, or the influence of legumes when intermixed with wheat (to fix nitrogen), or the new grafting techniques, and then there was the whole industry of raising animals, and every animal was fast becoming its own specialty: those who knew how to grow chickens at industrial scale knew nothing about pigs. And then there was the rise of the railroads, and the great urban centers, and the interplay of transport and agriculture and urban markets. The complexity increased dramatically. Just the work of monitoring agriculture could overwhelm a legislative session, so it was best to hand all of that work to a specialized committee. Then there was the rapid growth of the steel industry, the electrical industry, the automotive industry, and so much more.

By the early 1900s it was clear that the system of highly specialized committees was the only way for the legislatures to keep up with the rapidly growing complexity of society.

By the 1930s, in the USA, there was the growing sense that the general assembly of Congress should only act as a rubber stamp for the committees. In the rare case that some some random Congressperson attempted to advance a law from the Congressional floor the law was inevitably badly written and full of unintended consequences. All good laws came from committees, without exception.

In 1946 the committee system reached the peak of its prestige and intellectual coherence with the Congressional Reorganization Act.

If you follow the trend line, from 1850 to 1950, and then if you project that trend line into the future, it seems clear that somewhere around 1970 or 1980 there should have been a Constitutional amendment that shifted the power to make laws from the Congress to the committees.

One possible system that could have worked well is if the Congress continued to exist, but only as an assembly that appointed people to committees. Rather than asking Congress to act as a rubber stamp, Congress would lose its power to make laws, as such power would shift to the committees.

So in the old days, in the 1800s and 1900s, if a legislator wanted to pass a law, they would write the law and then advocate for it, but in the new system, if a legislator wants to pass a law, they would find someone who agrees with them about the law, and they would try to appoint that person to the appropriate committee. In other words, if a legislator wants to limit the amount of pesticides that can be used on a farm, the legislator would no longer have the power to pass a law to that effect, instead they would find someone who agrees with them that the use of pesticides needs to be restricted, and then the legislator would try to get that person appointed to the Agriculture Committee.

Anyone who has started a growing business has seen this evolution occur: in the early days you do everything yourself, but as your company grows you delegate more and more authority, till finally, if you become leader of a large organization, you no longer do any direct work yourself, instead your whole job becomes hiring the right people to do the work for you. The bigger you get the more you delegate. And our government is now much bigger than it was in the 1700s, therefore it needs to delegate more. And the next phase of delegation has to be for the legislature to give up its power to make laws, and instead focus entirely on appointing other people to make laws. Put the right specialists in a position where their specialized knowledge can do the most good for society. (Another way to think of this: we can no longer go forward with one big (nominally omni-competent) legislature, instead, we must have hundreds of specialized legislatures.)

Presumably, as part of the shift to highly specialized committees, some kind of credentialing system would be put in place to limit who the legislators could appoint to the committee. Perhaps a person needs to have a degree in agriculture before they can be considered eligible to serve on the Agriculture Committee. The government already uses various credentialing systems in the military, in the civil service, and in the diplomatic corps. The same basic idea would be extended to the committees. The goal would be to ensure that laws about agriculture would come out of a committee that is composed of people who know something about agriculture.

Likewise, a committee for energy, a committee for transportation, a committee for education. All of these committees currently exist but they lack direct law making power, and they are staffed by politicians. But given the complexities of the modern world, if we want laws that take into account the technical nuances that good policy would take into account, we should shift law making power to the committees.

An additional benefit might be to further de-politicize some of the decision making. Limiting the power of each individual committee, and appointing people with technical skills, increases the possibility that the decisions will be made on technical merits rather than raw political calculation. And some of the ugliest forms of “horse trading” becomes impossible. The Agriculture Committee cannot trade votes with the Energy Committee. Some of the dangers of big omnibus bills, passed through a nominally omni-competent and omni-powerful legislature, are thus avoided.

Stripping the legislature of its power to make law directly, and shifting that power to dozens of committees, can also be thought of as an important advance to our system of “checks and balances.” One of the risks of democracy is that the majority will pass a law that infringes on the rights of minorities. Breaking up the power of the legislature and distributing it to multiple committees is another step towards a robust and redundant system that limits the power of any one actor.

Such a change, if we had done it, would have formalized the idea that we live in a complex and highly specialized world, very different from the simpler world of the 1700s.

The failure to push forward with necessary constitutional change meant that the whole system began to stagnate, and then it became vulnerable to the accusation that the government no longer functioned correctly (more and more pundits then began to suggest that, rather than fix the problems with our process of governance, the real solution would be to have less government -- for those who wanted less government, sabotaging the system was a great victory).

The committee system was still widely respected till the 1990s. It is often said that Newt Gingrich, when he gained power in 1994, began an attack on the committee system. His goal was less government, rather than great government, so it served his purpose to sabotage the whole system.

In the USA, there is universal agreement that the committee system is less important now than it was 30 years ago. Republicans have lead the way with a populist style of government in which laws are pushed forward from the floor of Congress, rather than from the committees. Many of these laws seem to be designed to function more as attention getting devices, rather than functioning first and foremost as instruments of governance.

If you buy this line of thinking, the answer to our problems is to declare the 1700s officially over: we should limit the power of the nominally omni-competent, unspecialized legislature, and instead shift power to the committees.

This would require an amendment to the Constitution, which is difficult in the USA and leads into the conversation, which we’ve discussed before, what is the ideal speed at which a Constitution should evolve? At the current moment, the world offers us two countries as examples of the dangers of the two extremes: Hungary and the USA. In Hungary it turned out to be too easy to amend the Constitution, while in the USA it has turned out to be too difficult to amend the Constitution. See our previous essay, where we compared the different constitutional problems faced by Hungary and the USA.

Such changes currently seem difficult, but perhaps over the next 20 years a movement can be built for needed reforms.

Agile governments will dominate the 21st Century

A final point. If a system of committees was the great invention of the late 1800s, here in the 2020s merely designing an efficient system of committees is no longer enough. The USA was the great innovator when it came to committees, and the invention of the committee system in the legislature meant that for a long time the USA had the most innovative government structure in the world. But that was a long time ago.

Anyone who has participated in growing a business is aware that growing a business also means growing a bureaucracy. This is especially important around all matters of handling money and paying bills. For example, a small company might decide to empower each team with an independent budget. This offers great flexibility, but it makes it more complicated for the accounting team to track the money, therefore it demands a larger accounting team. So should you empower the team's with independent budgets? There is no right or wrong answer, there is simply a question of what set of strengths and weaknesses you want to have. Designing a beautiful, ambitious bureaucracy is all about tradeoffs -- what you gain in one area you lose in another. A well designed bureaucracy allows you to achieve flexibility at scale. But time passes and circumstances change, and so the tradeoffs you've made also need to change. Suppose three years go by and now you've grown by a factor of ten. You no longer have a tech team, you now have a tech department and it has ten teams: frontend, backend, devops, database, dashboards, etc. You no longer have a marketing team, you now have a marketing department and it has 10 teams: online, print, television, magazine, European market, African market, etc. Now you have to decide, do you continue to empower the individual teams, or do you leave all decisions with the head of the departments? At this point the company has a very large number of teams. If you decide you want to continue to empower each individual team with its own independent budget, you can gain a powerful flexibility for the company, but it requires the accounting department to grow considerably so it can track such a large number of independent budgets. You also have to confront the possibility that you are undercutting the authority of the department heads by giving so much power to the teams they lead. Do you set a firm rule that the department head should never attempt to influence a team's decision regarding its budget? But wait, you can go in the other direction and strip the team's of their budget and consolidate such decision making power with the heads of the departments, but now you face the question, how do you know they are making good decisions regarding that budget? Are you sure they understand the real needs of their teams? You can give them the responsibility of "profit and loss" and so this will eventually tell you whether they are making a good decision, but if they record a loss you will learn the truth too late to save the situation (for any given quarter). If your competitor leaves decisions with their individual teams (with those on the frontline) then your competitor will make better decisions faster than you can. And also, for purely operational departments, it is difficult to measure profit and loss, so as a method of measuring performance, it cannot always be applied.

The point is, there are many difficult decisions to be made when designing a beautiful bureaucracy. Often when the bureaucracy is first put into place it does a good job of meeting the immediate circumstances that called it into existence, but over time circumstances change and the design of the bureaucracy becomes increasingly obsolete.

Agility becomes crucial. And this applies to all of the government's that exist in the world today. Designing the world's first committee system was a brilliant breakthrough in the late 1800s, but it is not enough to be innovative today. Rather, being able to rapidly re-design a system of committees, in an agile fashion, is what will mark a government as innovative during the 21st Century.

And here we can see how badly the USA is stuck. To design a system that has 100 separate legislatures would require a constitutional amendment. To then re-design that system of legislatures, and then redesign it again, and in fact re-design it every 10 to 20 years, would require many, many constitutional amendments. And so it becomes clear that a major impediment to further innovation in the USA government is the speed at which we can amend the constitution. This process of amending the constitution must become somewhat easier so that we can be more agile when updating the design of our government.

As I said before, there is an ideal speed at which any society should amend its constitution. I covered this in There is one correct way to amend a Constitution. I won't belabor the point here, you can read the details there, it is enough to point out that achieving the next cycle of truly innovative government will require changes to the way we amend the constitution, because eventually we must switch to a system of multiple specialized committees, each functioning as a specialized legislature, for that is the only system that will allow us to deal with the complexity of our modern and highly specialized world.