If it can be said that there is a father of data-based government, it is a famous and controversial one: Robert McNamara. As a young captain during World War II, McNamara was assigned to the Army Air Corps Office of Statistical Control, where he applied the ideas about efficiency and cost-effectiveness that he’d learned at […]
Government
Posted inBooks, Government, Magazine, March/April 2013
Charity Case
How taxpayers subsidize failing philanthropies.
Posted inBooks, Government, Health Care, Magazine, March/April 2013
Consequential Drift
The government program where party differences have widened the most, and matter the most, is Medicaid.
Posted inGovernment, Magazine, March/April 2013
Why Agencies Are Always Missing Their Deadlines
Even the best mainstream news stories on the regulatory process tend to mention the number of deadlines an agency has missed as if that’s an indication of its performance. But that kind of coverage is actually an indication of just how little we know about what’s going on behind the scenes. For one, deadlines are […]
Posted inMarch/April 2013
He Who Makes the Rules
Barack Obama’s biggest second-term challenge isn’ guns or immigration. It’s saving his biggest first-term achievements, like the Dodd-Frank law, from being dismembered by lobbyists and conservative jurists in the shadowy, Byzantine rule-making process.
Posted inGovernment, Magazine, March/April 2013
Mail Models
How letter carriers might save your grandma.
Posted inGovernment, Magazine, March/April 2013
Chasing Shiny Objects
In a nonelection year like this one, the narrative arc of American politics is set by the State of the Union address. The president lays out his policy proposals, and for the rest of the year Washington reporters follow the drama of how those proposals are faring in Congress. The story tends to unfold like […]
Posted inMagazine
Deconstructing Reconstruction
The tumultuous decade that followed the Civil War failed to enshrine black voting and civil rights, and instead paved the way for more than a century of entrenched racial injustice.
Posted inMagazine
America’s Twentieth-Century Slavery
The horrifying, little-known story of how hundreds of thousands of blacks worked in brutal bondage right up until World War II.
