The Collapse of Fortress Bush: The Crisis of Authority in American Government

3. Home Alone

3 Home Alone I kept saying on the air to the U.S. government, “Where are you? Where the hell are you? What the hell is going on?” —New Orleans broadcaster Garland Robinette, recalling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina1 THERE WAS A fundamental inconsistency in criticism of the Bush administration in the five years after the September 11 attacks. We were often told that the Bush administration was determined to expand the power of the executive branch of the federal government. We were even told that the administration had authoritarian tendencies. And yet the administration was also excoriated for failing to take steps necessary to protect the United States from further attacks. Investments in programs that would protect the nation’s borders, or increase its capacity to deal with catastrophe, were often inadequate. Plans to rationalize the work of the federal bureaucracy were foiled by interagency squabbles. Attempts to improve the readiness of state and local governments that would bear the immediate burden of the next disaster seemed half-hearted. These are the hallmarks of a weak government , incapable of imposing its preferences and establishing order, and not a strong one. How could this inconsistency be explained? One answer might be indifference: perhaps the Bush administration did not really treat homeland security as a top priority and as a result did not seek to expand its influence in all these areas. Another answer is incompetence: perhaps the administration sought to expand its power but lacked the basic qualities of leadership and management skills needed to do it properly. Neither of these arguments is wholly satisfying. A better explanation must also acknowledge the constraints that continued to shape the development of federal policy after September 11. The Bush ad58 ministration was, for example, chary about measures that would increase the power of the federal government but incur substantial political costs. For these reasons it persisted with a popular policy of tax cuts and spending restraint. The administration was also confronted with institutional limitations that typify the U.S. form of government: a highly fragmented bureaucracy, state and local governments that defend their jurisdictions carefully, and a Congress that is equally jealous of its prerogatives over matters of domestic policy. In the realm of domestic preparedness, the Bush administration did not execute an authoritarian project. On the contrary, the administration often declined to act authoritatively or saw its efforts to exercise authority frustrated by formidable obstacles. Indeed, the 9/11 crisis illustrated the challenge of policy innovation even during a period of emergency. Preparedness suffered as a consequence. Hurricane Katrina , which hit the Gulf Coast almost exactly on the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, revealed the persistent vulnerabilities of an advanced liberal state—and the recurrent temptation, in a moment of crisis, to turn to the military for relief. Caught in the Vise Better homeland security often meant increased spending on federal programs. Here, federal policymakers faced three tight constraints. The first of these is Americans’ ambivalence about the cost of federal government. Over the past sixty years, federal government revenue— that is, the taxes and charges that pay for federal programs—has averaged about 18.5 percent of GDP. This statistic is remarkably stable— “about as close to a historical constant as one finds in public-sector economics.”2 That this statistic has not varied dramatically is further evidence of the rigidity of the policymaking process at the federal level. Policymakers in the executive branch and Congress confront deeply rooted public resistance to expansion of the federal tax load. For almost all of the past half century, a large majority of Americans have expressed the view that their federal taxes are too high.3 Complaints about high taxes have a clear connection to underlying realities. Figure 3.1 shows the relationship between the actual federal tax burden—expressed as a share of GDP—and the proportion of Americans who think their taxes are too high, over the past half Home Alone 59 century. Generally speaking, when federal taxes veer higher than the historical average, concern about taxes also increases. This was the case during the second Clinton administration, when the federal tax burden made its sharpest deviation from the historical average in modern history, and antitax sentiment also grew.4 Resistance to increased federal taxes is driven by attitudes and practicalities. According to many surveys, the average American believes that the federal government wastes roughly half...