Periodical Institutional Oscillation

            It has been a habit of news organizations and political analysis alike to analyze the Trump Administration in terms of the amount of impact on future presidencies. Every action by a President creates an opening for future ones to act in the same way and use the past action as justification. This creation of a precedent for executive action is common way to measure the impact of a current presidency. But unlike others, this administration has become known for breaking with norms and other precedents. This includes everything from ignoring subpoenas and declaring emergencies, to pulling the country out of international agreements. Unfortunately, this large amount of changes seems to be more based on the undoing of the Obama Administration’s achievements rather than a genuine need for change. This could lead to an unsustainable practice of working to undo everything your predecessor achieved in order to score political points. I call this periodical institutional oscillation.

            According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, Federal, state, and local governments employ more than 21 million people. All of those levels of government spend a combined $8 trillion per year. There are over 200,000 major rules implemented by executive agencies alone, with hundreds, if not thousands of changes every year. The point of bringing all this up is the government of the United States is a massive undertaking with thousands of rules and millions of employees to carry them out. Like any massive ship, it takes a very long time to turn. Because of this long turn-around time, immediate, snap decisions made from the executive do not truly take effect until much later.

            The GOP tax law of 2017 is a perfect example of this slow process. This law was put in place nearly three years ago, and the IRS is still working out problems and issuing guidelines for various policies under the new plan. And the GOP sold this place as a simplification of the tax code. This is not an insult to the GOP or the IRS. It is merely an indication as to how complicated this process of changing rules really is. If a president decides to undo the actions of their predecessor, it would lead to massive confusion in the system that would last longer than the presidential term. This would then create a cycle of presidents warring back and forth every four or eight years, causing massive chaos in every system in the country. The trend would look like the graph above, small incremental shifts from one ideology to another, eventually spinning out of control. This is, I think, the largest risk of the Trump Presidency.

            It is possible that a Democrat will be elected to the presidency this year. A not insignificant portion of their talking points is to “undo the damage” that Trump has done. This means recreating the massive gutting of regulations, increasing taxes, and restoring confidence in institutions. And all of this is to get us back to normal, without mentioning the possible liberal turn that some of these regulations might take. Responding to a disruptive presence like Trump forces other to become more extreme themselves. Systems in society require slow changes and steady rules to be productive, yet the political climate is increasingly challenging that goal. Companies are often at the short end of the stick because they are the entities that actually need to follow these rules. Investing in new technologies to adhere to stricter regulations, only to find those regulations gone a year later, may cause companies to not follow new regimes in the first place. Another option is they could always adhere to a stricter rule, as car companies are now doing, but we cannot rely on this good will.

            I am not happy with calling for a moderate democrat to be elected this year, but that might be the best response to insure the continued survival of our country and our institutions. Getting the US government back to normal would already seem like big steps, only because of the massive detour the Trump Administration has taken. Adding a greater liberal swing to that reorientation could be destructive and signal to future presidents of a new norm that is unsustainable.    

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