Policy Schools Have Few Conservative Faculty Members

 Frederick M. Hess and Riley Fletcher at the Manhattan Institute:

Setting aside concerns about the broader shape of the American professoriate, we examined faculty at leading public affairs programs, where faculty focus explicitly on government, civic leadership, and public policy. Among the 10 programs and 443 teaching faculty members who had identifiable affiliations, those with left-leaning affiliations outnumbered their right-leaning counterparts 7-to-1.

The leftward tilt was more pronounced among tenure-track faculty than among limited-term faculty, but the progressive lean was still 6-to-1 even among the latter group. This is especially important because these positions could—and should—help promote a healthy ideological balance. These patterns were broadly consistent across all 10 schools, with right-leaning faculty dramatically outnumbered by left-leaning (and centrist) faculty in every case.

The takeaways here are straightforward. Schools of public policy and government must do a better job of cultivating a faculty that captures the breadth of views, values, and perspectives that constitute the larger world of American political thought. It is more than a little surprising that this even needs to be said. After all, it’s not as though these schools are unaware of the importance of diversity and inclusion.

In its mission statement, for instance, Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs promises that its faculty and students approach “the challenges of public and international affairs, with particular emphasis on diverse scholarly perspectives and evidence-based analysis.”[14] Well, when it comes to the study of government and public policy, ideological and political perspectives are a crucial dimension of diversity. To state the obvious, right-leaning and left-leaning Americans have fundamental disagreements about how best to approach public and international affairs.

Schools seeking to equip their students for the rigors of leadership and public affairs need to help them grapple with competing views on the role of government, desirable public policy, and the role of the U.S. in the world. That’s why it is so problematic that, of the 58 faculty members with identifiable political affiliations at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, there are eight left-leaning faculty members for every one right-leaning member.

If there is any field where exposure to a robust range of competing viewpoints is essential, it’s the study of public policy and government. While one can dream up rationales (no matter how tortuous) as to why ideological groupthink is acceptable elsewhere in the academy, such claims collapse when it comes to schools of public policy. Today’s academic discourse about health care, gender identity, race, immigration, abortion, DEI, or Israel does little to support the claim that progressive scholars are able and willing to forcefully articulate right-leaning views on such questions. Indeed, recent developments on campus pose a particular burden for those who would claim that left-leaning faculty are creating room for robust discourse or exposing students to good-faith accounts of conservative thought.

Federal Headcount

 

Musk and Ramaswamy promise "mass head count reductions" across the federal government in a new WSJ op-ed.

They say they want to finish their work by July 4, 2026.

[Keep in mind the federal gov't headcount peaked in the 1990s] pic.twitter.com/kZT3FRuT4P

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) November 20, 2024

Polarization and Trust in Science

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization.

Alec Tyson and Brian Kennedy at Pew:

Roughly nine-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (88%) express a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. The share of Democrats with at least a fair amount of confidence in scientists is similar to levels seen prior to the pandemic.

However, the share of Democrats who express a great deal of confidence in scientists stands at 40%, significantly below the peak in strong trust seen during the pandemic’s first year. In April 2020, 52% of Democrats expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists, and in November 2020, that share reached 55%.

Republicans’ views follow a different pattern. Two-thirds of Republicans and Republican leaners say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest. About a third (34%) express distrust, saying they have not too much or no confidence at all in scientists. In April 2020, an 85% majority of Republicans said they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists, compared with just 14% who had little or no confidence.

Waste Fraud and Abuse!

Americans vastly overestimate the amount of waste in the budget

 Andrew Rudalevige at Good Authority:

Probably the closest quasi-recent parallel is the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government, convened by Ronald Reagan in 1982. PPSSCCFG was hardly a mellifluous acronym, so the body was usually known as the Grace Commission, after its chair, J. Peter Grace of the W.R. Grace & Co. chemical manufacturing firm. In the end, public administration professor Charles Goodsell later wrote, “some 2,000 business executives, managers, experts and special consultants were brought into the project, probably the biggest army of outside help given the government since World War II.” Goodsell concluded that some of the 2,478 proposals that resulted (after duplicates the number was closer to 2,160) were quite useful. One legacy, arguably, was the federal base closing process adopted in 1988.

But (Goodsell continued) the overall effort was of “decidedly mixed quality” and the amount saved by adopting these proposals fell far short of the $424 billion over three years that Grace himself claimed. Indeed, a joint GAO-CBO analysis put the figure at closer to $98 billion. In 1986, Reagan himself said the U.S. government had accepted 1,741 of the recommendations, but most still required congressional action – which would save just under $70 billion over five years. (At this point the federal budget was about $930 billion, so the savings would have been about 1.4% of each year’s spending.)

The Grace Commission exercise, then, had its analytic uses. But its contribution to cutting the budget deficit was greatly exaggerated. Further – as none other than John Roberts (yes, the current chief justice, then serving in the White House Counsel’s office) noted in two 1985 memos – the “Commission itself presented an unending parade of legal problems.” Indeed, “serious conflict of interest problems were presented … as corporate executives on the Commission scrutinized the internal workings of agencies charged with regulating their businesses.” (And yes, the potential Musk task force raises similar legal concerns – especially since Musk companies have $3 billion in federal contracts, according to the New York Times.)

Recess Appointments

Amber Phillips at WP:

“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, adding that he wants positions filled “IMMEDIATELY!”

What Trump’s asking is technically constitutional, experts say, but would be a stark abdication of powers on the part of the Senate. And it could be just the beginning of Trump’s effort to get what he wants out of a Republican Congress.

...

 “What Trump is essentially doing is telling the Senate to give up one of its core constitutional roles,” said Sarah Binder, a constitutional expert at George Washington University. “The Senate’s role of advice and consent was to be a check on who the president wants to put in these positions."

In 2020, Trump threatened to force Congress to adjourn to make appointments without Senate approval.

...

Several Republican senators have said they’re open to Trump’s plan to bypass the nomination process.

That’s rare. Josh Chafetz, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, said members of Congress are usually loathe to give up their constitutional power, even for presidents of the same party. Sometimes Congress has stayed in office in what’s known as a perfunctory “pro forma” session, rather than recess in full, to prevent presidents from installing appointees.

This time, all three leading Republican contenders for the Senate majority leader seem open to it. “100% agree,” Sen. Rick Scott (Florida) replied to Trump on social media. “I will do whatever it takes to get your nominations through as quickly as possible.” Sen. John Thune (South Dakota) told Fox News Digital that “all options are on the table.” And Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) said on social media that the Constitution “expressly confers the power on the President to make recess appointments."

From CRS:

Notwithstanding the legal opinions and practices of the preceding decades, a Department of Justice legal opinion and two federal appeals court decisions related to four controversial recess appointments made by President Barack Obama on January 4, 2012, raised questions about what a “recess” is with regard to the recess appointment power. 16 In a June 26, 2014, opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed these questions. It held that the President’s recess appointment power extends to both intersession and intrasession recesses. The Court also held that the President may use the recess appointment power essentially only during a recess of 10 days or longer. A Senate recess of 3 days “is not long enough to trigger the President’s recess appointment power,” and a recess of more than 3 days but less than 10 is “presumptively too short to fall within the Clause” but “leaves open the possibility that a very unusual circumstance could demand the exercise of the recess-appointment power during a shorter break.” The opinion gave as an example of an unusual circumstance an instance such as “a national catastrophe … that renders the Senate unavailable but calls for an urgent response.” The Court noted that “political opposition in the Senate would not qualify as an unusual circumstance.” 17 Furthermore, the Court concluded that, for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, “the Senate is in session when it says it is, provided that, under its own rules, it retains the capacity to transact Senate business.” 18 This implies that the Senate would also determine if and when it will adjourn for a recess of 10 days or longer and thus allow for the possibility of recess appointments. Under the Adjournments Clause of the Constitution, however, such a determination requires the consent of the House.19 Consequently, either the Senate or the House can unilaterally prevent a Senate adjournment of 10 days or longer that would permit the President to exercise his recess appointment authority.

 

Veterans of Afghanistan

Today is Veterans Day. Many posts have discussed veterans.

Three years ago, Marine Corps veteran William Galston wrote at Brookings:

In the wake of the chaotic U. S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, many observers believed that the memory would quickly fade as Americans shifted their attention back to domestic issues. It now appears that this judgment was premature. Our hasty retreat from a 20-year war contributed to the decline of confidence in President Biden’s over competence and his ability to handle the duties of commander-in-chief. And on Veterans’ Day, More in Common, an organization that seeks to identify the cause of and cures for our polarized politics and society, made public its survey of the impact of the withdrawal on our veterans and on our society.

The findings of this survey are disturbing. Afghanistan veterans number about 775 thousand, many with multiple tours of duty. They are angry about the withdrawal, 73% feel betrayed, and 67% feel humiliated.

Two-thirds of all Americans, and more than 7 in 10 veterans, believe that “Veterans of the war in Afghanistan are going to have a hard time processing the end of the war,” and 56% of veterans do not believe that “American society will move on quickly from the end of the war.”

I fear that the veterans are right. Seventy-six percent of Afghanistan veterans say that they sometimes feel “like a stranger in my own country.” Overcoming this sense of estrangement will not be easy, especially because only one-third of Americans report belonging to social circles that include any of these veterans. Ever since the abolition of the draft and the establishment of all-volunteer armed forces, political observers have worried about the consequences of a tiny fraction of society doing the fighting for the rest of us. So far, anyway, the social impact of ending the Afghan war reinforces these fears.

This said, the non-veteran portion of American society has hardly been left untouched. Seven in ten veterans believe that “American did not leave Afghanistan with honor,” and 57% of all Americans agree. As we saw in the late 1970s, similar sentiments about the end of the war in Vietnam had a powerful impact on our politics, beginning with a pervasive sense of American decline and ending with the election of a president in 1980 who was determined to reverse this decline and who campaigned on the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

Left unaddressed, these sentiments can undermine veterans’ lives and inject a slow-acting poison into the body politic.

Veto-Proof Majorities

Many posts have discussed state legislatures.

Ballotpedia:

State governors may veto bills advanced by the state legislature. With sufficient support—between one-half and two-thirds of sitting legislators, depending on the state—state legislatures may overturn a gubernatorial veto. When one party controls enough seats to overturn a veto without any support from the other party, a legislature can be said to hold a veto-proof majority. These are most important when the governor belongs to the opposite party as the veto-proof legislature.

Heading into the 2024 elections, there were four states with a governor of one party and a veto-proof state legislative majority of the opposing party: Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Vermont. All four states held elections in both legislative chambers in 2024, meaning their veto-proof supermajority status was at stake.

There were two states—Nevada and Wisconsin—that could have switched to having a veto-proof majority and an opposing party governor as a result of the 2024 elections. They were considered potential supermajorities. Click here to learn more about potential supermajorities.

As of Nov. 7, two of the four states that had a veto-proof legislative majority and governor of the opposing party heading into the 2024 elections — Kansas and Kentucky — maintained that status after the elections. Vermont lost that status as a result of the 2024 elections, with Democrats falling below the threshold for supermajority control in both chambers.[1] Axios Raleigh also reported that North Carolina Republicans lost their veto-proof supermajority as a result of a key Democratic pickup in the House.[2]

Wisconsin did not become a veto-proof supermajority as a result of the 2024 elections. As of Nov. 7, Nevada's supermajority status was uncalled.