NEW BOOK: Burning Money: How Public Employee Unions Made Government Unmanageable
What happens when managers no longer have the authority to manage? When managers can’t terminate an employee who is inept? Or when they can’t consolidate near-empty facilities? Any business would soon fail.
Welcome to the sinkhole of American public administration. Government supervisors and school principals in most states and cities are more like compliance officers, lacking rudimentary management powers, because public union collective bargaining agreements—often several hundred pages long—dictate how to do almost everything.
In Burning Money, Philip K. Howard shows why the public union stranglehold must be broken, and how that will unlock massive public resources and human initiative.
Burning Money will be published by Rodin Books on January 19, 2027.
Read More
‘I’m a Government AI, and I’m Here to Help’
We’ve been taught that America’s regulatory system is organized in legal codes, like traffic signals and road signs. In reality, the codes are more like an overgrown jungle, incoherent to any real person and often contradictory.
Setting artificial intelligence loose into the red-tape thicket, experts think, will untangle the knots and make government work better. This is simplistic and largely misguided. While AI can certainly identify duplication and contradictions, it cannot replace the rigidities of red-tape operating structures that preempt common sense as a matter of law.
In a review of New York City school law during the Mike Bloomberg administration, for example, I found that disciplining a student could require 66 different legal steps and considerations. AI can identify idiocies like these, but actually restoring teacher control of the classroom requires a new framework that empowers teachers and administrators to use their judgment.
Read More
Short Circuit: AI Meets Red Tape
It’s hard to find balance in the current storm. Global perils are getting hotter while America is getting weaker. Is our only choice MAGA or socialism? AI could disrupt everything. Trump’s daily impulsiveness underscores the sense that America has lost its keel.
The missing keel, I think, is human responsibility. Americans at all levels of society feel powerless to do what they think is right. Just follow the rules. Don’t be judgmental. Americans can’t fix what they know is broken, so they point fingers and reach for extremist solutions.
Taking responsibility requires authority to act on your best judgment—to always ask, “What’s the right thing to do here?” Trust is not required—just accountability, which requires empowering other people to act on their best judgment.
Read More
Firewall Podcast: Start Making Sense
Philip Howard is an agitator for common sense. He’s been at it since at least 1994, when he wrote a book about public-sector dysfunction called The Death of Common Sense.
During the tumult of the 1960s, he explains to host Bradley Tusk, Americans stopped trusting anyone in government to make sensible decisions and replaced judgment with thousand-page rulebooks. And the country that devalued judgment ultimately tried to correct itself by electing Donald Trump, who honors no rules at all.
Though the societal snafu Howard identified three decades ago has only worsened with time, he keeps coming up with new ways to fight the problem, most recently a vision for government he calls the Green Light. “People say, well, have you done any good?” says Howard. “And I say, I think I have a more or less perfect record of failure. But at least I’m trying.”
Read More
Lecture: Responsibility Versus Red Tape
Philip Howard spoke about Common Good’s work – including our forthcoming “Green Light” initiative – at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. His lecture was titled, “Responsibility Versus Red Tape: Why Human Judgment Can't Be Strained Through a Legal Sieve.”
Read More
Human Judgment. Human Accountability.
There’s no doubting the power and potential of artificial intelligence. But AI is not reliably moral. Indeed, its own inventors suggest that unchecked AI could lead to catastrophic consequences.
How do we control AI? There must be some mechanism that empowers human judgment and locates human responsibility—for example, requiring people who are accountable to build in guardrails. The frontier AI companies probably need to take this responsibility, overseen by an independent expert panel. Developing this oversight may require as much invention as AI itself.
But it’s not the only innovation required. The role of human judgment must also be resuscitated. We must abandon the myth that any complex legal system can achieve effective government.
Read More
How Red Tape Replaced Common Sense
There’s a consensus among U.S. policymakers and public officials—an increasingly rare sight—that America is being suffocated by red tape.
“Abundance” advocates want to cut through zoning and permitting laws to build housing and infrastructure more quickly. Researchers such as Stanford professor Daniel Ho are using artificial intelligence to identify obsolete rules in the more than 3 billion words of legal code in the United States. And President Donald Trump, of course, brought in Elon Musk to wield the DOGE chainsaw.
But why does America have so much red tape? Society might work better if people understood what was expected of them and had room to use their judgment. The U.S. Constitution has 7,591 words. The difference between the modern red-tape state and the Constitution is operational philosophy.
Read More
Reclaiming Ownership of America
What does America stand for? Pausing to reflect on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America’s self-conception seems to be in disarray. Americans no longer believe the future will be brighter. Trust is near all-time lows, not only low trust of governing institutions but low trust of the moral character of other Americans.
I have a hypothesis: America is out of our control. Like a giant wind tunnel, the “system” propels us forward with little opportunity for human direction. Law is everywhere, even in ordinary daily interactions. Instead of discussing what’s right, or practical, Americans worry about legal ramifications. Instead of upholding law as a shield for freedom, our leaders wield law as a weapon for self-interest. Of course Americans feel fear and distrust. The land of opportunity is a legal minefield.
Read More
Great Americans: The Godmother of Management
Mary Parker Follett was a seminal thinker in management theory. In the early days of large industrial organization, when Frederick Winslow Taylor was preaching the gospel of “scientific management,” Follett emphasized the social aspects of any group enterprise. Taylor was not wrong—improving efficiency remains an ongoing goal of successful manufacturers. But his efficient workplace could result in mind-numbing repetition. Follett understood that workers had human needs—for variety, for agency, for mutual understanding.
Follett originated the idea that, in the words of former Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, “organizations perform best when they operate on the basis of shared responsibility and not … command and obedience.”
Read More
Edmund S. Phelps
Columbia professor Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel laureate in economics, died last week. Ned Phelps won the Nobel in part for disabusing the supposed permanent tradeoff between inflation and the rate of unemployment. Real people would catch on, Phelps explained, and adjust expectations accordingly. Formulas did not account for the short and long-term reactions by real people. Over time, unemployment graduates to its “natural rate”—a concept Phelps first described and a term coined by Milton Friedman a year later.
For the past several decades, Phelps developed a theory of how workers as well as entrepreneurs flourish within an open framework of dynamic capitalism that gives people ample room to overcome authentic challenges in their own ways. This individual resourcefulness can’t thrive under stifling bureaucratic and corporatist structures.
Read More
The Vital Center Podcast: Reforming Our Way to Dynamism
In this podcast discussion with the Niskanen Center’s Geoff Kabaservice, Philip Howard offers qualified approval of the Abundance movement that he in some ways anticipated by decades. But he insists that the pruning of excessive rules and procedures must also be accompanied by restoring a role for human judgement: “It’s not simply having less to comply with. It’s actually re-empowering everybody—the teacher in the classroom, the principal, the head of the school, whoever it happens to be—empowering them to do what’s right.”
By the same token, he criticizes Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative for focusing on cutting the things government does but squandering the opportunity to change how the government does things: “There was not even a pretense that they had an idea about how things would work better the day after DOGE.”
Read More
Trust in a Troubled World
“The more I read the papers, the less I comprehend. The world with all its capers, and how it all will end.” These are Ira Gershwin’s opening lyrics to Our Love Is Here to Stay, written in 1938. Now as well, the world order seems to be unraveling as we sit down for morning coffee.
My fear is not that America and other free nations lack the power to contain totalitarian threats. What scares me is that America is weakened by distrust. The strength of any culture and coalition comes not just from aligned interests, but mutual trust. Take away trust, and commitment becomes tentative. To be strong, any group must be bonded by belief in each other.
The bad guys know this. They like it if the U.S. acts like a bully, because that fractures alliances and undermines our moral authority. China, Russia, and others also sow division within America, hacking our culture using social media. America can’t be strong abroad, they know, if we’re weak at home.
Read More
The Need for Judgment
Social trust is a barometer for the health of society. A trusting society is more energetic, more collaborative, and more hopeful. America, unfortunately, is going in the wrong direction.
Social distrust is a kind of cancer, causing gears to grind ever more slowly. David Brooks, in his farewell New York Times column, connects Americans’ “loss of faith” in each other with their loss of hope for the future—over two-thirds of Americans say they no longer believe in the American dream.
How does America pull out of this downward spiral of distrust? Accepted wisdom is that America is just too diverse. But America has thrived with diversity since the latter half of the nineteenth century, and surveys suggest that Americans of diverse backgrounds still share basic values such as truthfulness, reciprocity (“Do unto others …”), and respect for the common good.
Read More
Spring Cleaning Commission
Washington used to be petty and inept. Now it’s a roller-coaster. What will Trump do tomorrow? New York too. Is the “warmthof collectivism” promised by Mayor Mamdani a precursor for class warfare?
Americans are right to want a new vision for governing. But the political instinct for radical cures ignores a main cause of public frustration—the inability of government to do almost anything sensibly.
Sooner or later the focus on affordability will shine the spotlight on how government spends taxpayer dollars—almost 40% of GDP is spent by government. How much is wasted, how much productive initiative is stymied, when government is effectively unmanageable?
Read More
Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America
In Saving Can-Do, Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard unlocks the quandary of populist resentment and also of broken government.
America is flailing in legal quicksand. The solution is a new governing framework that allows Americans to roll up their sleeves and take responsibility. We must scrap the red tape state. What’s required is a multi-year effort to replace these massive failed bureaucracies with simpler codes that are activated by people using their judgment. As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the revolution, it’s time to reclaim the magic of America’s unique can-do culture.
Saving Can-Do was published by Rodin Books on September 23, 2025.
Read More
Hope over Hate
The strength of America, I think, is our culture of self-determination. What we choose to do, and how we do it, is up to each of us. We can make a difference—to ourselves and our community. This sense of ownership creates what Tocqueville saw as “a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it.” It also creates a hopeful culture—the future can be better because we can make it better.
Americans’ confidence has eroded in recent decades. This is due in part to the intrusion of forces beyond any individual’s control—global markets that supplant jobs and opportunities; centralized bureaucracies that suffocate human instincts and interactions; and cultural clashes that dislodge community values.
Even Americans who are “doing well” feel pushed around.
Read More
American Optimist Podcast: Philip Howard on Saving the American Spirit
For decades, Philip Howard has been sounding the alarm: our government is broken, and tinkering around the edges won’t work. We need a new operating system. How did it break? What do both parties get wrong? And what will it take to revive the American spirit?
In this conversation with host Joe Lonsdale, Philip explains how law began to supplant human judgment, politicians stopped making hard decisions, and governance was outsourced to an instruction manual.
Read More
First You Fail, Then I Fail
Most Americans think government is broken, but the prospects for reform are bleak—no matter which party is in control.
The Economist this week hosted an episode of its “Checks and Balance” podcast on what’s needed for America to break out of this doom loop. The format was unique, at least for the Economist: executive editor Charlotte Howard interviewed her father (me), and then discussed the interview with U.S. editor John Prideaux and Washington columnist James Bennet. For the record, this was not my idea and Charlotte reluctantly was pushed into it by her colleagues. I wish we did it all the time.
Fixing what’s broken doesn’t happen because the political dynamic is aimed at beating the other side—not making government work better.
Read More
Checks and Balance Podcast: Philip, Meet Charlotte
Philip Howard is an outspoken authority on government reform whose books include The Death of Common Sense and Saving Can-Do. He is also co-host Charlotte Howard’s father. In a special episode aiming to reflect tetchy political discussions over Thanksgiving dinner, they discuss America’s bureaucratic morass and why escaping it is so difficult.
John Prideaux hosts with Charlotte Howard and James Bennet.
Read More
Keen on America Podcast: How Lawyers Created a Can't Do America
Lawyers usually like the law. The more the better. But in addition to his life as a lawyer, Philip Howard has made a second career out of criticizing the invasion of law into American society. In books like The Death of Common Sense, Life Without Lawyers and his latest, Saving Can-Do, Howard argues that a uncontrolled thicket of legal red tape is undermining innovation in America. The lawyer’s central thesis is against the law: America has morphed from a can-do nation into a can’t-do society where individual judgment has been replaced by legal central planning, and where citizens must ask lawyers for permission before acting.
Read More
