Category Domestic Policy

Boehner Retiring Doesn’t Necessarily Help President Obama

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

Jonathan Chait posted an article today that outlines the optimistic scenario if Speaker Boehner retires after the 2014 elections. The midterm elections are far off still so we won’t know for a while if Boehner is sticking around or not, but Chait hypothesizes that if Boehner does decide that he’s done with political office, it could be a boon for the President’s second term:

The trouble in Washington is not so much Boehner himself, though he’s no prize, but Boehner’s desire to keep his job. A small minority of the most extreme Republicans in the House have managed to keep Boehner on a leash by threatening to depose him as Speaker if he displeases them. The Republicans hold a narrow enough majority that even an amateur-hour coup came within a handful of votes of deposing Boehner already. If Boehner wants to keep his job, he has to avoid displeasing his extremists, and his extremists are so detached from reality that they insist on wildly unrealistic demands on issues like the debt ceiling and Obamacare.

But if Boehner feels liberated to flee the House, then suddenly all sorts of governing possibilities open up. He can lift the debt ceiling and keep the government running. He could sign immigration reform, even cut a deal on the budget. There’s probably a majority in the House for all these things — it’s just a majority consisting mainly of Democrats along with a handful of Republicans. Boehner could use that majority and then ride off into the sunset to become a lobbyist, enjoy a huge raise, and play a lot more golf.

Everything Chait says there is true. If Boehner finally gets fed up with the extremists in his group and decides to govern, Congress could suddenly become quite productive (well, not that productive – there’s still the Senate filibuster). There are a couple of landmines here though.

First, Boehner probably wants to keep his speakership til the end of 2014. If he starts breaking the Hastert Rule frequently, his conference would likely revolt pretty quickly. Maybe the Speaker could make a deal with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi so that he’d keep his speakership with significant Democratic support. But that would effectively give Pelosi control over the House. If Boehner needs the Minority Leader to keep his position and to pass anything, he doesn’t actually have much power. I can’t see Boehner putting himself in that position right before his retirement.

Second, this puts the rest of the Republican leadership in limbo. Do they support Boehner even as he pisses off a number of House Republicans? Or do they ditch him as well and give up their current leadership position in hopes of taking the speakership in the next Congress? A lame-duck Boehner who chose to govern would split House Republicans. It could get very messy. Does Boehner want to leave that as part of his legacy.

Third, Chait’s analysis rests on the idea that Boehner can “ride off into the sunset to become a lobbyist” and make a bunch of money. If he ruins his relationship with most of his Republican colleagues though, how will that look? How may firms on K-street are looking to hire a former Speaker who passed legislation right before his retirement that most of his party opposed? I imagine he’d still have a number of suitors, but he’ll make a lot more money and have a lot more friends if he rides out Republican opposition until the very end.

Finally, and most importantly, even if Boehner’s retirement helps the President move some of his agenda in the short run, it could hurt him even worse in the long run. A new Republican Speaker (assuming the Democrats do not retake the House) will be in the same position that Boehner currently finds himself in, balancing the moderates in his party who are looking to govern with the many extremists who reflexively oppose the President on everything. Boehner has done an excellent job appeasing the extremists during times of non-crisis while ensuring that they do not cause too much damage during crises (see the debt limit fight earlier this year). A new speaker will have less experience striking that balance and may face greater suspicion from the Tea Party. Even worse, if a Tea Party member is elected, we could find ourselves with a speaker who wants to shut down the government or breach the debt ceiling. That would be a disaster for Obama’s last two years in office.

So, if Boehner retires, does it really help the President? It’s certainly not clear.

“Who Are We Really Affecting With All These Cuts? It’s The Future”

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

I spent yesterday morning at the Center for American Progress (CAP) where a panel discussed sequestration’s effects on the Head Start program and the thousands of kids harmed by cuts to it. The panel was moderated Christina Samuels from Education Week and included participants from CAP, the Head Start Program, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

Carmel Martin, the Executive Vice President for Policy at CAP, and Yasmina Vinci, the Executive Director of the National Head Start Association, kicked off the program by running through some of the numbers about sequestration’s harmful effects. More than 57,000 kids have lost access to Head Start, including 6,000 infants and toddlers and 51,000 3-4 year olds. Another 87,000 kids have fewer days to attend Head Start, with programs cutting an average of 15 days per child. Yet another 11,000 kids have shorter days (approx. 1.5 hours less each day). Head Start was allowed some flexibility in their cuts and they passed that flexibility on to individual programs. Thus, some programs decided to cut days altogether or eliminate transportation to and from the site while others laid off employees or kicked students out.

But that flexibility will end in 2014, when more scheduled cuts are due to take effect. Colleen Rathgeb, the Director of Policy at Head Start, warned that future cuts will harm children even more.

“These one-time fixes aren’t available in the future,” she said. “This is unsustainable.”

The sequester cut Head Start by 5.27% – equal to $405 million – and more is coming next year unless Congress finds a way to make a deal that undoes the law.

Yet, while the cuts have been steep, they have caused less damage than expected. In February, the White house predicted that 70,000 kids would be kicked out of the program. Fortunately, “only” 57,000 actually have been. Of course, that number will certainly grow next year if the cuts aren’t replaced. And while most of the panelists offered optimistic takes that Congress will find a way to undo the sequester, Michael Linden, the Managing Director for Economic Policy at CAP, offered a more negative view:

“It’s also important to note that while there’s a growing awareness among some policymakers that sequestration is bad, others are saying that it wasn’t as bad as expected to be,” he said. “They have to understand that sequestration is not the status quo.”

Martha Coven, the Associate Director for Education, Income Maintenance and Labor at OMB, emphasized that the Obama Administration does not support the sequester  and is determined not just to undo those cuts, but to add additional funding for early childhood education.

“One thing to be very clear: the cuts to sequestration and Head Start in general were very much not part of the Administrations plan,” she said. “We’re very much trying to put ourselves on a path to reverse that. Moreover, our plan for early education is very much one of investment.”

Investment was a major theme throughout the discussion, with all of the panelists noting that funding for Head Start was not about the present, but was about the future. Head Start has a strong record of improving the quality of neighboring early childhood programs as well, said CBPP’s Sharon Parrott. In addition, states have trouble funding programs like these as they face different budget restrictions than the federal government does, Coven added. For that reason, it’s important for the federal government to fund Head Start and other such programs.

Yet, Congress is gridlocked and the federal government’s budget expires on September 30th. If it can’t reach a deal by then, the government shuts down. And any deal on a budget will have to figure out what to do with sequestration’s cuts. If Republicans and Democrats can’t come to an agreement and instead pass a continuing resolution that keeps the government funding at current levels, Head Start will have to start looking ahead to cuts it will have to make in 2014.

Linden summed up the dangers of the sequester’s effects on Head Start the best:

“Who are we really affecting with all these cuts? It’s the future.”

Charities Should Perform Experiments

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

The most recent episode of This American Life spends the first part of the show examining two different charities, GiveDirectly and Heifer International. GiveDirectly is a revolutionary new organization that gives money to poor people in Kenya. Its philosophy is pretty straightforward: poor people know what they need most so just give them the money to do so. It has seen remarkable results in Kenya and The Life You Can Save ranks it as the fourth most effective charity. It was started by a group of grad students in a development economics class who decided to give money to Africans and see what happened. More importantly, they’re very data-centric and are committed to figuring out whether giving poor Africans money is effective. The grad students are so committed to it that they’re running a randomized controlled trial where researchers are traveling to two villages right next to each other, one where the residents received money from GiveDirectly and one where they didn’t. It’s a massive survey with hundreds of questions that are trying to isolate down how the money affected all aspects of the Kenyans’ lives:

Have health outcomes improved? Has your income improved? Have you been able to feed yourself and have basic nutrition? How have family dynamics evolved? Do you feel like you have more respect in the family? School attendance, all these sorts of things. You do those in both cases and you compare.

Heifer International, on the other hand, takes a different approach to helping poor Africans: it gives them a cow. Planet Money’s Jacob Goldstein, who travelled to Kenya for this report, commented on how large the cows were:

And let’s just say right off, these were some very impressive cows. They looked strong and healthy. They looked like they could eat the other cows we saw in Kenya.

You can imagine how helpful a strong, healthy cow would be for poor, rural Kenyans. Overall, both charities are looking to improve the lives of impoverished Africans, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking to figure out which charity is best at doing so. Yet, that is basically Heifer International’s position, at least according to the Vice President of Heifer’s Africa programs, Elizabeth Bintliff. GiveDirectly challenged Heifer International to a charity-vs-charity competition in the same manner of the experiment above. They’d take two villages right next to each other and GiveDirectly would give money to residents of one while Heifer would give cows to the residents of another. Then they’d have independent researchers come in and collect all the data and figure out which one improved the lives of the Kenyans the most. This is the exact type of research that charities need to be doing. But Bintliff declined:

I mean, as an African woman, that sounds to me like a terrible idea. I mean, it sounds like an experiment, and we’re not about experiments. These are lives of real people and we have to do what we believe is correct. We can’t make experiments with people’s lives. They’re just– they’re people. It’s too important.

Bintliff obviously is very committed to Heifer and has devoted her life to helping Africans. It’s very noble, but her hesitance to use data hinders the ability of charities to help people. Maybe Heifer is very effective at improving the lives of Africans. Maybe it isn’t. We don’t know right now, because we don’t have the data. Yet, we have every ability to collect the data! Researchers actually can do a pretty good job of measuring happiness. And I understand that Bintliff doesn’t want to perform experiments, but charities will be so much more effective and help poor Africans even more if we do perform experiments. It’s a shame, because GiveDirectly has seen such promising results that I’d be fascinated to see how Heifer stacks up. But it looks like we’ll never know. In the end, Bintliff’s refusal to perform the experiments hurts those who she’s looking to help.