Marc J. Dunkelman

“Debates inside the new Johnson White House about how to shape what would become 1964’s Economic Opportunity Act pivoted on this same ideological divide. “Liberals,” holding a torch for the New Deal’s more Hamiltonian thrust, wanted the president to champion old-school jobs and education programs. “Radicals,” by contrast, were eager to steer the administration toward institutional reform. And the president, more inclined to one, but not wanting to alienate the other—Johnson worried about making moves that might appear like repudiations of his predecessor’s legacy—decided to split the difference. The legislation he eventually sent to Congress included proposals for both job training and institutional reform.17 Here was Johnson employing a strategy that he’d perfected as master of the Senate—giving both sides of a disagreement something they could count as a win. This time, however, the tactic backfired—and for reasons that might have seemed counterintuitive. As members of Congress began to consider the bill, many of the same mayors and local leaders who had scoffed at David Hackett’s radical ideas appeared to be even more miffed by the liberals’ agenda. Organized labor, for example, didn’t want the government hiring legions of unemployed youths to build projects that might otherwise be constructed by unionized workers. School officials didn’t want federal bureaucrats layering new mandates onto federal money they now spent at their own discretion.18 For decades, progressivism had worked to build up an Establishment—and now the various beacons of that same Establishment, scattered as they were across the country, were intent on maintaining their fiefdoms, whatever the public interest.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

“Amid all the public frustration, the image of bureaucracy shifted even more bleakly to give the impression that a sinecured workforce enjoying guaranteed retirement benefits simply did not care to do their jobs well. This pattern was repeated across the government, but perhaps no place was it more pronounced than at the Environmental Protection Agency. Conceived during the Nixon years, the EPA had originally been given a wide berth to make rules, issue sanctions, and even police other government bureaucracies. But as was the legislature’s wont, Congress imposed new mandates on the agency.68 During that same period, the White House tightened its grip on agency decision-making, often through standards and regulations designed to ensure the agency’s bureaucrats weren’t captured by polluters.69 And of course those same polluters, along with their Naderite adversaries, were rarely bashful about drawing on the courts to require the EPA to steer policy in one direction or, often enough, entirely in another.”
― Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back