The Federal Government: The Can't Do Government

"Government isn't the solution; it's the problem." As a candidate and a President, Ronald Reagan loved that line. But Reagan seemed simply to be indulging in harmless hyperbole or offering his version of the time-honored aphorism that government is best when it governs least. Surely he did not seriously propose to dismantle an institution that had brought the U.S. through two world wars, restored stability during the Depression and played a major part in developing one of the highest standards of living on earth.

Or did he? If Washington was "the problem" when Reagan took office in 1981, it looks like a costly irrelevancy today. After almost nine years of the Reagan Revolution, Americans may wonder whether the Government -- from Congress to the White House, from the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget -- can govern at all anymore.

Abroad and at home, challenges are going unmet. Under the shadow of a massive federal deficit that neither political party is willing to confront, a kind of neurosis of accepted limits has taken hold from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other. Whatever the situation -- the unprecedented opportunity to promote democracy in Eastern Europe, the spreading plague of drugs, the plight of the underclass, the urgent need for educational reform -- the typical response from Washington consists of encouraging words and token funds. Yet voters, especially the better-organized ones, continue to demand -- and often receive -- more benefits and services while rejecting higher taxes.

Even some Republicans are expressing concern about the paralysis. | Conservative analyst Kevin Phillips described the problem two weeks ago in the Washington Post as "a frightening inability to define and debate America's emerging problems." Last week's 190-point stock market tumble was the immediate result of economic developments, namely UAL's failure to obtain financing for its leveraged buyout. But Washington's glaring inability to control spending hardly inspires the confidence that markets need.

Ironically, the best depiction to date of the nation's gridlock may have come last summer from a ranking member of the Bush Administration: Budget Director Richard Darman. In a speech at the National Press Club, Darman blasted both the Government and the voters for mimicking spoiled children with demands of "now-nowism -- our collective shortsightedness, our obsession with the here and now, our reluctance adequately to address the future . . . Many think of ((the deficit)) as a cause of our problems. But it is also a symptom, a kind of silent now-now scream."

Darman's observation -- oddly reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's much maligned 1979 "malaise" speech on the nation's shrinking horizons -- was acute. But even as he was speaking, Darman and others in Government were obscuring the size of the federal deficit through slick bookkeeping and legislative tricks and promising bold new programs that they knew the federal budget could not sustain.

Such hypocrisy is becoming more and more common in the Administration and Congress as the contradictions, limitations, frustrations and injustices they have created become increasingly apparent. Three key indicators of the degree to which Government has lost its bearings were evident last week: