The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Why Democrats should prepare for years of headaches

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October 22, 2021 at 1:24 p.m. EDT
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., in 2010. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

If it becomes law, the Build Back Better bill will be a triumph, affecting millions of Americans’ lives in profoundly beneficial ways. It will also be a complete mess.

And as Democrats craft compromises to arrive at a final version that they can all agree to, it’s getting more and more complex. This is a symptom of the entire American system, but especially of how Democrats go about policymaking. They have become, to their own detriment, the party of kludgeocracy.

That term comes from this 2013 piece about the Affordable Care Act by political scientist Steven Teles, titled “Kludgeocracy in America”:

The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept.

The ACA was the prototypical policy kludge. Rather than scrapping the inordinately complex American health-care financing system and starting over — a reasonable decision at the time — Democrats layered even more complexity on top of it, to solve a long list of distinct yet interconnected health-care problems. All the ACA’s difficulties can be traced to that decision.

In the details of the BBB bill, you see kludge after kludge. In every case there’s a perfectly good reason policies are being designed the way they are. But they add up to something that the public can’t possibly understand, which means Democrats could gain little politically even from provisions that offer direct help to people. And they will probably require more policy kludges in the future to maintain.

Look at the way Democrats are addressing the 12 Republican-run states that have refused the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, leaving millions with no coverage. Though negotiations continue, Democrats have proposed a two-phase solution: It subsidizes coverage on the ACA marketplaces for people with incomes above the minimum Medicaid eligibility level for their state but below 138 percent of the federal poverty level. But that’s through 2024; after that they will get a separate, privately administered program within Medicaid especially for them.

Sound ridiculously complicated? It is! There are perfectly justifiable reasons for designing it that way, having to do with the intricacies of existing overlapping programs and jurisdictions. But at the end of it — where a human being wants to get health insurance — it becomes almost impossible to understand.

In other words, presented with a problem (people who need insurance) and an already kludgy system, Democrats feel they must solve it with yet another kludge. Republicans — who by and large don’t care much about policy — would solve that problem by saying, “Eh, let’s just not bother.” But Democrats care about policymaking and also accept that it’s complicated, so they’re used to making things more kludgy.

The diabolical thing about kludges is that they set you on a path where more kludges are almost inevitable. With Democrats having razor-thin majorities in Congress, it would be crazy to propose replacing the health-care system with something straightforward such as single payer. So what’s the alternative, right now, if you want to help people without insurance? More kludges.

A similar dynamic is going on in the negotiations. If you have centrists such as Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) who agree with a goal such as delivering pre-K but want to limit it more than other Democrats do, how do you find compromise? You limit who can get it, cut back the duration and impose requirements on recipients until the centrists are satisfied. In other words, more complexity.

Meanwhile, the simple ways to pay for the bill’s spending — such as allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and increasing corporate tax rates — look like they’re out. Instead there will be intricate, highly technical changes to the tax code that will (hopefully) bring in more revenue but are understood only by policy wonks.

This relates to another debate among Democrats: If at Manchin and Sinema’s insistence the bill must spend less, should it do fewer things but fund them adequately and permanently, or set up many more programs in the hope that they’ll show political and substantive dividends, forcing their extension later on?

I spoke to Teles about the BBB bill, and he said: “I’m definitely on team ‘do a few big things.’” He pointed to the expanded child tax credit — which has been delivering payments to parents’ bank accounts — as the best, and perhaps least kludgy, of the bill’s proposals.

“My bet is that a child benefit, if you do it in a transparent, direct way, will be very popular across the political spectrum,” Teles told me, in part because it “has a high probability of actually working.”

“I think one of the best arguments for doing a few things fully is that they’ll actually work, and register with the public as effective public policy,” Teles added.

Many of the factors pushing Democrats toward more elaborate kludges are out of their control. But regardless, the result is that this legislation — likely the most important of Biden’s presidency — is a gigantic collection of kludges.

As with the ACA — the most important legislation of Barack Obama’s presidency — the result will probably be a lot of good done for Americans. But the price for Democrats may once again be years of policy and political headaches.