Government Does That?

People have very little idea about the many things their governments do, which makes it easy to tell them we should cut a lot of it.

Earlier this month, a study published in the Lancet made national news, estimating that 14 million people will die if Donald Trump’s steep USAID cuts stand through the end of this decade. This finding was widely dismissed, even mocked, in right-wing social media circles. Several widely retweeted posts sneered that if this was true, that would mean that tens of millions of lives have been saved over the decades, and if that were true don’t you think we would all know about this marvelous, nay miraculous, live-saving success story?

This was an example of the much-used argumentative method—Socratic in origin, perhaps—of ‘proof by stunning mic-drop unanswerable rhetorical question easily answered by any eight-year-old with access to Google.’ Or in this case, access to the article being commented upon, as almost all news items about the Lancet study included the estimate that the programs have indeed saved more than 90 million lives in the past 20 years.

In a seemingly unrelated development, my beloved Commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been forced to release several defendants—including one charged with strangling his pregnant girlfriend—because of lack of representation. The situation stems from an unmet demand by public defenders for somewhat less demeaning compensation from the state for taking these cases. This tension dates back to at least 2003, when I wrote my very first Boston Phoenix item about then-Governor Mitt Romney’s refusal to improve funding for public defenders in Massachusetts. With these public defenders now refusing to take cases, the state’s top court (mostly filled with appointees of Republican Charlie Baker) has ruled that, hey what do you know, indigent defendants’ right to effective assistance of counsel is systemically violated if they aren’t getting any assistance of counsel at all.

The connection between these two things is government spending money in ways that most people don’t notice or appreciate. I’ve written here about the Trump administration’s dismantling of America’s hard-earned soft power gains, which USAID is a big part of, and as I noted above I’ve written elsewhere about states’ obligations to fund indigent defense counsel in order to make the criminal justice system function. Most people know little or nothing about how those systems work, or that they exist at all—using their tax dollars.

It's not even a matter of, as Joni Mitchell once crooned, “you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.” It’ll just be gone, and few people will realize the difference. Most Americans will never be directly, or even remotely, affected by the additional suffering and death that will come as a result of 86 percent of US AID awards getting the axe. Nor will many residents of Massachusetts, other than a small number of crime victims, find their lives altered by the temporary postponement of criminal prosecutions, even with the new court-ordered release of a trickle of perpetrators held on bail.

The truth is, a lot of what our governments spend money on is unknown to most of the participants in those governments. That’s especially true in this modern age of government bureaucracy, and that makes the Trump/MAGA/Steve Bannon form of populism an easy sell. We’ve all seen those polls where, for instance, the public wildly overestimates the amount the U.S. Government spends on foreign aid. But why should they know? As Marco Rubio begins cutting State Department staff, do you know roughly how many diplomats we employ, and what they do? How many of us knew how much our local universities receive in research funding, before we started reading about those grants being cancelled? Do you know which pills that you take began as government-funded research? Or how many people the Internal Revenue should have answering phones in April? Or what the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration budget will affect?

How do you know if we’re spending the right amount on something you barely know about or understand?

Perhaps this all points to a failure of communications. To return to the rhetorical question about USAID, why didn’t most Americans know how much good we’ve done in the world through that agency? Should the government, or those who support its functions, have been actively running a public relations campaign touting its work? Same with federal research grants, and fair housing enforcement, and local inspectional services, and all the other things that people might be more apt to defend if they knew about them.

Perhaps. But I don’t know, I tend to think that it’s a lot to ask for people to know what their governments do, and why. Yes, I realize that theoretically widespread knowledge is essential to a functional democracy, and as a journalist I believe strongly in the importance of providing people with information that informs their participation. But come on. We can’t really be expected to know about so many things, so many functions. We have to put our trust in people we elect, and in advocates, and in all the people who actually know about their one niche thing the government does and who like to complain to anybody who will listen when they think it’s not being done properly. (I love those people.)

Not that any of that matters with the current administration, which gives short shrift to all the elected officials, advocates, and niche experts who have, over much time and through great effort, crafted imperfect budgets in all their overwhelming scope and minutia. Even public opinion—for example, the deep popularity of what the Corporation for Public Broadcasting does—doesn’t serve as an impediment.

As for those public defenders in Massachusetts… well, my observation over the years is that nobody loses votes by demeaning and denying the rights of alleged or convicted criminals. If the public does get riled up—say by the alleged pregnant-girlfriend-strangling perp strangling her again while free as a result of this court order—they will likely blame the public defenders, if history is any judge.