How do governments handle such frequent changes in management?

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Every 4 years there is a new administration in the White House. How can meaningful progress be made with such frequent changes in staff? Same goes for state level administration.

In: Economics

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Much of what governments do isn’t especially controversial.

When a new mayor is elected, there’s no question whether the firefighters should keep putting out fires, or the parks department should keep mowing the grass at the soccer field. The police are going to keep catching drunk drivers, the teachers are going to keep teaching kids to read, the health inspectors are going to keep checking that the restaurant kitchens aren’t overrun with cockroaches, and the street repair crews are going to keep fixing potholes.

Budget priorities may change, and specific policies may be controversial, but quite a lot of “government stuff” is … ordinary, mainstream, non-controversial.

In other words: Most of what government does is not stuff that a new elected official would want to change.

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Now, this *can* break down when extremists are elected. Extremist politicians interfere with the normal stuff that most everyone wants the government to be doing. Mr. Trump for instance interfered directly with something as apolitical as the National Hurricane Center’s forecasting, in the infamous [“Sharpiegate”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian%E2%80%93Alabama_controversy) incident; and went on to try to pressure government weather forecasters to agree with false things he said about Hurricane Dorian.

This is really unusual and troublesome, and we shouldn’t vote for politicians who do things like that. If some (imaginary) politician intends to let murderers get away with murder, or to shut down the fire department, that’s a really clear sign that politician would be a bad choice.

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