Under modern ideological conditions, a national emergency produces a virtual free-for-all of policies, programs, and plans that expand the government’s power. This expansion leaves the public with altered political and ideological sensibilities. Efforts to rein in the government’s crisis-driven overreaching must concentrate, first, on affecting the public’s thinking about how the government ought to act during an emergency and, second, on changing the machinery of government so that ill-considered or poorly justified measures cannot be adopted so easily.

In the public sector, no tool adjusts spending to changing conditions. In the current recession, many states have decreased revenues, but little decreased spending has been seen. This pattern raises a difficult question: How do states correct for the inflexibility in spending cuts?

In this working paper, Senior Research Fellow Jerry Brito and Andrew Perraut discuss the importance of mandatory transparency to improve performance in the public sector.