Selected Media Coverage
Francis Fukuyama, Frankly Fukuyama (YouTube Series)
Francis Fukuyama talks with Philip about Everyday Freedom, and how the law has weakened the authority of government in ways that make us less free.
John Ketcham, City Journal
Everyday Freedom calls on individuals, families, and communities to exercise newfound authority in the pursuit of flourishing lives. By the last page, the book acts as a mirror, staring back at readers with a challenging question: Are we ready to live up to the responsibilities of such freedom?
Frank Barry, Bloomberg
Much of the answer lies in Everyday Freedom, a powerful and succinct new book by Philip Howard. As liberals ushered in a wave of fundamental changes to individual freedom and equality beginning in the 1960s — one of the great achievements in human history — they rightly sought to constrain the power of government to impinge on individual rights.
Michael J. Mazarr, War on the Rocks
The results will surely generate howls of protest and embody some risk. But with the right people involved and enough analytical rigor, there is a good chance of getting at least most of the answers right. The goal should be the sort of liberation from bureaucratic rule and routine described in broader terms by Philip K. Howard — to free people to a much greater degree to apply their common sense, case-specific judgment, and creativity. The need for such an agenda to shock the U.S. defense establishment out of its bureaucratic coma is now so obvious that taking risks with bold change is not only acceptable — it is urgently necessary.
Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg
Philip Howard is a US lawyer who published a book on The Death of Common Sense in 1995 and has been writing about the subject ever since. His new book, Everyday Freedom, is due out next week. Howard thinks that the root of the problem is “trained helplessness.” People usually know how to fix things — teachers know how to keep order in the classroom, police chiefs know who the bad apples are, local officials know that they need to build new infrastructure. But they are all prevented from using their best judgments because they are trapped in systems that are more concerned with avoiding mistakes (and penalizing people who make mistakes) than on getting things done.
Will Marshall, The Hill
In his latest, “Everyday Freedom,” Howard cites the buildup since the 1960s of laws and rules that were intended to ensure procedural fairness, but in practice have chipped away at officials’ authority to do their jobs.
Modern law, he says, has created “an elaborate precautionary system aimed at precluding human error.” Public officials have learned it’s safer to hide behind highly prescriptive laws and regulations than to risk using their judgment, moral intuition and common sense to solve public problems.
Mary Williams Walsh, News Items
System failure is going on all around us—the 911 operator who puts you on hold; the outsourced federal “processing centers” that are months behind on essential tasks; the public-school officials who do nothing when told a six-year-old has a loaded handgun in his backpack; the mandatory D.E.I. training that says you can’t say “pregnant women” anymore—now you have to say “pregnant people.” We’ve all seen versions of it. We get steamed up about it. We go online and commiserate about it. But most of us don’t think about it in analytical terms. That’s what Howard does.
Editorial, Las Vegas Review-Journal
The path forward is not political brinkmanship, but to remove politics and punt the solution to a nonpartisan committee, subject only to an up-or-down vote by Congress,” Philip K. Howard, author of the “Death of Common Sense,” wrote last month for The Hill. “Just as independent ‘base-closing commissions’ decide the politically-difficult choices of which military bases to close, so too an external ‘Fiscal Commission’ could present broader proposals that will have benefits as well as costs for most stakeholders.
Kimberley A. Strassel, The Wall Street Journal
Expect to see far more and detailed proposals from the GOP field, given how much material there now is to draw from. As the administrative state has run amok, serious policy thinkers have drilled for solutions. Authors like Philip K. Howard (“Not Accountable”) and former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt (“You Report to Me”) offer books outlining strong reforms; conservative think tanks are sitting on reams of paper; red-state reforms highlight successes and pitfalls. Name a problem in the federal government, and there’s already an innovative plan for solving it.
Dominic Pino, National Review
Dominic Pino: Let’s start with a lay of the land on public-sector unions. Where are they allowed and what areas of government are they most prevalent in?
Philip Howard: Public-sector unions were only authorized in the late 1960s, generally, and they’re allowed, with variations on what they can do, in the federal government and in 38 states.
Dominic Pino, National Review
In the March 20 issue of National Review, Philip Howard wrote a piece adapted from his book, Not Accountable, about how public-sector unions cause basic governance problems. … “Accountability is basically nonexistent in American government today,” Howard began that piece. “Blatant misconduct rarely leads to speedy dismissal; instead it is just the starting point for negotiation,” he said.
Quin Hillyer, New Orleans Times-Picayune
Philip K. Howard, the famed, centrist public-reform advocate and author of "The Death of Common Sense," explains all this in his book published this year called "Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions." He explains that by their very nature, public employee unions enjoy “extortive power.” Unlike in free enterprise, where “factories can be moved elsewhere when labor demands are unreasonable,” public unions experience “little downside risk with excessive collective-bargaining demands” because “government can’t go out of business.” The unions do not face “any other organized opposing force” such as business executives worried about profits.
Donald Kettl, Government Executive
In the new book NOT Accountable released in January 2023—and NOT in the title is in fact capitalized—best-selling author Philip Howard makes a powerful case against the power of public employee unions. Through a large number of examples, mostly related to state and local public unions, he launches a robust assault on unions and the constitutional issues they pose. “Accountability is basically nonexistent in American government,” he writes. “Performance doesn’t matter.” The reason, he says, is simple. “Police unions, teachers unions and other public sector unions have built a fortress against supervisory decisions.”
David Lewis Schaefer, The Washington Free Beacon
In his newest tome, Not Accountable, Howard traces the lack of government accountability to what he concludes to be its underlying source: the rise of public employee unions. Whereas his earlier studies described "a flawed governing philosophy" that overemphasized procedural rights at the expense of the public good, "applied by people acting in good faith," this one "is a story of raw power and democratic disloyalty."
John Ketcham, The Wall Street Journal
In “Not Accountable,” Philip Howard shows in vivid detail how such practices have made government at all levels unmanageable, inefficient and opposed to the common good. He argues that, in fact, public unions—that is, unions whose members work for the government—are forbidden by the Constitution. The argument, he notes, would have been familiar to President Franklin Roosevelt and George Meany, the longtime president of the AFL-CIO, both of whom championed private-sector labor but believed that public workers—teachers, fire fighters, policemen, civil-service employees—had no right to bargain collectively with the government.
Jonathan Alter, Old Goats
I asked Philip K. Howard — whom I first met in the 1980s — to ruminate about his provocative views on public policy. Phil is a New York lawyer, author and original thinker whose new book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, is making waves. We talk here about how to make government work better in the face of entrenched interest groups, especially teachers unions and other government employee unions.
Brendan Clarey, Chalkboard Review
“There is a kind of irony here which is that in the private sector, management is not allowed to unionize,” Howard said. “That’s a prohibition of the National Labor Relations Act because it’s thought to be a conflict of interest if you have unionized managers negotiating with unionized workers. They both have an interest in the power of the union, so the people who own the company would be harmed by that collusion.”
Kyle Peterson and Mene Ukueberuwa, The Wall Street Journal
Kyle Peterson: Mene, you mentioned the number of public employees, and I also wanted to ask you about your recent interview in the newspaper with Philip Howard. He's the author of a new book called Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. He was also recently on a Potomac Watch podcast episode. If listeners want to find your print interview, the headline on it is Public Unions Versus the People. But I bring this up because recently we've gotten a news story, a great example of I think Howard's thesis that union paralysis is part of what is making America's cities ungovernable. I would point to this dispute about schedules with the New York City Transit Union, and I wonder if you could spin that story out for listeners.
A.W. Maldonado, South Florida Sun Sentinel
In “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions,” Philip Howard writes, “No one elected unions to co-run American government. No democratic principle gave legislators and other officials the right to surrender government powers to unions. No ethical value allows public employees, having taken an oath to protect the public, to organize politically to harm the public. Democracy under union restraints can’t work as the framers intended.”
Mene Ukueberuwa, The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Howard, a lawyer and writer, first noticed how unions stymie governance during his public service in New York as a member of a neighborhood zoning board and chairman of the Municipal Art Society. “I kept wondering why my friends who had responsible jobs in government couldn’t do what they thought was right,” he recalls. That might be speeding up a land-use review for a construction project or approving repairs on a school building.
Caroline Banaszak, The Ripon Forum
Nearly 30 years later, with the GOP once again back in control of the House, Howard is out with another book that should not only once again be at the top of every Republican reading list, but should be on the reading list of any American who wants a more effective government and supports eliminating the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving that goal.
Quin Hillyer, Washington Examiner
What was true then remains true now: Such reforms are desperately needed. For decades, reformist author, lawyer, and advocate Philip Howard, best known for 1995’s The Death of Common Sense, has called for what amounts to a revolution in administrative practices and legal-system standards to provide just such flexibility. His new book, Not Accountable , calls for the elimination of public employee unions, arguing that they are unconstitutional while promoting massive inefficiency and sometimes corruption. No less a liberal standard-bearer than President Franklin Roosevelt adamantly opposed public-sector unions as being inimical to the public good.
Jace Lington, The American Conservative
After our sixty-plus year experiment with public collective bargaining, “democracy no longer works because public unions have turned the constitutional hierarchy upside down,” writes Philip K. Howard. But Howard, chair of Common Good and author of several books about government reform, found a potential legal solution to that problem. In Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, Howard makes the case that workable government depends on the U.S. Supreme Court deeming collective bargaining by public sector unions unconstitutional. In just 160 pages, Howard marshals vivid historical examples and cogent legal analysis to make a persuasive case against allowing public sector employees to unionize at any level of government: federal, state, or local.
Joe Klein, Sanity Clause
The clearest case against [public unions’] flagrant distortion of American democracy is made in a new book Not Accountable by Philip K. Howard, a lawyer who has been a lonely voice for common sense governance since his brilliant book, The Death of Common Sense, in 1994. I consider him a charter member of the Sanity Caucus. If you are interested in your progeny not having their intellects stunted by mediocre martinets, you should read this book.
David Freddoso, Washington Examiner
Howard argues persuasively that “the abuse of public power by public employee unions is the main story of public failure in America. … It is not possible to bring purpose and hope back to political discourse until, as a threshold condition, elected leaders regain the authority to run public operations.”
Newt Gingrich, The Washington Times
The need to return to government of the people and by the people has been captured by Philip K. Howard in his new book, “Not Accountable,” when he argues that “public employee unions have undermined democracy and should be unconstitutional. Voters elect a president, governors and mayors who have been disempowered from fixing lousy schools, firing rogue cops or managing public services sensibly. … Americans are frustrated with unresponsive and wasteful government, but the parties tend to debate policies and ignore what everyone knows is the inept operating machinery of government.”
George Will, The Washington Post
The contract for PS 30’s unionized teachers is 167 pages long, mostly detailing job protections, and what teachers can and cannot be required to do. The contract for Harlem 2’s nonunion teachers is one page long. Those teachers can be fired at will, and are paid 5 to 10 percent more than PS 30 teachers on the other side of the building. This contrast is presented in Philip K. Howard’s new book “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions.”
Mary Williams Walsh, Political News Items
As a young man, Howard said, he worked in government, doing policy research before going into the practice of law. His friends in government were always telling him they knew what the right thing was to do, but couldn’t seem to do it. “They kept asking me why,” he said. “I started looking into it.” … Howard was bound at some point to home in on collective bargaining. He began to see it as one of the biggest impediments to productivity and reform. “The abuse of power by public employee unions is the main story of public failure in America,” he writes in Not Accountable.
Mona Charen, The Bulwark
Another thoughtful contributor to this discussion, Philip K. Howard, has just published a timely book, Not Accountable, about public sector unions. Union power is a key factor, too rarely confronted, in police misconduct (and that of other public employees like teachers). Why are police so rarely held accountable for abusing their power? Consider the rules demanded and received through collective bargaining.
Angela McArdle, USA Today
The problems with public unions are so pervasive that the entire system needs to be scrapped. As Philip K. Howard states in his book, "Not Accountable," “they are impervious to reform.” Public union workers are incentivized to focus on entitlements and power instead of accomplishments.