Burning Money

How Public Employee Unions Made Government Unmanageable

What happens when managers no longer have the authority to manage? When managers can't terminate an employee who is inept? When they can't assign the best employees to a hard task? Or when they can't consolidate near-empty facilities? Any business would soon fail.

Welcome to the sinkhole of American public administration. Government supervisors and school principals in most states and cities are more like compliance officers, lacking rudimentary management powers, because public union collective bargaining agreements-often several hundred pages long-dictate how to do almost everything.

The harm of unmanageable government is not a matter of degree. Nothing much works as it should. American citizens are burdened with poor services and schools, often at twice the reasonable cost, plus massive unfunded benefits that could bankrupt our children.

Yet new governors or mayors can't do anything about it because they come to office bound by pre-existing union agreements. The legislatures won't help because they rely on public employee unions as their main source of campaign support.

Public union controls are a cancer in American democracy. Without managerial powers, the executive branch in many states and cities is an empty shell. Democracy is now in the grips of a new spoils system-serving public employees instead of the American public.

In Burning Money, Philip K. Howard shows why the public union stranglehold must be broken, and how that will unlock massive public resources and human initiative.

Burning Money will be published by Rodin Books on January 19, 2027.

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