Government failure is baked in: welcome to a world of bird flu, corrupt contractors, and glitchy websites.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: Columns - Column

On July 14, The New York Times reported that scientists at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had mishandled dangerous strains of anthrax and bird flu, failed to follow correct safety procedures after employees were exposed, and neglected to notify the appropriate supervisors for about one month.

This is not the first time we've heard about lax oversight and dangerous disregard at the CDC. In 2006, for instance, the agency "accidentally sent live anthrax to two other labs, and also shipped out live botulism bacteria."

Inadvertent biological warfare sounds bad enough, but the CDC's errors are really just an amuse-bouche in the banquet of government failures. In the past year alone, we've seen the amazingly botched rollout of Obamacare's website exchange, the Department of Veterans Affairs' inept handling of health care for former members of the armed forces, and the Internal Revenue Service politicizing right-wing groups' applications for nonprofit status. All of which took place against the background hum of death and disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the nation's attention tends to be narrowly focused on the day-to-day problems related to each of these disasters, they comprise only the most recent and visible signs of the fundamental flaws that plague government intervention.

In July, Brookings Institution scholar Paul Light published a report on this topic, called "A Cascade of Failures: Why Government Fails, and How to Stop It." The study identifies 41 major federal screw-ups that took place between 2001 and 2014, examines the official government reports written in the wake of each, and classifies them by leading cause--insufficient funds, bad policy design, or extreme difficulty.

Such an exercise requires a variety of judgment calls, and sometimes Light misclassifies the problems behind the failures. For instance, he blames the financial crisis on lax oversight rather than government policies such as the Federal Reserve's low interest rates; housing policies that encouraged larger, riskier mortgage loans; risk-based capital rules for banks that incentivized them to hold certain types of assets (including mortgage-backed securities); and the existence of credit insurance. Still, the paper is useful and packed full of information, including the conclusion that the most common factor among failed federal policies is poor design.

The underlying issue has long been observed by economists: Government means bad...