Mike the Mad Biologist

And in too many cities, the executive branch is failing its citizens. There are two posts from Joe Friday, both of which highlight what some asshole with a blog has been writing for a long time: many of the failures of governance in cities are executive branch failures (i.e., mayors). Obviously #NotAllMayors, and there is always room for improvement in the legislature (e.g., city councils), but it’s the executive branch which just isn’t providing the services it’s supposed to provide–and which we pay for and need.

As Joe Friday notes, on the criminal justice side of things, D.C. has seen a precipitous drop in murders this year (down thirty percent), and all of that happened before Congressional interference or the D.C. Council’s new crime bill. So what happened? Well, the MPD decided to start arresting people for violent crimes and the federally-appointed federal prosecutors decided to prosecute some of them*. Violent crime arrests increased 121 percent. The key thing is there was no change in staffing (if anything, staffing dropped by three percent). This was the MPD deciding to do their jobs. Likewise, the federal prosecutors actually prosecuted more than 33% of their cases. The question is why wasn’t this done sooner–and, again, the Council has very little role in these kinds of decisions.

Meanwhile, on the social safety net side of things, there are still a lot of failures (boldface mine):

• DC’s SNAP program “ranked last nationally for timely processing of SNAP applications in Fiscal Year 2022 with a rate of just 42.86% (the second worst performer was Guam at 65.93%)” which means that Washingtonians received their benefits much slower than other Americans. “Less than half of eligible seniors (48%) are enrolled in SNAP” which while a low-crime cohort helps show how DC’s safety net often struggles to reach people.
• DC’s Medicaid program has similar processing struggles with “43% of pending Medicaid renewal applications (more than 6,900 applications), were pending review for more than 60 days. 27% of renewal applications (more than 4,300), were pending review for more than 90 days” as of October 2023. There are also key performance issues for services like prenatal and postpartum care where most DC Medicaid plans perform worse than the national average and DC “has the fourth highest fetal mortality rate among the jurisdictions that reported data from 2019 to 2021 at 5.38 deaths per 1,000 compared to the national rate of 3.66.”
• The DC Housing Authority (DCHA) has long been embroiled in scandal and a “scathing federal audit of the D.C. Housing Authority found that the agency is failing in some of its most basic tasks, from maintaining public housing units in habitable condition to ensuring that every usable unit is actually offered to the thousands of low-income residents who have waited for years for a place to live.” DCHA had “among the lowest public housing occupancy rates in the nation” and despite promises by former Executive Director Brenda Donald to raise the occupancy rate it “fell to about 73 percent by the end of her tenure, even as many thousands of names languished on a frozen waiting list for units.” There are many problems with DCHA but one representative issue is how they signed a $4.35M contract for a “real estate management system” in 2018 but “The software still can’t be used effectively because staffers were never properly trained.”
• DC’s housing programs also involve the Department of Human Services (DHS) which helps administer “Permanent Supportive Housing” vouchers for people who are chronically homeless. Here again the processing times are incredibly long; in 2022 “voucher holders faced a nearly nine-month wait for the process to play out, according to data from the DHS. Recent reforms brought the delay down to about 4½ months.” These delays can often be deadly. In 2023, 90 people who were homeless died and 54 of them had been matched to a housing voucher but had not yet been able to move into stable housing.

While the funding issues can be laid at the feet of the Council–the power of the purse is their job, after all, these administrative failures are executive branch failures, which is to say, Mayor Bowser’s failures. I’m under no illusions that replacing Bowser would solve all of our problems, but her inability to solve many of these problems after nine years in the Mayor’s office indicates she is unable to do so.

Part of the problem is that, in most cities, the (usually Democratic) primary is the ‘real’ election, and very few people vote in that. Those eligible voters that do vote often do not represent the community as a whole, meaning that many essential services are neglected. It doesn’t help that the media coverage (at least in D.C.) is underfunded, and, in the case of the Washington Post, mediocre, especially on the opinion side (which gets read more than the news reporting).

That said, if national Democrats want to shore up support for themselves in urban areas, they need to bring pressure on their fellow local Democrats to improve executive branch functioning.

*The mainland colony of the District of Columbia does not have the authority to appoint its prosecutors. Instead, they are federal prosecutors who are appointed by presidents and approved by the (sanctimonious) Senate. Unofficially, it’s an open secret that they don’t like prosecuting lesser charges that don’t result in jail time, but there’s nothing we colonials can do about that, other than pester them.