Ten Questions to Ask Before You Support Any New Government Program

Every new government program arrives the same way. There is a photograph of a smiling child, a heartbreaking story, a sponsor with a catchy acronym and a press conference with a very large check. What is never in the photograph is the person who will pay for it, the person who will run it in year fifteen, or the person who will try to shut it down when it stops working. This post is about those people.

I want you to have a tool you can carry into a town hall, a county commission meeting, a statehouse hearing or the voting booth. Not a slogan, a checklist. Ten questions, grouped by theme, with the reason each one matters. You can run them on a proposal from the other party in about five minutes. The hard part, and the real test of whether you are a conservative or just a partisan, is running them on a proposal from your own side. I will show you that too.

How to use the list

Treat the ten questions as a filter, not a verdict. A good program can pass most of them and fail one, and a bad program can pass one and fail the rest. What you are looking for is a proposal that cannot give an answer, or whose answer is "trust us." Write the answers down. If the sponsor will not write them down, that is itself an answer.

Group one: authority

1. Is it authorized by the Constitution, and by which clause?

Why ask: The federal government has the powers the Constitution lists. Article I, Section 8 is the list, and the Tenth Amendment says the rest belongs to the states or the people. If the sponsor cannot point to a power, the program rests on stretching a clause like "commerce" or "general welfare," and a stretched clause has no natural stopping point. Use the questions in A Five-Question Constitutional Test You Can Run on Any Federal Law and the background in Congress Can Only Do What the Constitution Lists and Madison Said So.

A fair caution: The Supreme Court has accepted very wide readings of the spending and commerce powers since the 1930s. "It is constitutional" and "it is wise" are separate questions. A program can be within the law and still be a mistake, and you should ask both.

2. Is this a job for this level of government?

Why ask: The closer a decision is to the people it affects, the better the information and the sharper the accountability. This is the idea of subsidiarity, covered in Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible. A county knows whether its bridge is failing. A federal agency knows what is in a spreadsheet. If a state or a town could do it, and the benefit does not spill across borders, the burden of proof is on the people who want Washington to do it.

Example: The national minimum drinking age of 21 was enforced by threatening to withhold a share of federal highway funds from states that did not comply. The Supreme Court upheld the method in South Dakota v. Dole (1987). Whether you like the age or not, the method shows how federal money can be used to steer what the states do. The story is in The Drinking Age Story Shows How Washington Buys Control of the States.

Group two: the problem

3. What specific problem does it solve, and how do we know it is a problem?

Why ask: Some programs begin with a solution looking for a problem. Make the sponsor state the problem in a sentence, with evidence from a source you can check, not a slogan. "Too many people lack X" is not an answer unless it says how many, where and why the market, the family, the church and the state have not already handled it.

4. How will we know if it worked?

Why ask: A program without a measure cannot fail, and a program that cannot fail will not be fixed. Before you vote, ask what number would tell you it succeeded, and what number would tell you it failed. The 1996 welfare reform did this by writing work participation into the law and ending open-ended entitlements. People argued about the results for years, but they argued with numbers.

Group three: the money

5. Who pays, exactly?

Why ask: There are only a few answers. Taxpayers pay now, taxpayers pay later through borrowing, or people who buy something pay through higher prices. "The rich will pay for it" is a prediction about behavior, not a payment. Ask for the line in the budget.

Worked example (hypothetical): A small city of 6,000 households proposes a program that costs $600,000 a year. Divide: $600,000 / 6,000 = $100 per household. That is the average annual cost to each household, whether or not it uses the service. Now you can decide whether the program is worth $100 a year to you, and whether the households that benefit most are the ones paying least.

6. Is it paid for, and what does the official score say?

Why ask: The Congressional Budget Office, created by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, estimates what bills cost, usually over ten years. Use the score as a floor of honesty, not gospel. It is limited by what the bill actually says and by assumptions about behavior. Programs that start small tend to grow, and a ten-year window can hide the part of the cost that arrives in year eleven. To see how a budget actually works, read How to Read a Federal Budget With a Kitchen-Table Worksheet.

Group four: incentives and failure

7. What are the incentives of the people it pays?

Why ask: Programs change behavior. If a subsidy goes to a company, the company's incentive is to keep the subsidy. If a program pays a state per case, the state's incentive is to find cases. If an agency's budget grows with its caseload, its incentive is not to shrink the caseload. This does not mean that people are cynical. It means that a design that fights human nature will lose. Thomas Sowell's habit of asking "and then what?" is the right one here, as in Thomas Sowell Asks What Happens After the Policy Passes.

8. What happens when it fails, and who is accountable?

Why ask: Every program fails at something. The question is whether anyone can notice, say so, and change course. Look for a named official who answers to voters, a requirement to report results, and a way to stop it. If the answer is "the agency will review itself," then no one is accountable. Here is the test I use: if this program were run badly, whose job would be at risk?

Group five: time

9. Is there a sunset or a review date?

Why ask: Temporary programs have a way of becoming permanent. A sunset provision, which ends a program unless Congress renews it, forces the debate to happen again. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were written with expiration dates, and the fights over their renewal were fights the country needed to have, as The 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and why they came with an expiration date explains. The point is not that every program must end. It is that the law should force somebody to defend it with evidence.

Examples of programs that outlived their moment: The Rural Electrification Administration was created in 1935 to bring power to farms the private utilities had skipped, and the Rural Electrification Act followed in 1936. It did the job. The lending function survives today inside the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service. That may be fine, but it should be a decision and not an accident. A better example of an honest ending: the 18th Amendment, which brought Prohibition in 1920, was repealed by the 21st in 1933, an admission that the experiment had failed.

And one that worked: The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, the GI Bill, had a defined purpose, defined beneficiaries and clear results in education and home ownership for returning veterans.

10. What will it look like in twenty years?

Why ask: Imagine the program grown up. Programs expand, because the beneficiaries organize, because eligibility widens, because costs rise with the economy. A small pilot that is $50 million a year today could be several times that after two decades if it grows even at a modest rate. Ask what the sponsor will say when the program costs ten times as much and the original problem has changed.

Running the list on a proposal from our own side

This is where honesty gets expensive. Take two real examples from Republican administrations.

Medicare Part D (2003). Signed in December 2003 by President George W. Bush, the prescription drug benefit added a major new entitlement. Run the list. Authority (Q1): Congress had already established Medicare, so the power question was settled by precedent. Level (Q2): federal, which is defensible for a national program, though states and private plans could have played a bigger role. Money (Q5, Q6): the benefit was not paid for by offsetting taxes or spending cuts when it passed. Incentives (Q7): the law relied on private plans competing for enrollees, which was a market feature, but it also barred Medicare from directly negotiating prices, a restriction critics on both sides have questioned. Twenty years (Q10): the cost of an entitlement grows with drug prices and with the number of seniors. A conservative can defend parts of it. A conservative who says it passes the list cleanly is not being honest. For the full story see Compassionate Conservatism, No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D.

Wage and price controls (1971). On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon froze wages and prices for ninety days. Run the list. Problem (Q3): inflation was real. Authority (Q1): Congress had passed the Economic Stabilization Act in 1970, and the President used it. Incentives (Q7): sellers cannot be made to sell at a loss, so shortages follow. Failure (Q8): when the controls did not work, the response was more controls. Twenty years (Q10): the experience contributed to the long argument against price controls that From Diocletian to Nixon, Every Price Control Ends the Same Way traces back to Diocletian. A Republican President did it, and the checklist still says it failed.

Now apply the same discipline to a hypothetical. Picture a Republican governor who proposes a $50 million incentive package to bring a factory with 500 jobs to the state. The arithmetic: $50,000,000 / 500 jobs = $100,000 of public money per job. Is that worth it? The questions: Who else would have built the factory without the money (Q3)? Will the company pay back the money if it leaves (Q8)? What did the state decline to do for other businesses to afford this (Q5)? You can believe in economic growth and still say no to a deal that fails the list. That is what separates a market conservative from a booster.

What the sponsor will say back

You will hear the same four replies, so prepare for them.

"But think of the children." Fine. Think of them. Children are also the ones who inherit the debt and live under the program in year thirty. A real concern for them is a reason to ask the questions, not a reason to skip them. The question is never whether the cause is good. It is whether this design delivers it.

"We cannot afford to wait." Sometimes true. A hurricane does not wait for a committee. But emergencies are exactly when programs get written fast and run forever, which is why the sunset question (Q9) matters most in a crisis. If the need is urgent, a program with a two-year expiration date and a required report loses nothing and protects everyone.

"The cost of doing nothing is higher." This is an argument about the unseen side of the ledger, and it deserves a serious hearing. Sometimes it is correct. But the same logic applies to the program: it also has a cost that does not appear in the press release, in the form of the other things that money would have done. Ask for both columns, not one.

"You just want to cut everything." No. The list is symmetrical. It would reject a pet Republican project as quickly as a Democratic one, and it would approve a Democratic idea that passed. A person who runs the checklist honestly will sometimes say yes to a new program and should be proud to. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 is a yes. So are plenty of local programs that a town designed, measured and mended.

One more tip. Ask the questions in writing, in advance, and ask for written answers. Public officials who will talk for forty minutes at a podium sometimes go quiet when the question is "please show me the authorizing clause and the measure of success." That silence tells you something. If the sponsor answers well, you have learned what the program really is. If the sponsor answers badly, you have learned that too. In both cases you have done what a citizen is supposed to do, and the budget is better for it. The longer arc of how spending decisions get made is in Why Spending Restraint Keeps Losing in Washington, Whoever Is in Charge.

The bottom line

• Carry ten questions: authority, level, the problem, the measure, who pays, the score, incentives, accountability, the sunset and the twenty-year picture. Ask them out loud at the next hearing.
• Divide the cost by the number of households. A number you can picture is harder to hide behind than a number with nine zeros.
• A program with no measure of success and no date for review is asking for permanence. Say no, or say yes with a sunset.
• Run the list on your own side first. Part D and the 1971 price freeze both came from Republican administrations, and the questions still apply.
• Remember what the list is for. It is not to kill every program. It is to make sure the ones that survive deserve to.