By: Daniel Henninger – wsj.com – January 20, 2021

The now-mandatory conventional wisdom posits that the failure is because the Trump administration did not create a national plan to coordinate inoculations. Joe Biden says his plan, which in most respects sounds like the Operation Warp Speed plan, will vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days. That is the voice of a government lifer.

Blaming the vaccine rollout’s problems on the Trump administration is myopic. The failure is deeper; it is systemic and goes back years. Indeed easily as far back as Mr. Biden’s favorite template, the Obama administration.

The word most often invoked around the vaccinations is “coordination”—that the distribution “lacks coordination.”

True enough, and here is a relevant quotation: “Most critical was the absence of clear leadership, which caused delays in decision-making, lack of clarity in project tasks, and the inability of CMS”—the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—“to recognize the magnitude of problems as the project deteriorated.”

That’s not a New York Times description of the Covid vaccine rollout, but an excerpt from a 2016 federal inspector general’s report on the collapse of the ObamaCare open-enrollment period in 2013.

Any honest assessment of this phenomenon would recognize how often major public interventions in our time simply don’t work.

Despite astonishing advances in technologies that enable efficient coordination, many major public-policy problems still fester—underperforming public schools, Medicaid and public housing. Add to that list discrete failures such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Flint, Mich., water crisis.

We have become inured to this failure. Problems come and go, or just never go away. We have come to accept a public-performance culture of muddling through, but the vaccination rollout—with the whole country focused on this one thing—is showing people how inadequate and dangerous the status quo is. If government at so many levels can’t do something this straightforward—two injections—what can it do?

A popular phrase in our time is “It’s complicated,” generally said when something isn’t working—as planned. A useful corollary to ponder: Maybe it’s just too complicated to work.

An important, now largely forgotten principle of aeronautical design is KISS—keep it simple, stupid. In science, Occam’s razor describes the dangers of gratuitous complexity. At the opposite end of this wisdom stands America’s politics, which is becoming increasingly arcane, conducted in coded language and disconnected from the practical management of problems.

The vaccine rollout bogged down immediately in debates over degrees of essentialness and equity. A New York hospital’s website asks frantic vaccine seekers to enter their self-identifying pronoun.

We should be able to recognize that the administrative state is at a level of dangerous absurdity. When you banged on a pinball machine, asking it to do too much, the screen would blink “Tilt” and the machine locked up. The vaccination mess is America’s political system at tilt.

Bureaucrats naturally will conform their decisions to these multiplying pressures in our political culture. Nothing can go forward without buy-in at every endless step across each level of government.

Partisans will squeal, but those seeking solutions must come to grips with the reality of red states such as Florida, West Virginia and Texas accomplishing Covid inoculations, while blue California and New York falter. In July, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio blandly announced the city government would create day-care centers for hundreds of thousands of out-of-school children. It never happened.

The arriving Biden administration is now seeking $1.9 trillion for pretty much every need imaginable and will reflexively brush past government’s endemic malfunctions. “Act big,” Janet Yellen said at her Treasury confirmation hearing Tuesday.

Why not “Go small” instead?

How refreshing it would be if someone on the left would blow the whistle on the dysfunctional complexity of government bigness and say the solution lies in the opposite direction, as was suggested in the early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The pandemic again offers guidance: Private, parochial and charter schools returned quickly to teaching, while the too-big public systems stayed closed. Even as vaccine distribution faltered, the gig economy never stopped delivering stuff everywhere.

In fact, and optimistically, for all the problems in the vaccination “last mile,” the organizations administering the injections—from hospitals to pharmacies inside supermarkets—have been efficient, friendly and competent. But please note: This superb last-inch effort is not top-down—the failed Andrew Cuomo model that is soon to be Joe Biden’s. It works because it is decentralized.

Government as currently configured can’t deliver. We await someone who will run for office on that reality before the next pandemic arrives.

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Source: Joe Biden’s Super State – WSJ