Can We Make Public Policy Sexy?
Why nobody cares about policy until the bill comes due (and why that might be fatal)
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We are on the eve of the state legislative season. Across the country, much ink will be spilled trying to recalibrate the law. And while the fights will draw eyeballs, few will read the documents that actually detail the changes being made.
This is so very unfortunate, I feel compelled to put my forearm over my brow and have a wee moment of faint.
Why?
Because it is in the details of policy that real power and prosperity are traded like slivers of the One Ring. The dusty documents are where the magic happens, and if enough of us don’t take the time to read them and develop the skills to understand them, we have no one to blame when our sand castles come crashing down but ourselves.
I. The Attention Recession
Oh, the brutal truth: almost nobody likes policy.
Not you, well maybe me, but not the guy who screams about politics on X every night. We like the story of politics, who’s up, who’s down, who owned whom, but the actual machinery?
Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of people would rather get a root canal than read a committee report.
This isn’t new. Tocqueville noticed it in 1835: Americans are joiners, marchers, and sermon-listeners, but ask them to sit through a zoning hearing, and they suddenly remember urgent lawn care. The difference now is scale. A 19th-century citizen could still grasp most of what government did in a single newspaper. Today, the Federal Register spits out near 100,000 pages a year. So Good luck to anyone trying to keep up with all that.
It doesn’t help that we have an attention recession more severe than anything the world has ever seen. Most people’s lives are filled with work, family, and friends. Smart phones make sure we’re never ever able to disconnect from juggling our status or updating yet another TPS report. We can plan a biking trip for Saturday morning, if we can wedge it in between kid’s soccer games and making sure grandpa gets to his diabetes doctor in the afternoon. Doom-scrolling fills the ever-shrinking spaces in between. Who has time to deeply read the details of that bill to license hair braiding or minnow pedicures?
And into that vacuum pours everyone who does have time: lobbyists, ideological staffers, and trade associations that have existed since Chester Arthur sitting on a billion dollar war chest. They are not evil cartoon villains, most of them; they are just the only ones who stayed for the second hour of the hearing, and have strong ideas about what they think is ‘right.’
When normal people finally notice government again, it’s usually because something has detonated, Social Security is broke, a bridge fell down, or an insurance company just denied their claim using a clause buried in a 1996 reconciliation rider. Then we rage, we meme, we demand heads. But the detonation was baked in fifteen years earlier in a subsection that changed three words, and folks weren’t watching.
II. The Tyranny of the Parenthetical Phrase
Here’s a real example that could keep Rip Van Winkle up at night: the Public Health Service Act, Section 319, the emergency-powers clause that gave HHS secretaries god-mode during Covid. Most people think the big expansions happened in 2020–21. No. The real expansion was a bit slipped into the 2006 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations To Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act:
“…a covered person shall be immune from suit and liability under Federal and State law with respect to all claims for loss caused by, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the administration to or the use by an individual of a covered countermeasure if a declaration under subsection (b) has been issued with respect to such countermeasure
That ‘immunity from suit and liability’ and the open-ended definition of “covered countermeasures” turned out to be a blank check. Fifteen years later it was used to shield Pfizer from virtually all liability, on terms nobody had debated in public. Was it malicious? Probably not. Was it foreseen? Almost certainly not. Was it read by more than a dozen people before passage? I’d bet my house, no.
This is the pattern. Tiny drafting choices—definitions that are one adjective too broad, sunset clauses that mysteriously disappear in conference, jurisdiction triggers written like Rorschach tests—sit quietly until the right crisis hits. Then they cause meltdowns.
These aren’t conspiracy theories; they’re just Tuesday in Washington. And they keep working because the only people who read the text are the ones paid to insert the landmines.
III. The Jeffersonian Alarm Bell
Ah the dark side of self-governance. For our republic to function, a critical mass of citizens has to care about the process, not just the outcomes. Not because process is sexy (it isn’t), but because outcomes are downstream of process the way floods are downstream of neglected levees.
James Madison built the system assuming energetic civic attention would act as a constant counterweight to rampant manipulation or simple sloppy wording. He was explicit: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
We are deep in the third act now.
When attention collapses, the system doesn’t produce moderate compromise; it produces brittle overreach, followed by backlash, followed by more overreach. The lobbyists write the 942-page bill, the partisans jam it through on reconciliation, the other side vows total war, rinse, repeat. Each cycle leaves more tripwires in the code.
Thomas Jefferson thought the solution was periodic rebellion—“the tree of liberty” nourished by blood. While I’m not endorsing violence, he wasn’t entirely wrong about the underlying mechanism. Every so often, the contradictions become so absurd that people do pay attention again. They march, they primary incumbents, and burn the whole thing down in a fit of righteous fury. Then the new crowd writes its own 2,000-page bills, and the cycle restarts.
The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way. If 5% of the electorate—just 5%—treated legislative text the way sports fans treat box scores, the professional influence peddlers would be cut off at the pass. A single viral thread dissecting a sneaky definition can now shift more votes than a hundred TV ads. We have tools Madison couldn’t dream of.
But we don’t use them, because policy is still boring until it’s catastrophic.
So here we are. The republic limps along on near 100,000-page autopilot, occasionally crashing into a mountain everybody saw coming except the pilot. And every few decades, the passengers storm the cockpit, which is cold comfort when you’re cramped in the economy section watching the ground rush up.
The honest question, no partisan spin, is whether this is a stable equilibrium or the long setup for something much worse. My fear is that we keep muddling through with bad policy until the contradictions just leave mud. At that point, Jefferson’s “refreshing” looks less like 1776 and more like 1861.
The alternative, the one nobody wants to talk about, is to build a culture that treats the fine print as a civic duty instead of a punch line. Not everyone, just enough to shift incentives. A few thousand policy nerds with large audiences, a few hundred journalists who read the actual bills, a few dozen members of Congress who know they’ll be primaried for sneaky drafting.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not even fun. But it beats waiting for the next explosion and pretending we’re surprised when the shrapnel has a 1996 copyright date.
The floor is open. Who wants to read the next 1,400-page continuing resolution with me? I’ll bring the coffee.
And of course, there is also the other secrety dangerous option everyone’s really really scared of.
Deregulation.
……..Is that crickets I’m hearing?
Further Reading
Money and Good Intentions Are Not Enough by John E. Brandl
Taxing Ourselves by Joel Slemrod
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About
Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee. What I found instead was a program saturated in Critical Theories ideology—where my Buddhist practice was treated as invalidating and where dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy was met with hostility. After witnessing how this ideology undermined both ethics and the foundations of good clinical practice, I made the difficult decision to walk away.
Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to exposing the ideological capture of psychology, higher education, and related institutions. My investigative writing has appeared in Real Clear Education, Minding the Campus, The College Fix, and has been republished by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. I also speak and consult on policy reform to help rebuild public trust in once-respected professions.
Occasionally, I’m accused of being funny.
When I’m not writing or digging into documents, you’ll find me in the garden, making art, walking my dog,