Toasting Government’s Good Ideas from 2010

Extract from an article by Emily Badger in the current issue of Miller-McCune magazine.

Despite the past year’s bitter politics, the US government found some new ways to encourage nonpartisan innovation and transparency.

There have been a lot of bad ideas from government officials this past year, knee-jerk responses to national crises or hotheaded proposals that cooled in the wake of the midterm elections. There was Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s ferocious embrace of sand berms, the man-made islands designed to protect his state from the Gulf oil spill that wound up wasting millions of dollars and invaluable time. 

There was the sudden rallying cry to rewrite the 14th Amendment, the Virginia attorney general’s witch hunt of academic research, and that dubious scheme to spend stimulus money on stimulus road signs. 

But some quietly good — and nonpartisan — ideas have also been reshaping Washington over the past year in ways that will resonate beyond 2010, impacting both how policy is made and who gets to influence it.

The full article is available at Miller-McCune magazine.