I Don't Want to Believe This is Real

Presenting the U.S. House of Representatives Unmanned Systems Caucus! It's real. Not a joke. Here are the mission statement and goals:

Mission & Main Goals

The mission of the U.S. House Unmanned Systems Caucus is to educate members of Congress and the public on the strategic, tactical, and scientific value of unmanned systems; actively support further development and acquisition of more systems, and to more effectively engage the civilian aviation community on unmanned system use and safety.

As members of this Caucus, we:

1. Acknowledge the overwhelming value of these systems to the defense, intelligence, homeland security, law enforcement, and the scientific communities;
    
2. Recognize the urgent need to rapidly develop and deploy more Unmanned Systems in support of ongoing civil, military, and law enforcement operations;
    
3. Work with the military, industry, the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and other stakeholders to seek fair and equitable solutions to challenges created by UAV operations in the U.S. National Air Space (NAS);
    
4. Support our world-class industrial base that engineers, develops, manufactures, and tests unmanned systems creating thousands of American jobs;
    
5. Support policies and budgets that promote a larger, more robust national security unmanned system capability.

And the message from the Chairmen (remember, these are elected Representatives of actual people, not drones):

Chairmen's Message

We want to thank you for interest in this industry. This is an exciting and existing technology that will continue to grow, and improve our lives as public acceptance progresses. The Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus’ goal is to educate members of Congress on every facet of this industry. We are this industry’s voice on Capitol Hill, and will work closely with industry to ensure we continue to expand this sector through efficient government regulation and oversight. Thank you for visiting our page and please don't hesitate to contact us for further information. 

Sincerely,

H/T to James Fallows, who has more thoughts on this. It's nice of these elected representatives of actual people to serve as the industry's voice on Capitol Hill, especially since the Chair on the Unmanned Systems Committee is also the Chair of the Armed Forces Committee.

If the House were getting behind autonomous cars and driverless trains I may be supportive of this...

This is another example where public choice theory is applicable. I near as I can tell the whole plan here is to maximize the spending on and size of the program regardless of benefits.

The Problems of Transport Investment Summarized in One Sentence

This NY Times article about "instant bridges"  has a quote from a transportation official that neatly summarizes many of the problems with out current transport planning and investment systems:

“The highway department didn’t use to see the drivers as customers,” said Frank DePaola, administrator of the highway division for the department. “For a while there, the highway department was so focused on construction and road projects, it’s almost as if the contractors became their customers.”

This is a bridge replacement on a road, so referring to drivers is appropriate.  The idea that the clients being served are the contractors is problematic. The taxpayers, be they drivers, riders, cyclists, walkers,  or some combination of them all, are the ones who should be the priority. Considering that travel time savings are a major factor used to justify expensive projects it is a wonder that delay caused by really long construction periods is not a larger concern. This quote illustrates many of the issues raised though public choice theory.

Certainly there are some efforts underway to speed up construction times, such as Carmageddon last year. There are ways that the public can foster faster construction. One way is to charge rents for road space to the companies doing the construction. If a company has to take some capacity out of service for whatever reason, then they have to pay the value of the delay caused drivers. This will reduce construction times as the less time a road is out of service the lower the costs to the construction companies. If infrastructure were privatized rents for time out of service would be standard operating procedure. For example, Chicago Parking Meters, the company that owns the rights to Chicago's parking meters through 2084, must be paid by the city if any of the parking meters are taken out of service for any amount of time. (I'm not advocating privatization, just highlighting an example where this approach has been implemented.)

Considering how long infrastructure construction and maintenance takes, any policies that help speed up the process should be considered.

Why Public Choice Analysis is Important

There are a few recent stories that highlight the value of public choice theory. Public investment in large projects is challenging for many reasons. In many cases, public investment is justified and worthwhile, and public agencies are perfectly well suited to carrying out the work. In other cases, the public interest is badly matched with the project at hand. Of course, in all cases the role of individuals and institutions matters, which is why public choice theory is so useful. Public choice theory provides a framework that helps understand the factors that influence public choices, and accounts for self-interested public servants. It is an important frame of analysis but one that is underutilized. (Key scholars of public choice include William Niskanen, James Buchanan, Gary Becker and Elinor Ostrom.)

Just this week there are two examples in transportation policy that beg for rigorous public choice analysis. First, the California High Speed Rail project is getting a congressional investigation. Second, New Jersey Governor Christie is criticized for his rationale and justification for cancelling the ARC tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan. (Christie pushes back here.) Either of these projects will make a fine case study through the lens of public choice. In both cases the public actors are not acting in the public's (their constituents) best interest, or if they are it is not clear how. (I am making no claims about the value or merits of these projects individually. I am only considering the actions of officials.) These two projects involve large complicated budgets and bureaucracies that span across multiple governments. The presence of federal funds in each project changes the desirability of each project for the local actors (federal money is a plus for California officials and viewed as a minus by Christie).  Understanding the politics of these projects is not straightforward, but is both cases the real and perceived costs and benefits of the projects are subject to political considerations.

Along these lines, Mike Giberson at Knowledge Problem has a nice post about why public projects cost so much and how we measure success. He argues that too often projects are judged based only on how much they cost:

In general, in public policy analysis, you’d like to judge ultimate success or failure of a program by its net results, by actual benefits less the costs involved in achieving those benefits. Admittedly sometimes benefits are hard to measure, but ultimately the point of a policy change is to bring about some improvement in something somewhere. Ultimately it would be nice, once a program is done, to try to find and measure that improvement.

What we often get instead, however, is an attempt to infer a benefit based on the expenditures on the program: how much money was spent, how many people were employed, how many miles of ditches were dug, and so on. This is, more or less, what we see this week from the U.S. Department of Energy in the study it commissioned from the National Renewable Energy Lab on the impact of the Section 1603 Treasury Grant Program.

...

The DOE asked NREL to estimate the effects of the 1603 program on jobs and economic expenditures. In NREL’s report they explicitly state that their work is an estimate of “gross jobs, earnings, and economic output.” This means that they don’t consider any private sector crowding out, any disincentives from the taxation needed to support the program, any consequences from duplication of other government incentive programs, and so on. They simply treat the federal resources as if it were manna falling from the heavens, and the jobs, capital, and industries that became involved in building renewable power plants would have otherwise sat idle. (Note that I’m not criticizing NREL in performing just a piece of the overall analysis, they just did the work that DOE asked for and paid them to do.)
But note that this is primarily a study which just measures the expenses of the program and a part of what the expenditures bought. So, it is a partial study of the costs of the Section 1603 program, and not any kind of estimate of any of the benefits of the program.

Nonetheless, in the DOE press release accompanying publication of the study, they said the study found “the program has been a huge success.” How does it justify its claim of success? By noting how much was spent, how many people were employed, and how many things were subsidized by the program. 

In transportation policy and planning, projects are good if they cost a lot in part because more money means more jobs. But for the California HSR and  the ARC tunnel the high costs, which some actors view as a benefit, are problematic and threaten (or killed) the projects. Hopefully in the future we can develop honest measures of success for evaluating projects. Privatization is not the obvious answer as private agencies are also subject to Machiavellian impulses.