COMMENTARY: Shutdown lesson: Don’t depend on D.C.

The federal shutdown is over. Here’s one big takeaway: We need to depend less on Washington. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food aid program’s vulnerability and the shortage of air traffic controllers show how government failure puts people at risk.

Shutdowns make the federal government too unreliable to be solely entrusted with helping the poor. When people need help, they should be able to get it. Almost everyone agrees on that, regardless of politics. The question is how to deliver that help.

When Congress cannot agree on a budget, SNAP recipients are an unintended casualty. The solution is to move aid out of Washington and closer to home, so national political spats have no bearing on whether hungry families can afford food.

Government-run relief programs should be funded at the state and local levels to the greatest extent possible. SNAP is administered by state governments but depends almost entirely on federal funding, which makes it unreliable. States should transition to funding and running their aid programs without federal involvement.

There are other benefits to reform. Programs run at lower levels of government tend to be less distant and impersonal, more adaptable, more accountable and have fewer long-term dependency problems. It is easier to fix a problem in your own town than it is to solve one halfway across the country from a Washington office building.

Private aid tends to work better than government aid. Everyday citizens should consider donating and volunteering at a local food pantry, soup kitchen or shelter and look for other ways to help people in their community. Americans gave $550 billion to charities last year, according to the National Philanthropic Trust. That makes us among the world’s most generous donors, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of our income.

We have the means to succeed where Washington fails.

The historian David Beito’s book “From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State” shows the rich history of neighbors helping neighbors in pre-New Deal America and how that degraded when Washington took over the job. Even in a society much poorer than ours is today, people found ways to help each other out.

Imagine what the good people could do for each other today when the average person is perhaps an order of magnitude wealthier.

Although government aid has crowded out a lot of private aid, that private infrastructure is still there in the form of nonprofits, churches, families, friends and neighbors. More importantly, the will to help is still there. Anyone who puts his or her mind to it can do what Washington can’t. So why not you?

The shutdown also showed why air travel should not depend on Washington. The shutdown meant that air traffic controllers weren’t getting paid. While some employees continued to work, there was still a shortage. And the ones who continued to show up were badly overworked. Some took on second jobs after their shifts, leaving them even more frazzled.

Meanwhile, flights were delayed and canceled throughout the country, affecting business travelers and tourists alike.

The United States should instead move to a system similar to what more than 90 countries around the world use: a user-fee based system.

Canada’s air traffic control system, for example, is a public-private partnership funded by airlines, not taxpayers. The result is a safer system that uses more modern technology and cannot be interrupted by government shutdowns. The United States could easily adopt a similar system.

Given the safety risks every time another shutdown hits, shutdown-proofing air traffic control should be an important priority once Congress gets back to business.

The most important lesson from the latest federal shutdown is this: Don’t trust Washington, and don’t give the politicians there any more power.

Poverty relief and air traffic control are two examples out of many that demonstrate why a combination of federalism and private initiative can provide higher-quality services that are not affected by federal shutdowns.

Ryan Young is senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). He wrote this for InsideSources.com.