State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Closing the Policy Lag in Changing and Challenging Times

Governing: When Americans identify a problem, their typical reaction is that there should be a law or a rule about it. The United States passes lots of laws and issues many rules as a result. Sadly, the economy doesn’t appear to present problems that are permanently fixable.

U.S. policymakers imagined that the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, or SOX, would prevent large-scale corporate abuse. We saw how that worked out, so why should we have assumed that the Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 would succeed in fixing the system where SOX had failed? It, too, was designed to be the comprehensive fix. Yet it has already been dramatically altered, with much controversy around the alterations, in part because it was designed to be permanent.

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