Grasping at (Paper) Straws

You can have government efficiency or wage the culture war, but not both at once

Today’s post is from Gabe Menchaca, a senior state capacity analyst at the Niskanen Center and former management strategist at the Office of Management Budget.

Federal rulemaking rarely doubles as comedy. But on July 21, the Trump Administration published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that could read as satire. Based apparently on months of work by the Domestic Policy Council, which culminated in a “National Strategy To End The Use of Paper Straws,” this proposed regulation is aimed at doing what it says on the tin: “Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws” by amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation, or the FAR, which governs how agencies buy.

Lots of people seem to dislike paper straws (or at least have genuinely mixed feelings on the topic), so perhaps this will prove to be a popular move. But this ban also comes at the same time that the federal government is working hard at realizing the President’s separate goal of simplifying the procurement process with a particular emphasis on paring back the rules to “only provisions required by statute or essential to sound procurement.” Last I checked, there are no federal statutes banning the use of paper straws, and I can’t imagine how this provision could be essential to sound procurement of anything.

So how did it come to be that the same agencies advancing a welcome and much needed effort to overhaul the FAR also decided to add their own non-statutory rules into the FAR?

Because the ban on paper straws isn’t actually about the straws, it’s about the cultural shibboleth straws have become. This regulation reflects a persistent governing pathology: when activists can't achieve their goals through normal politics, they resort to social engineering via government operations. For all the (warranted) criticism being hurled at Democrats for “everything bagel liberalism,” this proves that conservatives can fall for the same fantasy that merely having the government “lead by example” will make a difference.

It doesn’t work. Hijacking the government’s ordinary operations to fight unrelated culture wars needlessly politicizes our institutions, snarls our civil servants in red tape, and usually fails to achieve even those unrelated objectives.

Procurement as an Ideological Battleground

The paper straw regulation sounds silly but it represents the latest chapter in a decades-long pattern of using procurement policy as a means to accomplish ideological goals unrelated to the acquisition of “property and services of the requisite quality and within the time needed at the lowest reasonable cost.”

Just as implementation of the last Administration’s signature legislative accomplishments was layered with exhausting requirements for environmental reviews, equity strategies, and supply chain diversity plans, each administration feels compelled to add its preferred toppings to the federal operational “bagel” over time, usually after they fail to achieve their policy goals some other way.

In 1988, Ronald Reagan led Congress to require that all federal contractors with contracts greater than $100,000 establish “drug-free awareness” programs. In 2009, President Obama signed Executive Order 13513, “Federal Leadership on Reducing Text Messaging while Driving” that required contracting officers to include a clause in every contract directing vendors to encourage their employees not to text while driving. In 2020, President Trump required agencies to ask contractors and recipients of federal financial assistance “to certify that it will not use Federal funds to promote the concepts” like “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex” as part of a broader push to eliminate diversity training. In 2023, on the heels of a broader push to drive clean energy and sustainability across the country, a cross-section of White House principals issued a directive to agencies to prioritize sustainable modes of transportation for official travel under the theory that “[a]s the Nation’s largest employer, the Federal Government has the opportunity to lead by example.”

These policy fights (and the many ones not highlighted here) rarely end up accomplishing even those unrelated goals: the War on Drugs has largely failed and some employers are walking back testing entirely; texting and driving is still a huge problem; diversity training has not been ended in corporate America; and the travel industry is slowly creeping towards sustainability despite the fact that much federal travel has been curtailed by DOGE.

This tendency is not limited, by the way, to the federal government. As Jen Pahlka & Andrew Greenway discussed in their recent report The How We Need Now: A State Capacity Agenda for 2025, in 2017, San Francisco similarly “imposed a ban on doing business with states that failed to support LGBTQ rights and abortion rights, and even prohibited certain city employees from traveling to those states on city business.” This resulted in a functional ban on doing business with 30 states on behalf of the city, caused a deluge of paperwork for businesses seeking waivers, contributed to the cost of the now-infamous Noe Valley toilet debacle, and failed to have any impact on any of the states it targeted before ultimately being repealed in 2024.

These efforts contribute to the accretion of rules and regulations as each administration adds its preferred requirements while criticizing its predecessors, creating an ever-expanding web of compliance obligations that distorts the system's fundamental purpose and results in overgrown procedures that prevent agencies from achieving any of their goals. In the case of San Francisco, a city Supervisor described this trap succinctly: "I don't think we are advocating our social policy goals one bit, in fact, we're holding them back to the extent that we make San Francisco this great blue progressive city look like a basket case that can't get anything done.”

Contractors and contracting officers become unwilling proxies for policy goals they have no special competency or interest in advancing. Compliance burdens multiply without addressing underlying problems. For example, an industry group noted that between 1996 and 2024, the number of required clauses for a commercial service acquisition in the Department of Defense grew from 3 to over 100. The procurement system's core mission of value and efficiency gets distorted, and the resulting dysfunction generates political backlash that undermines the credibility of reform efforts–and incentivizes the next President to take the opposite action, swinging the pendulum back the other way and necessitating costly re-work.

A Case Study in Beverage Technology

The recent move to ban the procurement of paper straws exemplifies this pathology.

In 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14057, “Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability,” which (among many other sustainability-focused things) directed the federal government to prioritize “Reducing Waste and Pollution,” which was operationalized by the Council on Environmental Quality to mean in 2024 that agencies should phase out single-use plastics like straws.

Then the pendulum swung back. In February, President Trump issued Executive Order 14208, “Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws” that instructed agencies to take “appropriate action to eliminate policies designed to disfavor plastic straws issued to further Executive Order 14057” and directed the Domestic Policy Council (DPC) to develop a National Strategy to End the Use of Paper Straws. Among all sorts of zany activist-driven ideas in the strategy (like the DOJ filing suit against businesses that choose to offer paper straws or the FDA deciding paper straws were poisonous), DPC included a suggestion that the FAR Council promulgate acquisition rules on the topic.

The recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking implements this suggestion. The rule requires vendors to make formal representations about their straw policies when bidding on federal contracts. It establishes federal performance standards for drinking straws, mandating that they have "the strength and durability of plastic straws." Vendors must certify that they do “not have policies promoting the use of paper straws or penalizing the use of plastic straws.” Contracting officers are expected to track compliance with these requirements when they award contracts and vendors will have to do the same on their end.

Taken alone, this requirement probably will result in fairly minimal process and cost – though, in a remarkable piece of regulatory honesty, the notice self-consciously admits that the government doesn’t actually know how many straws it’s responsible for and therefore couldn’t do the cost-benefit analysis normally associated with regulations. It’s also on its face reasonable: the public mostly prefers plastic straws, there are legitimate concerns in the disability activist community over their availability, and it doesn’t seem like the government buys enough straws for it to really matter either way whether they’re paper or plastic.

In some senses, one more tiny clause appended to a contract doesn’t mean much in the way of delay or dysfunction–the FAR is over 2,000 pages and this regulation will probably occupy less than half a page if it is finalized. If the original policy was mostly about “leading by example” rather than materially changing broader US climate policy then it seems that the Trump Administration’s counter-example will likely have similarly slim impact on the climate.

So, if trying to use the federal government’s buying power to influence the broader economy doesn’t work and the plastic straw rule doesn’t really add much administrative burden, why should anyone care?

The Tyranny of Tiny Decisions

Because at the same time as the FAR Council is issuing new rules about straws, the same people are undertaking the first comprehensive redesign of the government’s procurement rules in decades. This effort, still ongoing, appears to be making good progress in streamlining the FAR and has been met with some very positive initial reviews by informed observers. From the outside, many of us in the management reform community are very optimistic about the possibility that the Administration will make headway in reducing unnecessary procedural bloat by doing battle with entrenched vendors and industry special interests that benefit from byzantine rules.

But for all the good work happening to grant additional flexibility to procurement professionals and programs in the acquisition process, this straw episode is a prime example of how the FAR got to be 2,000 pages long in the first place. Successive Presidents (with the support of Congress and lobbyists) continue to saddle the procurement process with rules, mandatory representations, set-aside programs for ever more granularly-defined socio-economic purposes, etc. and it has resulted in a system so complex that it does not resemble purchasing or sourcing in any other sector of the economy. Despite a stated policy to remove ten regulations for every new one, an actual policy of “one in, one out” when it comes to pruning back operational policy cruft won’t actually help make government more efficient. The FAR “overhaul” won’t achieve that goal if it just adds back all sorts of hyper-partisan clauses of their own.

This same dynamic is playing out in the personnel space, with OPM finally removing overly burdensome requirements on federal resumes…but then adding in partisan requirements for applicants to write an essay praising the President’s Executive Orders. The administration set an ambitious 80-day goal for time to hire… but then required that all new hires are personally approved by political appointees designated by the agency head, creating new bottlenecks on speedy hiring. OPM removed the requirement for Senior Executives to write essays in their applications… but then assigned them 80 hours of training about the President’s priorities. One step forward, one step back (or, in the case of loyalty tests, one hundred years back).

Public trust in government institutions has eroded precisely because people see government as a vehicle for partisan objectives rather than competent service delivery, as something that serves other people, rather than all of us. In a 2022 Pew poll that attempted to diagnose the root causes of that decline, “majorities said the federal government unfairly benefits some people over others, doesn’t respond to the needs of ordinary Americans, and isn’t adequately careful with taxpayer money.” Rebuilding that trust requires demonstrating that the government can manage basic functions effectively, whether that's processing passport applications, delivering veterans' benefits, or buying office supplies, without turning it into an ideological battle.

The straw rule is emblematic of how sensible reform gets derailed and government gets politicized: smart people identify prudent ways to streamline government, but partisan activists use their own pet policies to fill the gap left over when they run out of steam to achieve them politically. Sabotage is not the intention, but they stuff so many priorities into the gears that the machine stops working altogether.

The path forward is clear but difficult. Leaders need to resist the temptation to use the operation of government for political ends and build systems that work regardless of which party is in power. We need to rebalance the brake and the gas to empower civil servants to focus on the missions Congress entrusts to them rather than spending all day tangled in compliance exercises driven by unproductive oversight. The paper straw regulation may seem trivial, but it reveals whether the government has the discipline to choose efficiency over symbolism in its reform efforts.

In the end, you can have government efficiency or you can wage the culture war through administrative policy—but you can't have both. The choice is up to us.

Soap Bubbles, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (France, Paris, 1699-1779), Los Angeles County Museum of Art