Passing a reform nominally can still leave it gutted in practice

Evidence

After weeks of hearings, the Bureau of Standards finally submitted its recommendations to the Board of Estimate, which thereupon adopted a budget including Moses’ proposed schedule of civil service grades and salaries, along with hundreds of individual budget items for the individual workers who had persuaded the Bureau of Standards they should be excluded from the schedule. In what was expected to be a matter of routine, the new schedule then went to the Board of Aldermen for approval—and the aldermen vetoed portions of it and added to it dozens of general civil service levels which did not correspond to any levels in the Moses plan. At the end of 1915, the only real result of Moses’ effort was still the stacks of yellow form cards. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 356

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how nominal reform victories get hollowed out at later approval stages — the ‘routine’ step as the killing field of legislation.
• XREF: connects to: Convincing arguments fail when reform lacks power behind it — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 375; Reform can be stolen through procedural speed and surprise rather than force — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1042; Bureaucratic inertia and lax enforcement can quietly sabotage reform from within — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 359 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Bureaucratic inertia and lax enforcement can quietly sabotage reform from within #exemplifies (0.95) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 359
• Convincing arguments fail when reform lacks power behind it #expands (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 375
• Regulatory reform fails without a prior change in moral climate #expands (0.82) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1611
• Reform fails if it does not reach the people as a national educative force #expands (0.78)
• Reform can be stolen through procedural speed and surprise rather than force #exemplifies (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1042
• Early reform reads as genuine while late change reads as whitewash #expands (0.72) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 437