Chicago is not short on commissions. It is short on candor
Whenever the city confronts a crisis, such as pensions, crime, schools, or infrastructure, it convenes a task force. The panels are populated by serious people with serious résumés. Reports are issued. Charts are drawn. The language is sober. And yet the same problems persist, year after year, growing heavier rather than lighter.
The reason is not necessarily corruption or incompetence. When it comes to the public sector, corruption and incompetence will always be present. That’s true for the private sector as well, although not on as grand a scale. It is something more basic. Chicago has built a system in which large categories of government activity are treated as untouchable facts rather than policy choices. Nowhere is this more evident than in the city’s expanding universe of mandates, which are requirements imposed by state law, federal law, court orders, or regulatory regimes that compel spending, staffing, training, reporting, and compliance without requiring anyone to demonstrate that the costs are proportional to the benefits.
Some mandates are plainly reasonable. Replacing lead pipe service lines with plastic pipes is one of them. Lead is a well-known neurotoxin. There is no safe exposure level. Removal permanently eliminates risk. The costs are high, but the logic is unassailable. You might even say that it is a lead pipe-cinch. It is a mandate that solves a real problem, visibly and conclusively. Most mandates are the furthest thing from that.
Consider the Chicago Police Department. CPD operates under layers of requirements that dictate how officers are trained, documented, evaluated, reported on, and audited. Illinois law mandates specific categories of training. Federal oversight adds another layer through consent decree monitoring. Each new requirement arrives with a moral justification. That is accountability, professionalism, trust, but rarely with a demonstration the added hours, paperwork, or staffing improve clearance rates, reduce crime, or prevent misconduct. The burden is measurable in indirect ways. CPD overtime has surged, not because officers are patrolling more neighborhoods, but because compliance consumes time that must be backfilled. Officers are pulled from the street for training and documentation. Supervisors spend hours certifying compliance rather than managing operations. Legal and administrative staff expand to keep up with reporting obligations. None of this appears as a line item labeled “mandates.” It is simply absorbed into a growing cost structure that few outside City Hall can decipher.
Then there is the question of liability without authority. Chicago is held politically and legally responsible for crime outcomes, jail conditions, and recidivism. Yet sentencing law, bail standards, and release rules are set by the state. Prosecutorial discretion lies elsewhere. The city is accountable for outcomes it cannot fully control, while being mandated to fund compliance with standards over which it has little influence.
Chicago Public Schools tells a parallel story. CPS’s budget has grown dramatically even as enrollment has fallen. The official explanation is always multifaceted: pensions, special education, social services, equity initiatives, federal compliance. But what is never clearly stated is how many administrators, coordinators, compliance officers, and reporting specialists exist because the law requires them, not because they directly improve instruction. State and federal education mandates demand constant reporting, auditing, metric tracking, and certification. Each one arrives with a rationale. Almost none are retired when they fail to produce measurable declines in illiteracy or innumeracy. The result is an administrative superstructure that grows even as classroom outcomes stagnate, or regress even further. Teachers look at it as paperwork and not as teaching. Parents feel it is more indecipherable B.S. Taxpayers feel it is rising costs without the clarity that is needed as to what they are buying.
Would Chicago be better off discarding the entire public school system in favor of private choice that is funded rather than administered by the City of Chicago? Undoubtedly that is true. Until that day comes working on the mandates is the next best alternative.
This inversion, with liability flowing downward while authority flows upward, is one of the defining features of modern urban governance. It is also one of the least discussed. What unites these examples is opacity. Let the sunshine in! Chicago needs a public inventory of mandates. There is no table that lists which requirements impose recurring costs for the city. There is no annual accounting of how many full-time operations exist solely to satisfy external requirements. There is no systematic effort to compare mandates against outcomes or to sunset those that fail. Measuring mandate burden, officials say, would require new data collection, new reporting systems, and new bureaucracy. In other words, it would create more paperwork. This answer should be alarming.
If measuring the cost of a mandate requires additional bureaucracy, that fact alone tells us something important about the mandate itself. A system so saturated with compliance obligations that it cannot describe its own compliance costs is not a sign of good governance. It is self-obscuring. The quantifying of these mandates would inevitably raise uncomfortable follow-ups. If training requirements consume hours without improving outcomes, why does it persist? If a reporting regime expands administrative staffing without improving results, why is it renewed? If a mandate imposes costs without funding, who should bear responsibility?
These questions threaten too many constituencies at once. Legislators would be asked to defend their laws. Advocates would be asked to justify symbolic victories. Agencies would be asked to explain growth. Consultants would be asked to account for billable compliance work. No one is eager to start that conversation. That is why Chicago’s commissions so often disappoint. Bodies like the Financial Future Task Force are populated by like-minded people who are afraid of the possible outcomes. The mandates are treated as background conditions, like weather, rather than policy choices. They recommend efficiency, coordination, and new revenue, but rarely subtraction. They manage decline; they do not interrogate causes.
A commission designed to examine mandate burden would have to be different by design. It would need adversarial membership, not consensus-seeking. It would need to produce statistical tables before narratives. It would need to reverse the burden of proof, requiring mandates to justify themselves rather than presuming permanence. And it would need to operate under strict anti-paperwork rules: no new data collection, only existing records. If a mandate cannot be evaluated without generating more bureaucracy, that is evidence against it. Most importantly, it would need to be published before permission is sought. Mandate politics collapses under daylight. Once costs, staffing, and outcomes are visible at a simple table, silence becomes an answer.
Chicago has a mandate problem that no one is allowed to measure. Reasonable mandates like lead pipe replacement are defended alongside unreasonable ones, all protected by the same fog of complexity. Chicago is failing because it is growing too much. It also fails because it accumulates obligations without discarding any of them. Once again, the greatest disinfectant is sunshine. Chicago needs to empanel a Sunshine Commission posthaste.
