I cannot recall a time when my name has prompted an editorial, but such is the case with the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump administration initiative to achieve “government efficiency.” It’s anacronym DOGE is one letter short of my last name, Dodge.

Moreover, adding the second D is critical to assuring that this initiative makes thenational government more than just ineffectively smaller. And, maybe help give my name a more positive reputation in the future.

The press releases on DOGE suggest that it will pursue laying off national civil service employees at the same pace as it eliminates national government regulations, as if the only need for these public servants is to regulate, which itself, is critical to protect citizens. Forget all the predictable health, education, employment, and other services that they provide to millions of citizens; not to mention the emergency ones that require them to save citizens caught in fires, floods, pandemics, and other disasters.

The national government needs to deliver its critical services to citizens, efficiently, but it also needs to achieve other Es in the process; to deliver critical services equitably and environmentally, to address the fears of our children and grandchildren about surviving on an affordable, livable planet, and overall effectively, to shepherd the use of more fairly-raised taxes to meet critical needs. The similar effort to DOGE in the first Trump administration confirmed that unless the national government has and listens to seasoned civil servants to quickly address especially unexpected crisis, it is quickly overwhelmed. Witness the response to COVID.

The word dodge has always had a somewhat negative implication, that it is an action to avoid a threat or get behind something for protection. However, it has two positive attributes. First, it is a quick action, which is what civil service employees often must take to keep delivering quality services to citizens. Dodge also has a historic slang meaning as one’s lifelong occupation, and a professional civil servant qualifies as such.

The word doge might even have worse implications. Doges served as the highest level of authority in the Republics of Genoa and Venice, for over 400 years in the former and over a millennium in the latter. They were selected by the most privileged family and merchant oligarchies, many for one- or two-year terms, some for their whole lives. Over time, the doges had their authoritarian roles challenged and, finally, their positions replaced by Napoleon, following his conquest of the republics at the end of the 18 th century. In the 1870s, the republics became two of the founding city-states in the Kingdom of Italy.

Dodge the Doge

Let us rename the DOGE, DODGE, to confirm that public servants need to achieve all the Es, democratically. Have the anacronym stand for its two most important responsibilities; (1) DO Democracy and (2) Govern Equitably, Environmentally, Efficiently, and overall Effectively to indicate that all four Es must be addressed by civil servants to successfully resolve the toughest challenges. If civil servants cannot help citizens receive affordable health care and shelter, enforce the regulations that prevent and punish prejudice and corruption, and keep pressure on the wealthy to pay their fair share, the national government will fail to meet citizen needs and fall victim to tyrants. A disastrous fate threatening all too many democracies, globally.

Arguing for applying one’s name to anything sounds incredibly self-serving, but calling on our national government, and, more importantly, our intergovernmental (national/state/local) system to govern effectively, equitably, and environmentally, as well as efficiently, must be our primary citizen mission, whatever it is called. And, our national government must have the capacity to lead our intergovernmental efforts, to bring all sectors together -- private, non-profit, labor, civic, as well as public -- with citizens, to address increasingly-tough challenges, successfully.

Earlier in my career, the national government had Congressional committees that focused on building our intergovernmental capacity; executive agencies, such as the Bureau of the Budget (now Office of Management and Budget), which issued directives to facilitate intergovernmental cooperation, and provide largesse, such as the HUD 701 program to help prepare plans to address new intergovernmental challenges; intergovernmental partnerships, such as the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) to study and fund testing new intergovernmental tools/networks; and even a Congressionally-created National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to gather the most renown government experts to develop new intergovernmental initiatives.

I enjoyed the support of all these resources during my career. Now, they have become less proactive or disappeared.

Some intergovernmental capacity building efforts do exist, such as the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and could be models for building the governance capacity to address new intergovernmental challenges. Some other than national intergovernmental research institutes have been created, such as the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies and Joint Venture Silicon Valley to foster regional cooperation. However, these efforts primarily focus on developing the program tools to address tough challenges, not building the intergovernmental capacity, to use them, effectively.

Moreover, a few intergovernmental challenges receive some level of ongoing, though unpredictable, national government funding, especially for preparing and funding regional transportation and air and water quality plans. New challenges mostly receive legislative mandates and some unpredictable largesse to bring governmental and community interests together, such as the Continuums of Care for housing the continually-mobile homeless in our metropolitan and rural regions, especially during the COVID pandemic. However, we lack the centers of experience and wisdom to which I could once turn, with any predictably, to help design and implement the intergovernmental networks to address them.

The rest of the world increasingly believes in intergovernmental subsidiarity, that we need to create the capacity to address tough challenges at the most local level that effectively covers all aspects of the challenge. For example, to address transportation challenges, this level must be large enough to cover the trips taken by commuters going to and from work, yet small enough to engage citizens in designing, and all levels of governments in funding, the actions to resolve them.

The rest of the world has concluded that the new local has become the region, which varies geographically, depending on the challenge. It often refers to these regionwide areas as sheds, maybe first popularized by the air and water sheds that must be covered in strategies to preserve air and water quality to succeed Now, in addition to transportation commuter sheds, there are market place stall sheds that are large enough to provide the tools needed to be competitive in the global market place, and even habitat sheds that cover the continual movements of the poorly-sheltered to find affordable housing.

Many nations have created a new level of regional government, especially in the larger metropolitan regions, to bring towns, cities and counties together with state/provincial and national governments to address shed-wide challenges, such as the historic lander governments in Germany; the new regional governments in Italy, Canada, South Africa, and China, as well as in national capitals, such as London, Paris and Addas Abba; and even new states/provinces, such as the Geater Bangkok Administration in Thailand.

Especially since the turn of the century, we have developed, much less tested, all too few ideas for empowering our intergovernmental system at home, in part due to the political polarization that instantly debases every thoughtful initiative. We defend the independence of all levels of government and believe that throwing enough money at shed-wide challenges will result in creating effective ad hoc regional networks to resolve them. If not, we create independent special districts, so many that, in some regions, we have run out of letters in the alphabet for memorable acronyms for their names, much less post them on a readable organizational chart.

Domestically, experimentation with regional shed-wide models mostly wound down in the last century, with the creation of regional planning and service districts, called Metro in the Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis/St. Paul regions. Both have targeted regionwide powers, were considered non-partisan and often led by Republican-elected officials, and have become tourist meccas for visiting regionalists. Instead, the Congress issues legislative mandates to address new challenges. Local governments, with the support of community leaders, eventually develop informal, sometimes shed-wide, networks to address them; and, if they are lucky, national, state and even local governments make some funding available, at least for a few years. Some of these networks have survived and even succeeded in addressing some of the 4 Es, such as in addressing transportation and air and water quality challenges, but only after over half a century of efforts, and still lack many of the powers, such as going to the voters to fund their plans, needed to succeed.

Whereas reforms are needed at national, state, and local levels, the Dodge must especially focus on making regional cooperation excel to make our intergovernmental system work.

First, the Dodge needs to create places that tap the most-seasoned public/private/non-profit/foundation/labor/civic expertise and wisdom to develop and test new ways to cooperate, regionally.

One national model to consider for such a place is the Committee of the Regions. It was built into the charter for the European Community to advise the European Parliament on empowering its intergovernmental system (nation states, provinces, regions, and local authorities) to address new challenges, and to support developing regional plans for distributing its Value-Added Tax revenues to fund them.  For example, it sponsors the Innovations and Environment Regions of Europe Sharing Solutions program, called INTERREG C, to fund applications from regions interested in sharing innovative regional practices, both from the regions that developed them and those interested in adopting them. It has spent tens of millions of euros annually supporting participation in training exchanges, over 6000 to date, as well as sharing successful innovative regional practices, over 5000 to date. It also supports training local leaders to be practicing regionalists, tests new approaches for addressing emerging challenges, and promotes the general application of innovative practices that have universal applicability across European regions.

The Committee of the Regions also holds an annual community-wide Open Days in multiple locations each year to share these practices, including celebrating the most successful ones, in ceremonies that rival the Oscars. Supporting governance innovation institutes, in individual regions, as well as at state and regional levels, would have helped assure that Continuums of Care were sufficiently shed-wide to address the explosion of unsheltered individuals and families triggered by the COVID pandemic and help them coordinate the critical social, health, employment and other services to support them. And, now, help the victims of destructive southern California wildfires many of whom were also the victims of housing discrimination in the last century.

Charter Regions

Second, the Dodge needs to support chartering regions that have theintergovernm ental capacity to address shed-wide challenges; not top-down, bottom-up, but region-out.

My recent book, Regional Charters, calls on leaders and citizens in each region to adopt a Regional Charter to empower them to plan and implement just, ecofriendly, and democratic compacts for addressing shed-wide challenges, without creating a new level of threatening regional governments or overburdening our intergovernmental system with endless special authorities.

Regional Charters will provide regions with the same capacity shed-wide that similar charters already provide to individual local, state, and national governments, as well as to non-profit and private corporations. Instead of empowering a single organization, however, they will empower the array of tools needed to enable regional leaders and citizens, and their organizations, to address regional challenges, and preclude having to create an all-powerful regional government. The first nine are critical components of each Regional Charter; the tenth is a joint effort of all Regional Charters. The most important component is preparing everyone to be practicing regional citizens participating in governing their region.

• Crafting a Regional Excellent Governance (ReGov) Vision to guide building the capacity to govern the region,

• Launching a Citizens Campaign to prepare regional citizens and a Regional CitizensShip to support their participation in governing the region,

• Creating an Ad Hoc Committee of the Region to select regional challenges and designate and support regional organizations and others to address them,

• Empowering at least one Full-Service/Turn-To Regional Connector to assist regional and other organizations and regional citizens to address regional challenges and implementing their action plans,

• Creating a Regional Governance Innovation Institute to develop and test options for strengthening regional governance capacity, or sharing one with other Regional Charters,

• Regularly preparing State of Regional Governance reports to hold the Regional Charter, and its components, accountable,

• Financing a Regional Excellent Charter (REChart) Fund to keep the Regional Charter components predictably operational,

• Negotiating a Grand Regional Bargain with state and national partners to agree upon expectations from and rewards to regions with Regional Charters,

• Shaping future growth with a Regional Renewable Equitable Growth (REG) Compact and a Regional Equitable Growth (REGrow) Fund to finance its recommendations, and

• Founding a National League of Regions and Global Alliance of Regions to share the experiences of Regional Charters and propose and pursue a national, and one day a global, agenda for strengthening regional governance.

If a few regions prepared Regional Charters and were rewarded by Regional Grand Bargains, others would be persuaded to do the same. It would only take a few regions with Regional Charters to strengthen the capacity of our intergovernmental system to address challenges that must be addressed, collaboratively, at the regional level.

Third, the Dodge needs to institutionalize the support for creating and sustaining regional charters and predictably building the intergovernmental capacity to address tough challenges. This could include creating Regional Charter committees in the House and Senate and state legislatures, presidential and gubernatorial offices of Regional Charters, and, most importantly, well-funded institutes to develop and test new ideas for building regional governance capacity.

Overall, I call on the Trump administration, and all of us, to Do Democracy and Govern Equitably, Environmentally, Efficiently, and overall Effectively and focus our efforts on creating dynamic charters in each urban and rural region.

Be a Dodger

Then, an r for Regionally could be attached to Dodge, and thosewho support Regional Charters called Dodgers. And maybe make my suggested name for achieving regional excellence a winning choice, at least in Southern California, my regional home for most of the year.

I welcome your thoughts and partnership.

Since the founding of our republic, turning to the governments closest to citizens has been the preferred way to address new challenges. Until the turn of the century, this strategy most often called on individual local governments—the municipality or county in which one resided— to prepare plans and lobby state and national governments to provide the special powers and sometimes largesse to implement them, successfully.

Moreover, most of our newer and tougher challenges, such as providing enough housing for citizens of limited wealth, becoming carbon neutral enough to save the planet, and shaping future growth enough to be affordable, cannot be addressed unless local government jurisdictions (new and old, rich and poor, clean and polluted) and community sectors (public, private, nonprofit, faith-based and civic) can agree to participate in resolving them, cooperatively, regionwide.

There are roughly 600 regions, nationally, compared to about 40,000 local governments and an equal number of special water, transit, and other authorities. They vary in size from neighboring groups of more rural human settlements that one can drive across in a couple of hours to metropolitan conglomerations of cities and counties that take from dawn to dusk to traverse. These extremes describe my two regional homes, Southwestern Colorado and Greater Los Angeles.

Regions are organic and keep expanding, sometime explosively, into green fields outside of existing jurisdictional boundaries. They stay connected, however, by a sense of common regional community, resulting from reading the same news¬papers, attending the same festivals, following the same sports teams, sharing the same roads and transit systems, and recreating in the same natural assets.

Most importantly, regions are big enough to provide the tools critical to having a competitive “stall” in the “global farmer’s market” (labor, capital, training, etc.) and the amenities desired for quality of life (housing, shopping, serving others, etc.). Yet, regions are still small enough to bring all interests together to address the thorniest common challenges.

Regional Charters offer the opportunity to play “championship” regional governance to address these emerging challenges. My new book, also called Regional Charters, guides you and your fellow regional citizens, with the assistance of seasoned regionalists, to work with elected officials and other leaders and breathe life into a Regional Charter. Such a charter would enable your region to work together, cooperatively, at least as well as the charters for your local governments and other community organizations empower them to work, independently. (A regional citizen is anyone who declares that regions are one of their citizenships and practices regional cooperation. Regionalists are the more-trained professional planners, administrators, and organizers.)

Regional Charters are needed to ensure that all views and experiences are heard across all sectors to make regions work and guarantee that challenges are being resolved together at the same charter-empowered tables. Regional Charters will not guarantee interjurisdictional equity nor renewable growth but will provide the governance capacity to practice it, as well as collaborate with other levels of governance—from neighborhood to global.

Charters are already ubiquitous. They provide the authority for public, as well as private, non-profit, academic, labor, and even civic organizations to exist. Charters specify their purposes, powers, structures, relationships, and limitations and guide their operations. Charters provide their organizations with the capacity to address the challenges facing their constituents and to deliver the services they need or desire.

Regional Charters will institutionalize the governance capacity to address the toughest common challenges without creating new regional governments that would threaten existing local governments and other community interests. Such governments have already been created in many of the larger and some smaller regions, globally. And, finally, they need to be prepared by regional citizens, probably in some type of charter commission, and approved by regional voters, as well as supported by state and national governments.

Regional Charters will be different from other charters in that they empower a continually evolving region, not a single fixed organization. Regional Charters need to engage not just local governments and special authorities but all community sectors and regional citizens to succeed. Each region needs to create a dynamic, but flexible, governance capacity, and a set of interconnected tools that enables it to respond to both known and as yet unforeseen threats/opportunities, as well as to grow as its human settlements evolve.

In other words, designing Regional Charters requires building understanding and trust in “shared power” governance across all community sectors and, in the process, helping make our struggling intergovernmental system of national, state, and local governments succeed, a critical, but not an easy, task.

What would life with a Regional Charter be like?

Regional Charters will provide our evolving human settlements with a joint capacity to address the common aspects of any tough challenge. As a result, they will require redrawing the boundaries of many regional organizations, as they also divide up human settlements, and recasting them as part of a human settlement-wide governance capacity.

Regional Charters will:

• enable providing adequate staff and resources to existing and new entities to design common strategies to address the tough challenges,

• specify predictable funding streams for implementing approved actions, including the ability to submit funding options to voters in regional referenda, and

• engage regional stakeholders, from all sectors and the general public, but be shaped, or at least heavily influenced, by their local governments.

In fact, the term “charter” was selected for strengthening regional governance capacity, since local governments, which also use the term charter, will be key partners and beneficiaries of effective Regional Charters.

Most importantly, Regional Charters will be held accountable by the public, through ongoing citizen monitoring of their components, regular evaluations of their accomplishments, and periodic updating of their components.

Regional Charters in both urban and rural regions need the flexibility to address challenges that do not fit within fixed geographic boundaries. Regional Charters could call for developing agreements with neighboring regions to address challenges that impact both. State governments could empower regions with adopted Regional Charters to do anything collectively with neighboring regions that they can do within their charter powers. Similarly, state governments could empower Regional Charters for regions that cut across state boundaries to pursue “look-a- like” actions to address common regional challenges.

The major test for Regional Charters is to negotiate compacts to shape future growth and to assure that development is equitable and eco- friendly, and that infrastructure and services are high quality and affordable. To do this, Regional Charters could provide safe havens to hold open dialogues on the innovative, practical, and probably controversial actions required to shape future growth. Even the individual jurisdictions that are most dedicated to shaping growth cannot succeed if there is lack of agreement with their neighbors on what kind of region they want to live in and how it will benefit all jurisdictions, rich and poor.

Regions with charters will especially transform their local governments. Each will require elected officials to be comfortable negotiating with their neighbors, as well as staff that is skilled in shared management, administering collaboratively what it cannot do alone.

Most importantly, Regional Charters will require leaders and staff across all sectors and the public to become practicing regional citizens. Everyone is already a regional consumer, knowing how to use the resources of the region, but few have declared themselves regional stewards, responsible for the region. Regional Charters will support training leaders, staff, and, most importantly, your fellow residents to become regional citizens and practice your skills and share your experiences.

Governance will become more interactive as local government elected officials and other community leaders, along with their staff, move seamlessly among Regional Charter processes and mechanisms. Everyone will become trained and experienced in removing the historic blinders that have blocked their view of the whole regional community and be prepared to consider the local and regional implications of their thoughts and actions.

Regional Charters could trigger the reform of our intergovernmental (national/state/local) system. Preparing a Regional Charter will require the cooperation of not only all local governments, but organizations in other community sectors as well. Moreover, it will require the approval and support of state and national governments in a Regional Grand Bargain, one of the components of a Regional Charter. One region adopting a Regional Charter will modify and strengthen its individual national/state/local relationships. Multiple regions adopting Regional Charters will change the intergovernmental system.

Additionally, a Regional Charter can protect your region from state and national government intervention and save your local governments. If your region has not empowered a Regional Charter and negotiated a Regional Grand Bargain, state and national governments will be more inclined to impose their own solutions to regional challenges, either because they believe they have the best ideas, or their constituents are demanding action. Why not prepare a Regional Charter that is controlled by you and your fellow regional citizens? Regional Charters provide you with the capacity to advance your own initiatives and help assure that proposed state and national government actions contribute to strengthening local governance, not imposing regional governments.

Although each Regional Charter will be uniquely different, all will need to contain ten key components to reunite regional human settlements and maybe, just maybe, restore governance excellence, nationally. (See exhibit at end of this article for a list of Regional Charter components.) Each of the components addresses a Regional Charter goal and defines a regional citizen role, or at least the first nine. Founding a National Council of Regions and a Global Alliance of Regions is not critical to launching each Regional Charter, but would increase the potential success of all Regional Charters.

Detailed guidance on creating each of these components is provided in the Regional Charters book. Especially smaller regions should not have to develop all of these components on their own but be able to tap into those created in neighboring larger regions, such as a Regional Governance Innovation Institute, which would potentially benefit by being housed in an educational/public policy institution.

Bottom line: Regional Charters provide the capacity, the robustness, the resilience, and—I hope, the audacity—to address the toughest cross-jurisdiction challenges in a time of chaotic change and help assure that each region, and its local jurisdictions, offer welcoming homes, environments, and futures for its citizens.

Bill Dodge has devoted his career to building successful communities, from income-diverse neighborhoods to metropolitan regions. He is the author of Regional Charters, which helps citizens and leaders to understand and guide preparing a Regional Charter. He is the former Executive Director of the National Association of Regions.