With appropriators blocking sunset commission legislation in House, there's a good chance we won't see the legislation again this year. The legislative battle, however, does leave us with some interesting questions about how to make government more responsive to public need. Eliminating federal programs with limited congressional debate is obviously not the answer, but what is? New York University professor Paul C. Light offers one possible solution in an Op-Ed for the Christian Science Monitor. Light suggests the problems with program effectiveness are poor government management and political ideology trumping good policy: More important, the Bush proposal misses the forest for the trees. By focusing on individual programs, the administration ignores the much more important governmentwide problems that currently frustrate performance. Poorly designed programs did not undermine the federal response to hurricane Katrina - bad management did; poor intelligence did not produce the rush to war in Iraq - ideology did. If the Bush administration truly wants to deal with poorly performing programs, it should propose an entirely different national commission with a much broader mission. Instead of focusing on programs, such a commission should focus on the management practices that have produced a cascade of recent failures. Given the same fast-track legislative authority to give its proposals a fighting chance, an astutely independent commission just might be able to tackle the persistent problems that plague all aspects of federal management. Light presents just one potential strategy, and there are certainly other ideas out there. How best to create an effective, responsive federal government is a question worth some real investigation by scholars and advocates alike.