It worked fine before

There’s a lot of “just do something” energy in politics these days.

Which is fine, until the “something” is aimed at a problem that doesn’t actually exist. Or worse, creates new ones.

That’s what my IndyStar column from last week is about:

One of the best descriptions of modern “smart” technology I’ve seen recently came from a piece in The Atlantic titled “Smart Homes Are Terrible.” The author describes light switches that “literally required a tutorial session from a technician,” with unlabeled buttons where “it depends” whether pressing them turns the lights on or off.

The thing is: the old light switch worked perfectly. The new fancy light switch is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. We didn’t need to reimagine the light switch, but they did anyway. This is called solutionism.

You see it everywhere in consumer technology. We have smart fridges that catalog everything you put in them, and smart toasters you control with an app. These are devices that take something simple and functional and layer on complexity that no one asked for.

Most tech solutionism is just annoying, but sometimes it can be worse than that.

I bought a treadmill recently. I didn’t need much from it. I wanted to walk on an incline for 30 minutes and get my Zone 2 cardio, just like my favorite podcasters told me to. Instead, I got constant prompts to update the software and sign up for classes. Eventually, the screen stopped working entirely.

The problem was that without the screen, I couldn’t even activate the basic mechanical functions of the belt. The entire device was useless. I had to order a replacement part and install it myself1. When I finally got it working again, I just never reconnected it to the internet. It has worked perfectly ever since.

This is harmful solutionism, where the “solution” is not just unnecessary, but actively harmful to the core function of the device.

That brings us to politics, where we are living through a golden age of harmful solutionism in public policy.

Take Senate Bill 1, recently signed into law by Gov. Mike Braun, which, among other things, added new immigration verification requirements for Medicaid and SNAP applications.

On paper, that sounds like a straightforward enforcement measure. People living in the country without legal status are already barred from receiving these benefits. What’s the harm in beefing up the verification process?

The answer depends on whether the problem you’re trying to solve actually exists.

Recent reporting found that when states went looking for undocumented people receiving Medicaid, they found almost none: dozens of cases out of tens of thousands reviewed, and in some states, none at all.

In other words, the system was already working, so there was no need for a solution in the first place.

The particulars of the SB 1 provisions are where the solutionism shifts from annoying to genuinely harmful. It requires applicants for benefits to disclose the immigration status of everyone in their household. If that status can’t be verified, the state forwards their information to federal authorities.

Which means the “solution” doesn’t just add paperwork. It turns a routine eligibility check into something much riskier, especially for U.S. citizen children living with an undocumented family member.

Advocates have been blunt about what happens next: those families will simply stop applying for health care or food assistance, even when the children are fully eligible, because they’re afraid of putting a family member at risk.

1 in 5 Indianapolis children have an immigrant parent. This means that the SB 1 “solution” risks degrading a core function of our public benefits programs by potentially disrupting access for as many as 20% of children in Indianapolis, all in service of solving a problem that doesn’t meaningfully exist.

Probably the best example of harmful solutionism in policy right now is the so-called SAVE America Act, currently being debated in Congress, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Again, on paper, that sounds reasonable. You have to be a citizen to vote, after all. What’s the harm in making people prove it?

The problem is that this is solving for something that isn’t actually happening. Non-citizen voting is vanishingly rare. Every serious study has found the same thing, which is that this is just not a widespread problem in American elections. This problem does not meaningfully exist.

You wouldn’t know that from the rhetoric. Congressional Republicans are talking about it like it’s an existential threat. It’s alarmist solutionism. Or solutionist alarmism. Take your pick.

What the policy does do is create new barriers for eligible voters. Married women who changed their names will have to jump through additional hoops, but the real burden falls on people who don’t have easy access to a birth certificate or passport. These are people who are already on the margins of participation in a country that does not exactly have a stellar track record of voter turnout.

Like the worst smart devices, the SAVE AMERICA “solution” doesn’t just fail to solve a real problem. It risks degrading a core function of our democracy by deterring eligible voters from casting their ballots.

This is what solutionism looks like when it moves from annoying to harmful.

There’s a reason so many analog devices still work better than their more sophisticated counterparts. They solve the problem they were meant to solve, and they do it well. As importantly, they don’t create new ones in the process.

Public policy could use much more of that ethos. We have enough real problems. We don’t need to invent new ones, even if it is good politics.