Inside the Port Authority, the Corrupt Powerhouse Behind Chrisite’s Bridgegate Scandal: Jim Epstein in The Daily Beast

I have a new piece up at The Daily Beast. Here’s the
opening:

“I feel violated,” Leon Keylin of Fort
Lee, New Jersey told USA
Today, describing his reaction to the dirty details behind
the Bridgegate traffic
jam that choked his town for four days last September. New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie’s office has taken most of the heat for
screwing citizens by playing dirty politics, but there’s another
party responsible that has so far evaded most of the blame. The
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the government agency
that directly caused the gridlock, is an enormously powerful
bastion of patronage that violates all commuters
every day of the year.

It would be easy to discount the George Washington Bridge
scandal as a case of a few bad apples abusing their power. But it’s
actually just one example of how an organization that was supposed
to rise above politics became a tool for politicians to act
out their worst impulses. The episode is an indictment of the very
concept of the Port Authority—and the Progressive-Era ethos that
good public policy is all about entrusting smart people to run
things.

Read the whole thing.