You can’t get good government without good oversight.” That quote from U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) is a touchstone for the work of Ben Eikey (MPP ’19) and that of the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, where he serves as a manager for the Center’s State Oversight Academy.
The Levin Center, housed at Wayne State University’s Law School, was established in 2015 to honor Senator Levin’s commitment to oversight as a crucial responsibility of the legislative branch. Eikey and his Oversight Academy colleagues help state legislatures improve their capacity to conduct bipartisan, fact-based, high-quality oversight. The Levin Center also hosts an “oversight bootcamp” in DC for federal legislators and staff and develops high school curricula on congressional oversight.
After completing a prestigious Riecker Fellowship with Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) as a Ford School student, Eikey graduated in December 2019 thinking he’d build a career in DC. When the pandemic derailed those plans, a Ford School connection led him to the Levin Center’s Director, former Michigan State Representative Jim Townsend (MPP/MBA ’97), and to work that he “absolutely loves.”
Eikey is an enthusiastic champion of government’s capacity for improving lives, and he believes that legislative oversight has a key role to play. “Legislatures are in a unique capacity in our society, where you can get together a group of diverse people who care about some policy priority, and they can team up and hold an effective hearing or publish a report in the pursuit of facts.” But legislators too often “leap to legislation,” Eikey notes, when uncovering the facts would be a better first step.
Eikey rattles off a few high-profile federal illustrations of the impact of Congressional oversight. Seatbelts and other car safety measures, for example, arose from bipartisan oversight led by former Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) in the mid-1960s. Former Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) and colleagues used public hearings to build a body of incontrovertible evidence that cigarette smoke causes cancer. Former Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), who worked across the aisle for decades to uncover and combat wasteful spending and earmarks, partnered with Carl Levin on a two-year investigation into key causes of the 2008 financial crisis, leading to Dodd-Frank and other significant reforms.
What does Eikey make of DC at present and the current balance of power between the branches of the federal government? He shakes his head. “It’s not impossible to do good oversight now,” he notes, recalling the 2018 bipartisan House oversight hearings that saw Mark Zuckerberg grilled about Meta’s privacy practices. But he is dismayed by the erosion of legislative authority, citing unilateral executive actions from the Biden administration as well as those from the second Trump administration.
Eikey brightens when he returns to talk of his work at the state level. In 2024, Eikey’s oversight academy team held training sessions in twelve states and had substantive interactions with officials in nearly every state. The partner states were red and blue, large and small. What was their common denominator? He notes that engagement often starts with one elected official or staffer who, in pursuit of sound public service, gets curious about oversight and finds the Center’s website. “It’s really hard work representing people in State Houses,” says Eikey. “Many people come to those jobs wanting to make their state or their communities run better. High-quality oversight of the executive branch is one incredibly effective tool for legislators.”
The simple act of requesting information from the executive branch is an oversight avenue often underutilized by legislators, he explains.
Legislators too often “leap to legislation” when uncovering the facts would be a better first step."
Ben Eikey
To illustrate, Eikey tells a story from his time as a staffer in the Michigan House of Representatives. His then-boss chaired the Department of Corrections Appropriations Subcommittee, and in that capacity, Eikey pursued a troubling puzzle he had spotted in MDOC reports: why was it that, despite spotless prison records, so few of the women imprisoned for property crimes were being considered for parole at their earliest possible release date? He asked for more information, and what he uncovered led to a powerful discovery.
Due to the opioid crisis in the 2010s, Eikey says, many convictions were drug-related, and as a result, judges started requiring women with a drug-related offense to take a substance abuse class before they could become eligible for parole. “That was a fine idea, but because of the crisis there was an upward spike in demand for the class. Waitlist times for the class grew longer than the earliest release dates of sentences.” As a result, women with prison records indicating parole eligibility were stuck in prison with a parole denial on their record simply because there wasn’t enough capacity in the mandated course.
“So I wrote a memo,” Eikey says, in classic Ford School style.
Once the challenge was in plain sight, it was quickly resolved. The state directed emergency funding to MDOC to hire more teachers and the waitlist dissolved; women served their sentences, got help with their addictions, and went home to their families.
Eikey cites other state-level examples as well, including the New York State Senate’s bipartisan work exposing Ticketmaster’s Eras Tour ticket debacle, which led to a federal anti-trust lawsuit, and a Texas House committee’s comprehensive investigation on the Uvalde shooting, which was released eighteen months ahead of the DOJ’s report on the tragedy. He mentions, too, death-row inmate Robert Roberson, whose story took a dramatic, last-minute turn when a Texas House committee used its subpoena power to halt what many believe would have been an unjust execution.
Eikey acknowledges unfortunate examples of oversight being used as a partisan weapon or a power grab; the McCarthy era “red scare” comes to mind. But he’s full of optimism about the power of legislators and their teams to effect positive change—particularly when the effort is bipartisan and tackles a genuine public challenge.
Eikey, a self-identified “Republican focused on strong national security, an agile government capable of great things, and a driving desire to learn something new from someone not like me,” made friends and worked across ideological differences while at the Ford School. “I would encourage other conservative students to join the Ford School,” he says with enthusiasm, when asked about his experience. “I found a home there. You’ll be surrounded by the brightest policy minds, and you’ll be challenged to sharpen your understanding of the world. People at the school wanted me to succeed. I use what I learned every day.”
Eikey hopes that the good work happening in state houses will be a source of inspiration for those distressed by developments in the federal sector. “I could talk all day about the legislatures and all the amazing people I’ve met and the work they’re doing,” he says. “I would love to see more students at the Ford School consider that as a path to take.”
By Laura K. Lee (MPP ’96)
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