A strange thing happened in Washington earlier this month: After spending two years studying an issue, a federal agency published a 475-page report documenting the problem only to announce that government is not the solution.

"Just because we have identified a problem does not mean we can solve it," Steven Waldman, the lead researcher for the agency, told me last week. "We did not feel we had to show some big regulatory pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to prove this work had value."

This...