In Praise of Bureacrats
One underappreciated aspect of the American system of government is that we have way more political appointees in the executive branch than is common in most democracies. Political appointees will go three or four levels deep into the org charts of agencies, and the top administrators are also staffed by a lot of political appointees rather than by career professionals. In the State Department, it’s customary to give a lot of the political positions (usually at the Assistant Secretary level) to career foreign service officers, but in some agencies there are politicals everywhere.
And as Shankar Vedantam explains in The Washington Post they do a way worse job than the bureaucrats do:
The United States has a far larger number of political appointees in government than any other industrialized democracy. Growing evidence suggests that while presidents and political parties appoint partisans in the belief that loyalists will drive the president’s agenda forward, appointees may actually damage the long-term interests of both presidents and their parties. [...]
In an unusual new analysis, another political scientist compared the Bush administration’s own evaluations of more than 600 government programs with the backgrounds of the 242 managers who ran those programs. David E. Lewis, who is now at Vanderbilt University, found that three-quarters of the managers administering the programs were political appointees while a quarter were career civil servants.
The political appointees were better educated, on average, than the civil staff. Many had stellar records in the private sector or on the campaign trail. Side by side, the political appointees just looked like a much smarter bunch than the careerists.
When it came to performance, however, the bureaucrats whipped the politicals: Programs administered by civil servants were significantly more likely to display better strategic planning, program design, financial oversight — and results. These findings, remember, were based on the Bush administration’s own evaluation system — the Program Assessment Rating Tool, administered by the Office of Management and Budget.
It would be nice to see some efforts made to scale back the quantity of political appointees. My understanding is that the Department of Homeland Security, which was born under the horrific misrule of George W. Bush, has an especially large problem in this regard. That said, when thinking about this it’s important to recall that conservative administration generally don’t want the government to be administered effectively. It was not incompetence that led the Bush administration Justice Department to stop enforcing non-discrimination law, it was deliberate malice. Conservatives think it should be easier for businesses to get away with racial and gender discrimination, just as they stand foresquare behind efforts to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Similarly, labor law was enforced poorly under Bush by design not by accident. The administration went out of its way to prevent the EPA from doing it’s job. The examples are almost endless.
And of course this is part of the problem with having so many political appointees. But it’s also why they’re hard to get rid of. Career bureaucrats tend not to go work for an agency unless they believe in its mission. And to conservatives one of the main tasks of a president is to ensure that many rules go unenforced so that the conservative donor class can better trample the public interest. It’s easier to do that the more political appointees you have, and if an occasional Katrina happens, that’s a small price to pay.
45 Responses to “In Praise of Bureacrats”
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December 7th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
“Career bureaucrats tend not to go work for an agency unless they believe in its mission.”
The problem is, that usually means that agencies will continue to follow their desired path without regard to the wishes of the President (and, by extension, of the electorate that brought him in).
There are problems on both ends of this, but I really don’t think that having agencies that have less political accountability sounds like a good idea. Unless the civil service rules are simultaneously changed so that government employees become “at will” employees, who can be fired or laid off easily. The very last thing anyone should want is a set of hidebound bureaucrats who know that all they need to do is hunker down and ignore the administration – because there’s no penalty for it.
December 7th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
This finding is “unusual” or surprising only to the extent that the public and the media have bought the Reagan line that government is bloated by a pack of evil bureaucrats. First, we don’t need too much thought to know that the GOP, particularly under Bush, has had minimal concern for integrity in government and plenty of concern for undermining the functioning of government. So if political appointees do just that, no surprise. It’d be interesting to see how far the results hold up under Democrats. And second, it doesn’t take years of study to know that the civil service came about as a response to the spoils system and thus to the dangers of relying on political appointees.
December 7th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I’m pleased by seeing this theme throughout the blogosphere lately: government is not inherently evil, and not all public officials and employees are inefficient, greedy dolts. I believe those in favor of a limited, rational, and principled government would do well to add this sentiment to their rantings…
December 7th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
It’s not that government is “evil” – it’s that employees who know that their jobs are permanent, and that it takes something resembling an act of god to lose, will not tend to be efficient. Over time, they tend to get stuck in ruts and treat the job as a parking space.
That was true of the pre-1980’s IBM, and I rather suspect that it’s been true for Google up until now as well. The difference is, out in the private sector reality eventually smacks such complacency down. In government, it simply doesn’t, and you end up with environments in which one or two people do actual work while the rest bide their time.
December 7th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Re James:
Since (as you yourself note) the problem is not exclusive to government but a symptom of any reasonably large organization that has lost its way or not reacted in a timely fashion to changes in their environment, I’m not sure what point you were trying to make.
US Government organizations have shown that they can be both competent and efficient – if they have good management. FEMA under Witt, for example. Or VA, Medicare and Social Security – as organizations they handle vast amounts of money with very low overhead or fraud – including in comparison to private insurance, medical, and finance institutions.
Can government agencies become sclerotic, corrupt unresponsive – sure. Makes them just like the private sector but without the added “massive personal greed” factor that’s figured into the recent meltdown.
December 7th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I have to agree with you on this one. It’s not because the environment in the government is really so politically charged, but because it’s just bad for our system to use job positions as awards. I mean assuming we’re trying to be a meritocracy here, it just seems a little silly that the higher-level adviser seats in an office (at the State Dept., where I work, for example) are reserved as handouts for politicians. It would make a lot more sense to give leadership to the civil servants who know the office better. But of course there’s no political benefit to that.
December 7th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Unless the civil service rules are simultaneously changed so that government employees become “at will” employees, who can be fired or laid off easily.
This is not changing the civil service rules but eliminating them. Under this system every appointment would be political. You might want to read up a little bit of history of the spoils system to see why this would be a disaster.
It’s not that government is “evil” – it’s that employees who know that their jobs are permanent, and that it takes something resembling an act of god to lose, will not tend to be efficient.
If only there were a study comparing the efficiency of political appointees to career civil servants, so we could test this assertion! Where, I wonder, might we find one?
December 7th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I know the history of the spoils system, and at this point, I’m not convinced that going 180 degrees in the other direction has worked out as well as we would have liked. The main advantage of having a smaller government is that the opportunities for corruption would be reduced.
Take the car companies, or the cable companies, or the telcos – how much better off would we be had they not been able to get government aid in the past (car companies), or had they not been able to get government backed monopolies (cable, telcos)?
You want better government and less corruption? Then you want less government. Large organizations of any kind tend to get corrupt and inefficient. Period.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
it’s that employees who know that their jobs are permanent, and that it takes something resembling an act of god to lose, will not tend to be efficient. Over time, they tend to get stuck in ruts and treat the job as a parking space.
But that’s not necessarily an adequate analogy for the kinds of jobs under discussion here, which in other countries are highly competitive, have a well-defined career structure and generally reward the best and the brightest who choose civil service work. Now, the problems that causes are well known to anyone who watched Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister: a permanent class of Sir Humphreys at the upper tier.
So, I’d argue that the opposite applies to James’s examples, which certainly are valid for public-sector positions much further down the greasy pole. (State-level managerial jobs come to mind.)
The upper tiers of a permanent civil service usually display the opposite of complacency: they’re very good at what they do. The problem is that they’re institutionalist to the core, and have a meritocratic (and sometimes aristocratic) distrust of people who hold temporary power by the will of the masses, and sometimes a distaste for people who grubby their hands with party-politicking. In London, there’s a clear line between the City and Westminster, and while it’s not as class-encoded as it was, say, fifty years ago — the Civil/Diplomatic Service exams are something of a leveller — it’s culturally encoded.
I suppose the basic point is this: high-level career appointees deliver competence, but they’re small-c conservative about the institutions that nurtured them. They seem to work better in parliamentary systems where there’s an ongoing briefing relationship between all parties and the civil service. In the US, where the legislative branch is institutionally more lead-footed and the staff dynamics very different, having a mainly political upper tier seems to bring a nimbler executive, but not necessarily a better one, and limited ’stickability’ beyond the lifetime of any administration for any reforms not encoded in law.
There’s also the question of dealing with the other unelected mandarins of DC who have nothing to do with the federal government, never get fired — ever hear of someone get booted from Heritage or AEI? Or Brookings, for that matter? — and think Sally Quinn is a superb hostess. The Village is DC’s permanent ruling class.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
You want better government and less corruption? Then you want less government.
That’s just ideological cant unless you can shove a half-decent definition behind it. And since Republicans have shown no interest in being part of that “less government” — instead preferring to fuck over the institutions of government — they’re not really in a position to define its terms. Grover Norquist has been on wingnut welfare since he was a College Republican, and yet he’s Mr Drown Government In The Bathtub.
Now, Ron Paul-esque libertarians who imagine a return to a Victorian idyll of straightjacketed federal government may be delusional, but at least they’re honest.
December 7th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Is this a different James Robertson than the one cheering on the bloated military? The one whose incredible stupidity led him to believe that a nation which could not possibly affect our national security was such a threat to us that hundreds of thousands of them needed to be senselessly murdered?
I hope so, because that guy was a moron, but certainly wanted the government to be big enough to smack down random nations without cause.
On the other hand, this one isn’t very smart either. His inability to grasp that the purpose of government is to govern and that “the government that governs best is the government that governs least” is such a monumentally stupid idea that no nation of 300,000,000 people could possibly get along without a decent, effective, government. Hell, the people who think that have been in power for the last eight years and they have conclusively demonstrated that James Robertson is a moron. Both of him.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I don’t think I could be classified as “cheering on the military”. My entire argument with respect to Iraq could be boiled down to “you broke it, you bought it” – while lots of others here (and on the right) insisted on re-hashing 2002.
The problem with large government is that it tends to accrue more and more power. Where power collects, you get rent seeking (and worse). It’s pretty simple, actually – the less power the government has, the less ability it has to dole out favors (and vice versa). There’s an obvious balance between too little and too much – but I think it’s hard to argue that we currently have too little government, or government that attempts to control too little of our lives.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Yessir, those political appointments in the Attorney Generals’ office, like Monica Goodling, who graduated from piece of shit law schools like Regent and Liberty were really top notch, not. No best and brightest for the Rethuglican fucktards who have run this government for the last eight years.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I think it’s hard to argue that we currently have too little government, or government that attempts to control too little of our lives.
Actually, for most people, I think you would find it very hard to argue that. I’m not sure where you get the idea that we all live in houses abutting federally protected wetlands that also contains a spotted owl habitat.
It may well be that there is some associate human resources staffmember who is just “punching the clock” somewhere in government, but in general, I have found the “professional class” in government of the sort that MattY is talking about to be people who wanted to work on interesting problems in government, which happen to be much larger than the sort of things that a comparably experienced person could get an opportunity to approach in the private sector… and given their experience and knowledge of the policy landscape, this is why they tend to perform better than the political appointees from outside who had little interest in government before their appointment.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
James: you’re still left with a basic paradox here, which is that a commitment to small government is nothing without a commitment to government. In practice, “small government conservatives” like Norquist or market fundamentalists like Steve Moore despise government while enjoying an institutional DC presence in non-profit sinecures. This is different from the old Tory ideological line that the centre-left might create certain governmental institutions, but the centre-right is better placed to manage them.
See, you’re not getting beyond abstractions here, and that’s the consequence of two decades of Republicans flogging a couple of Reagan’s catchy lines to death. It’s backed by a fundamental misconception of government that comes from demonising it– it’s only slightly exaggerating to say that the talk radio line casts DC as full of pen-pushers who spend their days working out new ways to give Those People Your Tax Dollars.
And there’s an irony here: if any institution has truly demonstrated the corrupting effects of acquiring power over that period, it’s the Republican Party, and that power has been manifest both through official institutions — Monica Goodling’s purity tests — and para-institutions on K Street.
So I’d suggest that if you (or more generally, conservatives with a bit of clue) want to make the case for small government, the first step is to start giving a toss about government. This takes me back to my earlier point: in countries where the career civil service has a higher reach, there’s often an inherent institutional conservatism and less of a perceived ideological schism between the public and private sector.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
One final point: it’s hard to see anything but inherent conservatism in things like Napoleon’s ‘career open to talents’ or Bismarck’s Prussian civil service, or even the British bureaucratic model. Even Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” is an interestingly balanced phrase — and the letter to Adams on the topic is fascinating reading.
Now, the snarky response would be that American conservatives are ideologically engrained against government because they’re so fucking shite at it; I’ll be more generous, and say that since Reagan they haven’t really given it a shot, and it appears to hold no interest for them.
December 7th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
There’s government, and there’s government — or maybe I mean that leadership makes a difference. Years ago I knew a guy who had gone from a position in the California state government to work for the City of Los Angeles under Tom Bradley. He used to joke that it had been a shock to his system — the quantity and quality of work that Bradley expected, and got, was like nothing he’d seen working for the state. For what it’s worth, I believe the governor he left was the woeful George Deukmejian, a republican, although it may have been the final days of Jerry Brown.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
I think the reason why people think that government inefficiency is worse than private-sector is because, at least in theory, a private sector business that isn’t efficient will eventually lose so much money that it has to close down.
This is less likely to happen in government, because the revenue of a government is not directly tied to its performance, because its revenue is mainly from sources not related to the services it provides. For example, public schools are paid for by taxes rather than tuition, so the schools get funded even if no one wants to go there (whereas a private school that performed badly would get shut down when everyone stopped going and stopped paying).
I’m not saying that it always works out that way, but that I think is the theoretical model.
Also, I doubt that most people who criticize bureaucracy are suggesting that filling everything with political appointments is their preferred solution.
December 7th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
No James, there was no “you broke it, you bought it” until the idiots you voted into office decided to start slaughtering human beings – with no justification at all. And when they did, you cheered that slaughter and made excuses for it. That kind of sick cheerleading led to ever more slaughter.
But that’s okay because you are for “smaller government.” Not that you can explain how that would actually work. To do so would require some intellectual heft, some vague notion of what governance is, it requires a set of skills your analysis of the threat posed by Iraq demonstrates you don’t have.
The notion that businesses will fail if they become overburdened with cruft is another one of those fantasies common on the right. It doesn’t happen. Any large business has a large number of employees who provide less value than their pay. On the other hand, many of those people are called “executives” and are the darlings of the right.
Look at the latest round of business failures. Were they because the companies in question had too many layers of management? Inefficient workers? Nope. They were because the businesses were essentially criminal enterprises moving money from one location to another – their failure is a testament to the results of small government, and their bailout a natural result of the Republican “privatize the gains, socialize the losses” that is the hallmark of “small government conservatives.”
December 8th, 2008 at 2:33 am
Not as: let’s try more honey than vinegar here.
I’ll put it this way: those conservatives who want a career in public life, think that there should be “small government”, and would like to do something about it. Find the bits of government that you would like to be smaller, and see if you can work in them. It helps if you’re smart: I know plenty of smart conservative people.
I frankly don’t mind the idea of having a career bureaucracy that reaches higher in which plenty of the higher-ups are personally conservative and demonstrate institutional conservatism. (Movementarians, I take issue with, mainly because it comes across as a career open to assholes.) Matt mentioned State up top, and I have little doubt that, in spite of what talk radio might say, the highest ranking FSOs are basically small-c conservative. It’s the nature of the beast. (Just because they talk Foreign don’t make ‘em pinkos.)
See, I would ultimately like to get beyond sloganeering here. For “governs best, governs least”, I’m going to say “no, sorry, Mr Thoreau in your hut, who’s been dead 146 years: governs best really is just governs best.”
December 8th, 2008 at 9:18 am
James Robertson Says:
“It’s not that government is “evil” – it’s that employees who know that their jobs are permanent, and that it takes something resembling an act of god to lose, will not tend to be efficient. Over time, they tend to get stuck in ruts and treat the job as a parking space.”
So you’ll join me in supporting a serious purge of the economics professors who got us to where we are today? They’ve demonstrated incompetance in their jobs.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:11 am
I don’t have much to add to the post. I hope I add something.
My immediate reaction was “of course Bush political appointees are incompetent.” I think the point that their failures to do their jobs was a feature not a bug is a more important point, but it isn’t the only point.
Many of them came from the campaign which was focused on dumbind down the debate, finding slogans that defeated arguments and evidence, distracting the press with trivia etc etc etc. People who excel at that are not likely to be good managers. Also, the Republican party has committed itself to the denial of overwhelming evidence. You don’t have to be ignorant to be a Republican, but it helps.
An ability to shield oneself from evidence is very helpful if it is necessary to not gag when claiming not to believe in anthropogenic global warming, claiming that tax cuts cause higher revenues, claiming that making contraceptives more available does not reduce tean-age pregnancy, at leasting listening and not objecting when someone claims that the scientific standing of intelligent design is remotely comparable to that of the theory of evolution by natural selection, that missiles are a bigger threat than al Qaeda, that Ba’athists are like Islamic fundamentalists, that there is little risk of ethno sectarian conflict in Iraq etc etc etc
To be appointed by Bush it was necessary either to be insane, or ignorant (and determined to remain so) or deeply cynical, better to be two out of three and best to be all three.
As noted by Yglesias, convincing evidence on the merits of political appointees who were not appointed by George W Bush Jr requires evidence on such appointees. Extrapolating from Bush appointees is nonsensical.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I think we got sidetracked by a “how big should the govt be” debate. The point about trading political appointees for civil servants is a good one.
I’ve observed the US system up close, and the Australian system through the media, and the degree to which civil servants seem to be empowered in Australia is just amazing. The top civil servant will sometimes put forth a policy recommendation, and then the relevant minister will have to cop it in the media if (s)he doesn’t go along with it. That may be taking things a bit too far, but it seems to generate highly competent governance where decisions are based on evidence and expertise. This deference to bureaucrats/experts seems like one of the most surprising things I found when I moved to Australia.
I’d be willing to bet that if you found another country with a top five human development index and zero public debt you’d also find that that country gave its bureaucrats a lot of leverage.
December 8th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
I am sick of people saying it takes an “act of God” to fire someone from a government job. I have experience terminating employees who failed to perform within the civil service and all it takes is documentation and good management. If managers express their expectations and they are not met, then progressive discipline can and will occur. What often times happens is that political appointees are appointed who have no idea about the workings of the agency so they go with the flow instead of asking questions. They can’t ask questions because they don’t want to look ignorant. Or they start treating civil servants like private sector staff (want salaried employees to work 60 hour weeks, no cause terminations, etc.) or play favorites to the point that a disparate treatment cause of action occurs. Then a clash between personnel and management occurs causing gridlock.
December 8th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
My experience of working in the federal bureaucracy is that the vast majority of people work very hard, on a relatively low pay scale. They are largely deeply patriotic and committed to making the world a better place through service to their country. There are a few people who are clearly bad apples, but those people exist everywhere, even in the private sector. The ethic of service is very powerful. And while people may be small “c” conservative, some of that is a factor of managing multimillion dollar projects with completion dates well into the administration of whoever gets elected in the *2012 election*. Bureaucrats are office-holders by definition–they are defined by their role in the organization. They take the long view because they serve the larger mission, not the changing whims of the minute.
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