"Not Been Adequately Thought Through"
My thanks to Cato Institute chairman William Niskanen for enduring what sounded like a highly irritating perusal of the first five chapters of my book (he didn’t even get to the chapter on Social Security privatization, which really would have made him crazy!). I’d like to focus on Mr. Niskanen’s criticism that I am “profoundly wrong” that the Bush administration largely followed the conservative movement’s game plan for governing. In particular, let’s focus on the topic of politicizing the government, which is a conservative movement idea that owes much to Mr. Niskanen’s own public choice theory work. (And it’s the subject of one of the chapters he read).
In the weeks immediately preceding and following Bush’s first inauguration, the Heritage Foundation issued a flurry of reports, briefs, and op-eds with titles like “Taking Charge of Federal Personnel,” “Why the President Should Ignore Calls to Reduce the Number of Political Appointees,” and “Keep ’em Coming: In Defense of Political Appointees.” The thrust of the Heritage argument was that an ample supply of officials appointed by the president at the top levels of federal agencies is essential to ensure that his goals will be carried out in the face of resistance from the career civil service.
In a Washington Times op-ed on January 16, 2001, Heritage director of domestic policy studies Robert Moffit wrote, “Having the right number of political appointees is crucial to every president’s success. He can’t fulfill his mandate alone or with only a handful of staffers in the West Wing. Nor can his Cabinet implement his policies without a cadre of like-minded, personally committed appointees within the agencies. This is especially true in today’s political climate with a narrowly divided Congress providing a perfect excuse for those who merely want to perpetuate the status quo.”
It goes without saying that Heritage engaged in no such advocacy upon the occasion of either of Bill Clinton’s inaugurals. (Heritage remained opposed to proposals to limit presidential appointments during the Clinton administration, though, noting that when Republicans returned to the White House, they would want the flexibility to hire their own people). But the right’s call for greater reliance on political appointees after Bush’s election was consistent with an extensive body of public administration research and argumentation emanating for many years from conservative outposts, all in one way or another targeted at career government employees and the unions representing them. The intellectual foundation undergirding much of that work is the branch of economics dating back to the 1950s called “public choice” (and its extremely close cousin “rational choice”) theory, which attempts to explain the motivations and behavior of government workers, politicians, voters, and lobbyists as analogous to consumers and producers in the marketplace who are driven, the theory goes, entirely – or at least predominantly -- by self-interest.
Public choice models invariably show government employees behaving in ways that are unconnected or opposed to the broader public interest. For example, one of the ways that Niskanen first made a name for himself was a 1968 paper using public choice theory to purportedly demonstrate that “bureaucrats” will always act to maximize their budgets. (Niskanen neglected the possibility that motivations beyond self-interest might influence the behavior of government officials, including, as the economist Anthony Downs has emphasized, pride in performance, loyalty to a program, and a wish to best serve their fellow citizens). The lowest rungs of the civil service ladder also fare poorly under the public choice framework due to the so-called “principal-agent” problem. Because managers can not perfectly and costlessly monitor the activities of line staff layers below in the bureaucracy, the theory goes, civil servants will invariably goof off on the job, subvert the intentions of policymakers, and even steal.
For many years the right has drawn on public choice arguments as the basis for claiming that systematic approaches need to be pursued to weaken or bypass civil servants. In addition to making career government workers more submissive to political appointees (preferably conservative ones), the right has devoted abundant energy at all levels of government to pushing for privatization and contracting out of government services, weakening civil service employment protections, and diminishing the capacity of public employees to impose and monitor regulations. Public choice’s theoretical claims about the shortcomings of government workers, buttressed by elaborate economic equations beyond the comprehension of most journalists and average citizens, were used by the conservative movement as justifications for replacing the public sector in one way or another with private, competitive markets. The costs and risks associated with making those transitions usually receive short shrift, at best, in public choice literature.
Outside of the well funded enclaves of movement conservatism, the general consensus among individuals who care about public sector management is that less, rather than more, reliance on political appointees leads to more effective government. The Clinton administration, following the recommendations of Al Gore’s National Performance Review, significantly reduced the number of political appointees. Paul Volcker’s 2003 bi-partisan commission on the public service recommended further reductions in political appointees. And academic studies have shown that programs and agencies led by career civil servants are more effective than those run by political appointees.
In a March 26, 2005 article in the National Journal titled “By the Horns,” reporter Paul Singer recounted calling Robert Moffit at Heritage to ask him about the paper he co-authored four years earlier urging the president to reassert managerial control of government through political appointees. “Reminded of this paper recently, [Moffit] , who has moved on to other issues at Heritage, dusted off a copy and called a reporter back with a hint of rejoicing in his voice. ‘They apparently are really doing this stuff,’ he said.”
Singer’s article documented a variety of reorganizational efforts in different agencies that strengthened the leverage of politically appointed officials while weakening the discretion of career civil servants, including changes at the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and even the obscure National Resources Conservation Services -- a division of the Agriculture Department. Other media reports documented politicization in the Food and Drug Administration, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, and the Office of Special Council, which is supposed to protect career service whistleblowers who disclose waste, fraud, and abuse.
That was several months before the Katrina debacle called the public’s attention to the cronyism at FEMA, which caused an agency that had transformed from a “turkey farm” to a widely recognized model agency under Clinton chief James Lee Witt back into a turkey farm. The book looks in detail at FEMA and several other examples of the damage caused by the politicization of the government – which very much is an essential part of the conservative game plan for governing.
Finally, Mr. Niskanen is unhappy at my suggestion that the hostility toward government of his institution’s funders, as well as those of the right generally, has something to do with the failure of the conservative movement’s ideas to deliver the promised results. Let’s put it this way: the significant number of government success stories that preceded the right’s domination over public policy debates – Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, the Marshall Plan, civil rights legislation, environmental regulation, public health and safety protections, etc. – uniformly evolved from the belief that government was part of the solution, not the problem. The right’s funders believe the opposite, and it’s very difficult to identify comparable success stories demonstrating that they are correct.
This Niskanen character is a hoot. Reminds me of those fringe communists that argued that socialism was not to blame for the inefficiencies of the Soviet production, but it was those deviationist from true principle like Stalin, Khruschev and Breshnev who are to blame.
Mikhail Syvanen
September 18, 2007 2:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
One of my many objections to any Libertarian argument is that Libertarians start out knowing what they want to prove, then try to find the evidence and explanation that supports the ideas they started with. Unfortunately, they confuse this with "research." It's not. In real research the conclusion comes at the end of the process, not at the beginning
What the Libertarian (and this is true for ideologues of almost any stripe) approach really is is political polemic designed to convert people to the ideology. Rep. Dick Armey was head of the Economics Department at North Texas State University before entering politics. Sen. Phil Gramm was an Economist at Texas A&M. Both were highly frustrated at their lack of recognition in academia, but both were Libertarians trying to sell their ideology rather than researchers. Both schools were quite happy to see the back of them when they left.
If anyone wants to know why Conservatives and Libertarians complain that academia is stacked in favor of Liberals, this is the principle reason. There aren't many good and prolific researchers to begin with, but the ones there are (that is, those who are widely cited by other researchers in good and informative research) are not ideologues designing political polemic to sell their preordained ideologies.
CATO Institute is just another haven for such failed ideologues who can't make it as researchers.
September 18, 2007 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the "public-choice" theory primer. Utter nonsense, isn't it?
It might have some value if the goal was to make a bureaucracy work better, but essentially every area or department was expected to either do less or simply stop doing anything.
Even more fundametal, though, is the apparent intent of public choice---to circumvent legislation by executive inaction. What they want is less government, so they have the departments stop, and if necessary find reasons for doing nothing. NASA's flap over climate change positions in publications is an example of that.
So they really fit into "unitary executive" ideas. Even if the EPA is mandated, by law, to promulgate a regulation, the political appointee makes syre the agency does not actulally deliver. He is a blockade, not a facilitator.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., I of course knew many civil servants, probably the majority of my friends' parents, and including mine. All exhibited a pride in duty and importance. None discussed politics overtly. Public-choice "theorists" are kidding themselves, along with us.
September 18, 2007 6:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tom, Good points. Right, public choice theory can seem brilliant when it's used to explain past governmental failures. Some on the right even applied it to FEMA as a way of explaining why it failed after Katrina. But public choice theory has nothing to say at all about how James Lee Witt was able to successfully reform the agency in virtually everyone's eyes previously, in large part by enabling civil servants to apply their expertise and experience. The FEMA case alone explains an awful lot about why conservative ideology is failing as a governing philosophy. People like David Brooks and David Boaz of Cato said after Katrina: see, we told you government can't do anything right, as if their worldview isn't self-fulfilling.--Greg
September 18, 2007 7:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Immediately upon attaining office Bush began appointing agency heads and deputy heads whose backgrounds in corporations and religious organizations were at odds with the thrust of the laws their agencies were charged with enforcing. That is, rather than seeking to overturn or amend laws which he thought were bad, surreptitiously, he determined to subvert their enforcement. He, thus, violated his oath to see that the laws be "faithfully executed."
But I fail to see how Bush's actions sprang from public choice theory or indeed, were in any way influenced by it.* It's not that he didn't like the bureaucracy; he didn't like the laws those bureaucracies were established to enforce.
* Except perhaps, for his (and Karl Rove's) correct conclusion that they had nothing to fear from the individual voter who, individually, wouldn't "care" -- exactly what public choice theory correctly teaches.
September 19, 2007 12:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, One of the conclusions of public choic theory is that civil servants inherently act to the detiment of the broader public's benefit. Based on that, places like the Heritage Foundation argue, political appointees should do whatever they can to minimize the influence, discretion, and power of civil servants. So the Bush administration pursued that policy by appointing much higher numbers of ideologically committeed officials throughout the executive branch, who almost uniformly proceeded in one way or another to undercut career officials and their capacity to carry out laws. (Public choice theory applies to government officials, not just to voters, in other words). --Greg
September 19, 2007 4:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
One of the conclusions of public choic theory is that civil servants inherently act to the detiment of the broader public's benefit.
Should we not define the public choice idea as it is:
Public choice theory, misleading propaganda conceived to plant negative views about the U.S. government to cover subversive policy and actions
by the right wing power structure.
-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking
September 19, 2007 5:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
A part of the set of problems caused by strengthening the political leadership in government as I see it is that the political leaders are working from sound bites and ideology and do not have the necessary professional experience to know how to implement their ideas. This is what is meant by "Not well thought through."
Conservatives see the government as being a large factory or military organization in which the commander gives orders and everyone else has only the function of carrying out those orders. Using command instead of persuasion to get jobs done appears faster, but it is a lot less efficient. Removing civil service protection from employees makes them react more strongly to the boss' demands, but also makes it difficult for them to tell the boss when he is wrong. The concept of unitary command requires that the leader actually understand what every major department in the agency does in detail, and the only important measure of success or failure the employee is measured on is the limited standard of pleasing the boss, not successful accomplishment of the real job the civil servant is there to perform. It becomes the old game of "Look busy when the boss is around and don't worry about the collapsing infrastructure in the background." Anything the boss doesn't understand doesn't matter.
"Bounded rationality" which demonstrates how limited the ability of any single decision-maker is to understand and optimally react or anticipate problems. The leader tends to give instructions that cause negative interactions with other operations. Anyone familiar with object-oriented computer programming will understand that you have to isolate different functions and prevent uncontrolled interference with the interior operations of a given function. It's as true in organizations, particularly government organizations, as it is in computer programs. Conservatives, who tend to be authoritarian by nature, object to this limitation on the interference with the supposed Right to command an instant reaction from subordinates with no back talk.
An organization isolates functions by socializing professionals, telling them what is wanted, giving them the resources (or not giving them the resources if the ROI is too low) and then stepping back and letting the professionals work. Private business organizations that don't function that way simply don't become big organizations. Such failure is not an option for a government, as the bankruptcy of New York City proved.
Business leaders tend to believe their own press clippings. They actually believe that they are adding value to an organization through their interference with low-level functions. Why shouldn't they believe that? Who dares tell the boss to butt out when it can mean their job? No civil service protection means that whatever idiocy the boss demands gets attempted, and no one has the protection needed to correct and educate him. [This is clearly going to drag down the Department of Homeland Security until it is corrected.]
Political leaders who enter at the top of government from a background in private business simply aren't properly socialized professionals capable of getting best performance out of large government organizations. The limited reactions of civil servants to the (often inappropriate and invariable not well-thought out) demands and instructions of non-professionalized political leaders is built into successful organizations.
Remove the limited reactions by, for example, making political leaders more powerful and downgrading professional civil servants and you automatically get poorly performing government. The individuals in such a government organization are too busy trying to react to their bosses to spend much time actually dealing with the problems which are the real purpose of government in the first place.
This is not a set of facts I would expect an Economist to be familiar with. No equations or calculus. But it is a significant part of the controlling set of facts that determines how well or poorly a government agency will perform.
September 19, 2007 5:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, if your argument is that much of the problem with Bush's appointees is that they disagreed with the very goals that Congress intended for various departments to achieve, then I'd say that you are correct as far as that problem goes. The goal-clash is a reason why those Bush-appointed managers are frustrated with the civil servants and the bureaucracy. But that problem is different from normal inability of those Political appointees to get good performance from their departments.
There is a clash of the goals of the appointees and those established by the legislature using Constitutional means and implemented by the Executive who is controlled by the Rule of Law. For some strange reason there is a Conservative unwillingness to live with the establishment of government goals by the messy political processes in the Legislature rather than the clean and supposedly efficient determination of goals by a single clear-eyed steely leader.
But the political appointees generally also have a complete blindness to the procedures needed to efficiently manage and operate a government agency. The two problems - the clash of desired goals and inability to understand government management procedures - are related, but not the same thing at all.
The multiple problems make conservatives in government analogous to a patient who is ill both with TB and cancer at the same time. There are of course interactions between the two illnesses. The cancer may have weakened the immune system and allowed the TB to get started, but the two illnesses are essentially separate and have to each be treated in their own way.
September 19, 2007 6:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Have you considered that republicans/conservatives who advocate these nihilistic practices know full well what the outcome would be? They would prefer a subservient class of workers dependent on their political and personal largesse for jobs and protection. They want a political spoils system that punishes some and rewards others. That's primarily how they attain their jobs. (They think all government jobs are interchangable which explains "Heckuva Job Brownie". Anyone can issue orders to underlings if they're carried out or not, that's not their responsiblity. They're deciders not worker bees.)
No sentient person wants a return to the corruption, immorality and power struggle before civil service reform. That anyone is in any position to advocate such a "policy" illustrates just what a disaster it was and would be again. That people aren't laughing outright at Niskanen is a mystery to me. If his house ever catches fire, he better hope he's on the good side of the local political boss - if he isn't he's going to be standing their with his hose in his hand (if you'll pardon the expression) watching his life go up in smoke. What a putz.
September 19, 2007 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Where have I seen this phenomenon before...? Hmmm.... Oh yes:
The "Communist" Soviet Union!
Agreed that this is not directly relevant to economists' job descriptions, but shouldn't they have at least caught a whiff of the history that they should have studied as undergrads?
<end of sarcasm> I am not trying to be all that insulting, but the whole idea of a "unitary executive", and the "efficiencies" of autocratic rule have been tried, and discarded repeatedly. One would hope we would get wise to these repeated failures and look another way.
Perhaps toward a genuine democratic republic, which is rumored to be the worst form of government, except for all the others...
September 19, 2007 7:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Network-centric warfare goes a step farther, in another model relevant to efficient organizations. Previously, information flowed up and down a vertical chain of command. Now, especially in highly mobile warfare, information flows horizontally between peer unit in different chains of command. By keeping the units to either side informed, if a sudden opportunity arises for a unit to change its axis of attack, and perhaps move ahead of one to its flank, the information flow will prevent "friendly fire" incidents because the temporarily bypassed unit knows where the leading unit is going. Indeed, both units may then attack an enemy unit from two sides.
This is the antithesis of tight political control from the White House.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
September 19, 2007 7:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
The comments on my first post barely merit a response. The primary objective of this post was to challenge Anrig's assertion that the policies of the Bush administration have been wholly consistent with long-standing conservative principles; this is a question of fact, not of public choice theory. The dismissal of the conservative policy institutes as refuges for those who could not earn an academic appointment is absurd; I wonder whether this assertion would also be made about the Century Foundation. In my case, I have been a full professor at the University of California, both in Berkeley and Los Angeles.
In Chapter 6, Anrig describes the effort to limit and rationalize federal regulation as "Sophisticated Sabotage" by the right. In fact, President Carter was the first to establish a White House level review of federal regulation in his Council of Wage and Price Stability, a initiative that built on good studies by the center-left Brookings Institution, and this role was later strongly supported by President Clinton. The outcome of this process was a substantial reduction of the older forms of economic regulation and an increase in the federal regulation of health, safety, and the environment. I wonder what evidence that Anrig might offer that is consistent with his assertion that this was all the consequence of some conservative conspiracy.
In Chapter 7, Anrig is correct to conclude that the Milwaukee school choice experiment "hasn't worked like we thought it would in theory." Providing quality education to the children of poor single mothers has proved a major challenge to both public schools and private schools. For all that, Anrig does not acknowledge that the Wisconsin legislature increased the number of voucher-eligible students from 1% of the Milwaukee public school enrollment to 15%, removed the restriction that participating private schools must be nonsectarian, and reduced the state regulations to which these schools are subject, nor does he explain why this experiment has received high marks from two Harvard professors. Something must be going right.
September 20, 2007 1:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Duplication.
September 20, 2007 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am glad that I am not the only one who sees the right-wing authoritarian "management" techniques as being those of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Paul Berman, in his excellent but poorly named book Terror and Liberalism lays out the model which is used by the many movements in the twentieth century who are attacking the philosophy and government of Liberalism.
Those movements include conservatism, Marxist-Leninist Communism, Fascism, Nazism and more recently religious fundamentalism (in Islam, Christianity and elsewhere.) They are all trying to create a state modeled on the various Ur-Myths each movement is built around, but in each case they have to use similar authoritarian methods to achieve that fantasy Ur-Myth. In each case, the idea that the government must recognize and even protect the individual liberties of the people means that they cannot achieve their fantasy Ur-Myth.
Democracy may seem to be a really bad form of government, but democracy is actually the logical outgrowth of the creation of specific liberties which the government not only cannot infringe on but must even protect. Those Liberties are the heart of Liberalism, and democracy is Liberalism's outgrowth.
All of the major conflicts over control of government in the world today revolve around this basic disagreement. Can government be used to create an ideal top-down-defined society, or does government have a responsibility for recognizing and protecting individual liberties and creating a stable society which allows people to live in security and in which those liberties can flourish? The distinction will be in whether government operates in an authoritarian manner or as as a democracy.
I'll choose mostly Liberalism, with a sharply authoritarian approach to the criminals who yesterday broke into the home of some people living near me and used their backyard for dog-fights.
September 22, 2007 5:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are exactly right. The military does not actually operate the way I described, at least when it is operating effectively. That is merely the conventional stereotype of military decision-making, and most conservatives don't understand the difference between the stereotype and the reality.
I would never have used that description when I was taking Command and General Staff College. Training subordinate leaders to make independent decisions is to a large degree about convincing the subordinates that they can make intelligent mistakes without suffering severe consequences. (Intelligent in this case invariably means well-informed.) That means training the superior leaders to allow errors and make training situations out of them rather than punishment situations.
I found it interesting that two major advantages the American military had over soviet and soviet-trained military forces were (1) that the Americans had low-level leaders, even NCO's, able to make effective independent decision based on the situation they faced and (2) the soviet military was motivated by Communist ideology rather than by unit cohesion. The result was an American military that was a lot more combat effective than the soviet and soviet-style military organizations. The soviets also had no professional NCO's, and a much larger percentage of officers than the U.S. military did. I don't know if this has changed much since the fall of the USSR.
My experience with private industry and the employment-at-will concept suggests that few civilians - and fewer Republicans - understand the real limitations that good leaders operate under.
September 22, 2007 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
deleted
October 20, 2007 1:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
:-) Ah, but you might have gotten away with those descriptions, at Leavenworth, had you said them in German. That, however, is best answered with an attributed Generalstab-trained officer -- Guderian? von Manstein? "War is chaos. The reasons the Americans do so well at it is that they practice it every day." Actually, I've always thought of a comment like that coming from an Axis officer, like Yamamoto, who had lived in the US, and was often telling his junior officers to read biographies of Lincoln. I felt it only proper to bow to some of his relics at Yakusuni Shrine; contrary to general opinion, he, as I'm sure you know, was one of the voices in the Japanese inner circle that spoke loudest against attacking the US.
It's actually been in the last few years that I've gotten to know some professional NCOs really well (my mother didn't count, as she went from being a Navy Chief to an Army mustang). Randomly thinking about them, one is the best Byzantine historian I know. On a private mailing list, we are discussing TOPOFF 4, lessons learned, and, ironically more than some of their chain of command, how military TOCs need to interface with the civilian Incident Command System and the often-supporting Disaster Management Information System software.
There have been some individual heroics by NCOs, and I honor their memory. Raven 42, however, is the best example in recent years of a squad's NCOs bringing a unit to perfection in mutual support, and not being limited to your MOS skills. I'm very glad their chain of command in the Kentucky National Guard let them speak, uncensored, to the press.
I wonder if (ranks of the time) SSG Nein or SGT Hester could have a useful conversation with the White House?
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
October 20, 2007 3:32 PM | Reply | Permalink