Fraud, Waste, and Abuse

 Those terms are the mantra for conservatives attacking the size of government, and those who believe it's possible to reduce the deficit without cutting programs.

As a liberal and retired bureaucrat I'm dubious of the idea.

One thing we don't do is focus on is private companies.  Mr. Zuckerberg has been presumably cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse" in his Meta company--40 percent cuts? And Mr. Musk is cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in his Twitter company. 

Failure To Commit, To Decide

 Ran across this tweet, which sounds interesting. 

Excited to share this new work with @beckyj1 in @ASR_Journal! We examine how local organizations sort people to ration scarce social benefits. We analyze the case of prioritization in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program (1/12)https://t.co/AAlR8Z8AdN

— Simone Zhang (@simonezhang) January 30, 2023

 

Drawing on >1000 local waitlist prioritization policies and interviews with local housing officials, we find many local housing agencies don’t set explicit priorities to determine who accesses a voucher sooner. This is especially true in rural, conservative communities. (4/12)

— Simone Zhang (@simonezhang) January 30, 2023

 My guess is part of this is the costs of deciding priorities.  It requires a conscious decision, which many people find difficult. Being in a rural area raises the odds that the potential decider knows some of the people who will be affected by her decision, and the people affected know who made the decision so there's the risk of emotional confrontations. 

It's also possible that there's no one decider, which raises the possibility of conflict among the deciders.  The outcome can be similar to Congress; which Congress can dodge the decision by kicking the issue to the bureaucracy, local deciders can dodge the decision by leaving it up to first-come, first served. Both tactics give the advantage to those who have the ability and expertise to navigate the bureaucracy.

Fifth Act--Relying on Connections

I blogged earlier about  Eliot Ackerman's Fifth Act,  Thinking about it some more--one thing stands out is the reliance on personal connections. In the chaos of our exit from Afghanistan, personal connections were everywhere.  Initially it was the personal connection of American soldiers, diplomats, and contractors with those who had worked with them.  The Afghani asked their friends to help. As the days passed and the panic spread, Afghanis who had no such history contacted Afghanis who had the connection: a friend of a friend, a cousin, a neighbor.

Once contacted the Americans, like Ackerman, relied on their own connections. An ex-soldier contacted an old comrade still in Afghanistan.  As the days passed, the calls for help spread, asking any acquaintance who might have any pull over the Marines at the Kabul airport for help.  Sometimes the calls go to the chain of command but those at the gates have more power; the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is eventually at the mercy of and relying upon the grunt, the lieutenant at the gate.

In the situation, the bureaucratic rules get bent and broken, which I imagine is common in extreme cases.

I also see the whole process is dependent on the internet--the appeals for help may be phoned, but the logistics needed to coordinate the arrival of a group at the appropriate airport gate at the time when the right American is there; they all rely on forms of internet communication: email, Twitter, Slack, 

I assume our exit from Saigon back in the day was somewhat similar, but without the internet the connections were much more limited.

Complexity of Modern Life

 Had to go to my bank branch today and talk to a real person, who was very helpful BTW.  It was the first time in years.  I had told a bank rep on the phone earlier that I was confident I could follow the instructions in their online tutorial and manage the matter online.  

I was wrong.  Whether it's bad memory or fact, I got very confused, partly because of what I perceived as changes in the way the website operated, partly because the software I was running didn't work according to my expectations.  I thought, if you can fill out some fields in a form on line, you ought to be able to fill out all of them online.  As it turned out, filling out the remaining fields with ink was fine.  

I think part of what's happening these days is the addition problem--we add new programs or new features to old programs and we change the organizations.   But the new or changed is not tested to be consistent and compatible with the old.  The builders of the new have a different take, a different approach,, to their construction, so users/clients/customers find their expectations are faulty.  

My wife and I experienced that today, but when I read posts on the FSA employee group on Facebook I see county office employees (and presumably their farmers) having similar problems with what Congress and the administration do. 

Weaponized Globalization

 Here's the first of a thread in which Henry Farrell updates the thesis of a previous book in light of today's developments:

1. Six stories in the last few days about the weaponization of the world economy. It's very strange for @ANewman_forward and me to see the logic of our 2019 article (and forthcoming book - Underground Empire - Holt 2023) playing out. https://t.co/Z742KIljsl

— Henry Farrell (@henryfarrell) October 12, 2022

The thread is interesting. But I've a "but".  I remember back in the early Clinton administration when there was a big controversy over export controls on 486 chips (the hot PC cpu of the day). The Times made a big thing out of it, in my view misunderstanding  the problems of coordinating regulations between two cabinet departments.  Anyhow, Moore's law quickly made the 486 a dead issue.  It suggests to me that the "weaponization" which Farrel describes might be a bit more impressive on the surface, than it is when you get into the details. 

Bottom line: It's difficult for bureaucrats to keep up with innovation; even more difficult for Congress to keep up.

States Rights and Bureaucracy

 Reading Dr. Deborah Brix's "Silent Invasion", her memoir of her work in the pandemic. It's basically chronological, and I'm just about 2 weeks in.

She is trying to maneuver among the various camps in the Trump administration:

• economics interests such as Sec. Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, worried about economic impacts.
• politicos like Joe Grogan worried about political impacts.
• CDC scientists worried about science and being right.
• HHS bureaucrats who worry about implementation.
• Poli-scis, like Bob Redfield who's head of CDC and Tony Fauci, who's reluctant to get beyond the data.

Based on her experience in Pepfar--fighting HIV in Africa, she believes in the importance of data and worries about asymptomatic spread of virus.  She's also concerned about being a woman in a male world and an outsider/newcomer to the administration's effort.

Most of all she's concerned about maneuvering the players towards what she sees as important. 

A big hurdle is the lack of timely detailed data.  She explains that CDC did not require data from the states; indeed they were afraid of antagonizing state officials and had the history of coaxing them to cooperate.  I see this as fitting into a pet idea of mine--the fact that few federal government bureaucracies directly deal with citizens--FSA being one of the few. 

Asking Questions

 Finished Sec. Esper's book. One point I think worthy of commenting.  Esper, along with Gen. Milley, found the former guy to be very erratic, often reacting to what he saw on Fox or heard from his last contact, and sometimes with highly unrealistic ideas of what could be accomplished (as in withdrawals from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Africa).

According to Esper they often challenged Trump's wild hairs by raising lots of questions, often on the logistics of implementation, sometimes on legal issues involving internatonal law or the law of war.  That reaction accounts for Trumpians concerns over the "deep state" stalling.

Elsewhere I recently ran across a description of how environmentalists and NIMBY types delay and delay proposals for new pipelines (like the one Sen. Manchin got fast tracked as part of the IRA deal) by continually raising questions and legal issues.

So, I like Esper's questions, but am less enthusiastic about NIMBYism. Where do you draw the line, can you, between valid issues and stalling?  Because a new project involves unknowns, questions are inevitable and you can never resolve them all.  

How to Build Infrastructure and State Capacity

 Ezra Klein has an essay on building government infrastructure. Some thoughts on the topic, most unrealistic in today's polity:

• review and revise the statistical infrastructure. As I've written before, my guess is that the various statistical agencies of the government are operating in the context of yesterday's world. Because statistics is a boring subject, it doesn't attract much controversy or oversight.  
• there's lots of real-time data out there, as we're reminded regularly in articles voicing concerns about consumer privacy.  Can the government tap that?
• concerns about privacy mean that the census and other reports anonymized--is there a better approach to this?
• what gaps in statistical coverage have developed as the economy has changed over the last 40 years? 
• Jimmy Carter had a vision for changing the federal personnel system with the Senior Executive Service, making it more like the UK system.  IMO it's not worked as it was supposed to. 
• Slowly slowly the government is moving towards more standardization with gov.id and the US Digital Service. Maybe over many years the US will approach the UK in the degree of uniformity in govt sites.
• Probably should be more interaction between the various associatons of state and local government entities and the federal govt.  I'm just vaguely aware that such associations exist--like state legislature, county govts, sheriffs, etc. Possibly there is some formal interface which I don't know about
• Trying to encourage more standardization of state and local government operations would help, as shown by the problems with the unemployment insurance systems during the pandemic recession.
• Maybe giving each legal resident a no-charge banking account and govt email account  would be good.
• 
  

The Last Mile Problem

 I've used this term before, writing about government.  A slightly different focus this time: local government, schools, libraries, etc.

In theory these days there's lots more data available, in that data is mostly digital and most digital data can be accessed.  In the case of Ipswich, MA the 21st century has seen a gap develop:  in the 20th century the town published a "Town Report", a big volume containing a series of annual reports by each individual unit of town government, and there were a lot of them.  In the 20th century there were local newspapers which would run stories on important local issues, interviews with candidates for local office, etc.

Now in the 21st century the Town Report is no more; there's a website.  The newspapers are now online and much slimmed down.  The town has a website and a Facebook page.  Someone curious and adept can search out a lot of information, sometimes by links to reports by Massachusetts agencies, or from what seems to be a outfit providing business services.  But for the average citizen it's all confusing: just a lot of web pages and reports.

In other words there's no human intermediary, no institution which has developed over the ages to interpret the work of government for the average citizen.  Why is that:

• the leadership elite doesn't realize that the gap has resulted as the internet has evolved
• citizens usually don't have a driving interest in local government so aren't motivated to do research nor have they grown up with the internet so are lacking some tools to deal with the gap
• it's easy for bureaucrats to delegate the communication responsibility to others: in the past the news reporters, now the techies who are doing the websites, etc. 
• the result is there's no institution which has evolved over time to torture bureaucrats and make their living by interpreting data for citizens.

USDA and Rural Development

 Politico has a piece on USDA's challenges with rural development. Some excerpts:

“We were in the community earlier today of 130 people,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an interview last month as he toured the Delta region of Mississippi. “The mayor had zero full-time employees. There is no way that community could ever qualify or ever know how to qualify. Those are the communities we need to help.” 

The Agriculture Department oversees the largest set of programs focused on rural communities — roughly 40 — but there are more than 400 programs operating across the federal government

The wide swath of programs and the influx of money from Congress is intensifying long-standing concerns about how well federal money to help rural communities is getting to its intended recipients. In response, the White House has tasked the Agriculture Department with coordinating a pilot program, the Rural Partners Network, to help ensure the funding reaches the poorest and most underserved communities in the country. It is launching in five states and with three Native American tribes this spring to start, with plans to expand to another five, as well as Native Alaskan communities, in August.

 Rural Development staffing, specifically, has decreased by a third over the last decade, while their portfolio of responsibilities has increased by 80 percent, according to Justin Maxson, deputy undersecretary for rural development. In addition, 47 percent of Rural Development staff are eligible to retire.

This is Not Invented Here run rampant. Why do we have so many rural development programs--because everyone, in Congress and think tanks, everyone, thinks they have a better idea than what exists. So instead of modifying and improving an existing program, the incentive is to add a brand spanking new program you can boast to your constituents about, hopefully get reelected. 

Ignore the fact that it will taken the bureaucracy time to get up to speed on the program, even with the dubious assumption that what you've written into law makes some sort of sense.  So over decades of Congress doing their NIH thing,  the poor bureaucrat has to try to understand 40 programs, most of which, like ships, have attracted barnacles of interpretation.  And remember, the more time spent in trying to understand 40 programs means less time getting out and explaining them to the part-time unpaid mayor of a town with no stoplight, and helping her complete the forms and follow the process, much less implement a successful grant in the way Congress envisioned, long ago and far away.

So after years of this, and multiple attempts to reform and restructure the bureaucracy we come up with a new idea.  We need a new bureaucracy--the old one is too old, tired, disillusioned, and waiting to retire.  So instead of fixing those problems we'll create a new structure, where we can start from scratch and do it right.  We'll call it a pilot program--if it works we can expand it. Will we, the sponsors be around years later to assess its results and kill it, fix it, or expand it? 

ROTFLMAO

 

Essence of Decision-- II Then and Now

[I belatedly checked and saw I'd already posted on this book, so I'm changing the titles of the two posts so they make a series. ]Part of a planned series on Essence of Decision, a very interesting book using the Cuban missile crisis as the core example of three modes of analysis of how organzations work and act.  

 I'm struck by how much Kennedy got into the weeds during the crisis.  Even so, as Allison/Zelikow describe, there were still disconnects where State, Air Force and Navy were doing their thing unaware of or misunderstanding his orders and desires.

Thinking about that presidency and the one completed on Jan 20, 2021, it's like night and day.  Kennedy both by experience in the Navy and by inclination was hands-on; the former guy is hands-on only when it comes to furnishing his buildings or painting his airplane. LBJ, Nixon, and Carter would, I think, have been similarly involved, though with different perspectives, strengths, and weaknesses.  Ford I don't know well enough, but I have my doubts. Reagan and GWBush no.  

So America was lucky that the former guy never had a real crisis.

Another observation--the Soviet Union's communcation network between Moscow and Dobrynin in DC was marginally better than the 1941 network between Gen. Marshall and the Hawaii command (telegram delivered by Western Union).

And one more--Kennedy didn't have the option of a "surgical strike" on Cuba--dumb bombs on jet planes were too inaccurate.The authors say the decision to go with the blockade was due to that lack.  Maybe with today's missiles he would have quickly gone to a strike.  Then again, maybe Khrushchev wouldn't have  decided to install his weaponry.

Biden Bypassing Paperwork Reduction Act?

 I blogged a couple days ago about the website to request 4 free covid tests per household.  Vox has a piece related to it concerning "administrative burden"--which is bad. 

Using that term made me think: shouldn't there have been an OMB clearance number attached to the website for the necessary approval under the Paperwork Reduction Act?  After all it's getting information from 10 or more people?

I think my question points to the fact that Congress should revise and update the Act.

Sounds Like Advantage to Females?

 Steve Kelman reports on research in Federal Computer Week--"soft skills" help team performance. To me it reads as if teams will work better if they have at least one stereotypical woman.

Should Agency HQ's be in DC?

 One argument against the Trump administration's moves of BLM and the USDA agencies out of DC was the need to work closely with the rest of the administration and Congress.

There's a hint in this discussion of CDC director Walensky (the HQ is in Atlanta but she seems to be working from MA?) that CDC is being hurt by the location.

True Facts-I

 Some things are true, among them:

1. In American, and perhaps in all modern societies of reasonable complexity (i.e., possibly above tribes), there will be conmen who will find ways to exploit opportunities.  Their cons can range from affiliating with social movements to fraud (recently collecting unemployment) to crime (WSJ claims people are stealing from big box stores and reselling on the internet) to the Nigerian scam artists and the Rev. Jimmy Jones of Jonestown. A good bureaucrat must anticipate this; a good liberal must design government policies accordingly.

Protecting Our IT Infrastructure--and Bureaucracy

 Fred Kaplan has a Slate article on the problem of preventing attacks on IT infrastructure.  NSA has the charter to prevent attacks from foreign countries, but is prohibited from handling attacks based in the US, which is the loophole used by the recent Tradewinds attacks

Secretaries Gates (DOD) and Napolitano (DHS) had a plan to fill the hole, but Kaplan's piece gives the sorry history of how the workings of bureaucracy, NIHism, and different policy outlooks made the plan fail. 

Working across organizational divisions is always problematic.  VA and DOD have the problem of health records between active/reserve military and veterans; the FBI and NSA have the problem in counter-intelligence operations; State and DOD have the problem of state-building (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan); SCS and ASCS had the problem in handling sodbuster/swampbuster problems. 

Silos.  You can't live without them, you can't live with them.

Bureaucracy Extremes

Started reading "Midnight at Chernobyl" today.  It's been around the house for a while since we saw the TV series based on it,  but hadn't gotten to it until today.

Then I just got off the Facebook group for current and retired FSA employees (mostly field employees but some DC and retirees). I like to keep up with what's happening there. 

There's a big contrast between the rigid bureaucracy of the Soviet Union and the more free floating discussion of issues and techniques in the Facebook group. I wonder how much of that is American versus Russian and how much is technology enabling exchange of ideas. 

I think it was true in the old days of ASCS that there was pretty good sharing of ideas within a state, and perhaps some across state lines based on personal connections.  Back in the 90's we tried to develop the sharing by having "train the trainer" courses with county people mixed in with the state people.  Having the internet and Facebook now facilitates the exchange even more.  

Multiple Communication Channels--CFAP

 Back in the day I remember catching flak from state specialists when the various agricultural media outlets--magazines and radio--came out with program announcements and details before our procedures from DC had hit them. 

I suspect the problem has become even more complex.  An example:

My twitter feed is announcing a freeze of CFAP:

Biden just froze CFAP aid to farmers program. https://t.co/dOx5Lf6B62

— NYFarmer (@NYFarmer) January 28, 2021

The farmers.gov site has the notice:  

I'm sure the FSA directives system will take a while to catch up. 

Some Sympathy for Gen. Perna

 General Perna is the chief operating officer for Warp Speed, which is now taking some flak for the seemingly slow progress of vaccinating for covid-19.

I never had to deal with his problem, but I have been involved in rolling out programs affecting thousands of counties and a million or so people on a crash basis. The difference between his problems and mine were great:

• the visibility to modern media.  ASCS/FSA programs were visible to local newspapers, but weren't followed nationally or internationally.
• an organizational structure which reached to the end user, the farmer, and one which had long experience in crash programs, dating back to 1933 when it was first set up.
• a program which usually was similar to previous programs--I can't judge how closely the covid-19 program matches the influenza program but it seems quite different.

Just from my back seat position of almost total ignorance, there's some things which didn't happen which should have:

• a tick-tock time schedule. Perna's already apologized for screwing this up. My impression is that there weren't sit-down meetings thrashing through every minute step, which could then be documented in a schedule to establish a base of understanding.
• implementation training. Because a vaccine is just a "jab" in the arm which everyone knows how to give, and because the implementers of the Warp Speed hadn't done this before, it was easy to assume (I assume) that no training was necessary. The reality is that training sessions get everyone on the same page, allow for the identification of areas where silos create problems, and permit exchange of ideas.
• as a former directives person, I suspect whatever directives were issued weren't really in a system.  Part of the problem seems to be lack of delineated authority, but it's also the human tendency to resist systems--to believe that a memo (or these days an email, etc.) handles the immediate problem, without realizing the proliferation of unsystematic directions can worsen problems.

I suspect, given the overall directive of relying on state and local governments to distribute and vaccinate, leaders assumed that those governments had systems in place.  Ass u me.  

I want see to the after-action reports and analyses of the effort to see how wrong this post is.

I also want to restate my sympathy for Perna (unusual for me to feel for a general): doing something new under scrutiny and a time line is a formula for bad public relations.

Why Was I Wrong on Trump's Power Over Agencies?

After Trump had been elected president, I remember pontificating to a cousin and his family about the way the deep state would limit Trump's impact, except I was talking in terms of the "iron triangle".   That was conventional wisdom back in the 1960's--the idea being that a combination of the bureaucrats in an agency, the members of Congress on the committees overseeing the agency, and the interest groups lobbying the members and the agency formed a powerful "iron triangle".

With that understanding I've been surprised by the Trump administration's ability to overturn a lot of regulations in a number of different agencies.  So what happened?

A number of things have changed over the last 60 years:

• There's a lot more regulation and regulatory agencies, for one thing, and agencies which existed in the 1960's have been given more regulatory responsibilities.  EPA and OSHA are just two of the new agencies, and FSA/NRCS are an example of the added regulatory authority. I think there's a lot more generalized hostility to regulation now than there used to be, partly because of this expansion.  
• In the 1960's the discussion was more about the ICC or CAB, two agencies which were eliminated in the Carter/Reagan deregulation effort.  In those cases there had been "regulatory capture"; the agencies served the interests of the regulated, less the general public.
• In the 1960's there was a general faith in government, which carried over to endorse the validity of agency regulation. That was one aspect of LBJ's Great Society.  But while the faith was sufficient to create the agencies, it didn't result in forming interest groups which could effectively power the agencies as envisaged in the "iron triangle" theory.
• In the 1960's committee chairmen were powerful, Congressional leadership not so much.  That meant the chairmen could get their way reasonably often, despite the opposition of the President.  With the Gingrich revolution the chairs have diminished power.