Justice for Black Farmers-- A Systemic Problem

 One of my problems with the draft legislation S.4929, JBF, is it is piling new programs on old programs. (The text has been posted on Congress.gov.)

In a rational government Congress would evaluate the success or failure of existing rural development and farm loan programs, change the law where needed, and reorganize the bureaucracy. If current programs are successful we could add resources, if they have weaknesses we could reform them, if they're too bad we could kill them.  But such changes wouldn't convince the advocates that reforms were real  and therefore wouldn't reward the Congressional sponsors. So instead we get more programs, with somewhat different approaches, 

Bottom line: it makes life more difficult for the bureaucracy.

What's Good in America?

 From Cesar Hidalgo comes a twitter thread describing three things he finds good about America (although he's leaving for more academic opportunity in France).

A tweet:

Today I am leaving the US.
With my family we are exploring a new life in the south of France.
I’ve been in the US for more than 16 years. I earned my citizenship & experienced many ups & downs. But I am grateful. The US was good to me in many ways ...
/1 pic.twitter.com/YRIQrvxbsP

— César A. Hidalgo (@cesifoti) October 17, 2020

My summary of the thread:

• people value quality work (over cost)
• people value entertainment, even in speaking to business audiences
• our bureaucracy is simple!!! 

Let me expand on the last item, since it is so surprising.

He's talking specifically about the running of a small business, and comparing it to the notary-ridden bureaucracy in countries whose legal codes are based on Roman law, not common law. I think it might be related to the De Soto thesis, arguing the need for well-defined and documented property ownership.

A Test of Leadership

Back in the day I got bawled out by my deputy division director for cursing at an employee.  I deserved it.  I think it was that conversation where he discussed a fellow branch chief.  Lou was a WWII vet, whose ship IIRC had been sunk on D-Day.  He was a voluble guy, loud and boisterous with a temper.  But Bob pointed to him as a good leader, simply because he was consistently Lou.  His employees and those who dealt with him knew, at least after the initial getting-to-know-you, that what you saw was what you got, no surprises.  I needed that, to be consistent.  (Not sure I ever achieved that.)

I think of that lesson from time to time, never more these days when considering our President.  His approval rating on dealing with the pandemic has not been good.  Meanwhile some of our governors have very good ratings, particularly Gov. Cuomo. I don't follow him closely, but it seems to me his record of decision-making hasn't been all that great.  I account for the difference in ratings between him and Trump by consistency by the one and inconsistency by the other.

Legislating Good Norms

Our current president has broken a lot of the norms and a few of the laws which existed before 2017.  One of the tasks of whoever succeeds him will be to figure out how to return to those norms.  One pathway is for Congress to pass and the president to sign laws which have that effect.  One such effort is already under way, as described in this post from FCW.  Rep. Porter is proposing to tighten the rules on "acting" officials.  President Trump has admitted he likes to have acting officials so he has more power: he can intimidate them more easily and fire them if they won't bend.  In normal times presidents and Congress acted reasonably quickly to fill most vacancies, although they were instances where a Senate would put a hold on a nominee in order to pressure the administration to take some particular action.

My opinion of Porter'sbill: we shouldn't have needed it but we do. The bureaucracy does not work well with "acting"officials at the top.

Iron Triangle: I Was Wrong

Soon after the 2016 election we had lunch with cousins we hadn't met before, and the future under our new president was a topic of conversation.  As a longtime Washington resident I offered my opinion, partly shaped by my experience and partly by my long-ago college education. My government courses had included the concept of the "iron triangle", a congruence of interests among government bureaucrats in an agency, members of Congress with a particular interest in the agency's operations, and lobbyists/NGO's. 

I argued that the iron triangle would limit the amount of change Trump could effect.

I was wrong.  And I think the iron triangle concept is limited.  The iron triangle works fine in situations where the NGO's, Congress and the agency can work together to advance their interests, taking positive action.  I think the concept was developed at a time where you could say the farm lobby, farm Congressmen, and USDA agencies could work together in what was called the "farm bloc".

I think the 3.25 years of the Trump administration have shown bigger change is possible:

• for many agencies there's deep disagreement among the relevant NGO's and Congressmen--the divide between the "ins" and the "outs" has gotten much bigger, so there's more energy to change direction in EPA, Interior, etc.
• Congress has given itself new tools, specifically the Congressional Review Act, to reverse agency actions, while SCOTUS seems more and more likely to limit agency discretion.
• personnel makes a difference.  In the old days, the "ins" and "outs" would alternate and with each having expertise and, to some extent, an indoctrination in agency culture. With the Trump administration there seems to be less of that, perhaps because people (as is the case with foreign policy) reluctant to serve under the President. 
• the president, through force of personality and unique traits, and lack of experience with governing is willing and able to break old norms.
• the base of support for the president packs a lot more anger and energy than a president's base usually has.: 

What's the Cost Per Page of a Government Manual

$840.  According to this Defenseone article.  The 100,000 pages of manuals for Air Force One will cost $84 million.

As someone who spent years of his life writing and editing manuals, I'm interested.  A scattershot of points:

• The $84 figure isn't a bogus accounting trick like the infamous hammer and toilet seat of the past (Reagan admin, maybe?). The contract is for $84 million, so it's actual expense to the taxpayers.
• I've no handle on the reasons for the volume of manuals--it seems like overdoing it, but it's the President's aircraft and the military can over specify things.  As I read the article, it's basically taking the existing manuals for the 747 and working in the material for all the customizations and additions being made to the plane to make it ready for the next president.  
• I wonder about those manuals--the 747 has been around forever, or at least for 50 years, having first entered service in 1970.  Given bureaucracy, there's some likelihood that portions of the manuals were first written 50 years ago.  I'd hope that's not the case.  But when bureaucracies keep COBOL systems working for 50 years, similar dynamics could have kept manual text and organization the same for 50 years.
• It's probably inevitable that manual writing would be separated from the people who actually know the plane but it's a danger point--raises the possibility of miscommunication between the doer and the writer.
• I wonder about innovations in manual design and delivery.  I know some maintenance manuals for some functions in the world, I forget what and where, have been computerized and redesigned to work through visual displays, like the former Google Glasses or virtual reality displays.  I believe some apps have been released which allow you to point a phone at a product on store shelves and pull up information on it, like nutrition data, etc.  It seems to me logical that manuals could use a similar delivery system.  If so, are "pages" the right term, or has terminology changed the definition of a "page"?

My Sympathy to the Trump Administration

The bureaucrats in the Trump administration have my sympathy.  I've played a role in the FSA/USDA bureaucracy during times when we had to implement programs, new programs in a rush. What I didn't have to deal with was:

• social media--telephones and email were bad enough.
• the general public--only farmers and those who do business with them were paying attention, but that was more than enough.(The Senate minority leader was never on TV as he is now worrying about how we were going to implement.)
• a heated political and partisan atmosphere..
• IIRC 3 weeks was about the tightest time frame I had to deal with, which is a few days longer than those implementing the third stimulus act, signed a week ago.
• I think they have to construct or reconstruct the bureaucratic infrastructure needed to support the programs.  Things like setting up accounting structures, finding office space and providing IT for the new hires, etc. etc.
• the topper no. 1--doing this all in an environment where in-person meetings are dangerous and teleworking is new.
• the topper no. 2--top leadership which is either missing (as in vacancies) or missing (as in Trump).

There's probably more differences but those are the ones coming to mind now.

In a crisis situation there are a lot of decisions to be made and people do the best they can.  It's easy for kibitzers to criticize because they don't have the same information.  They have different information, often misinformation, but sometimes valuable information about aspects of reality which the bureaucrats have missed or aren't aware of.  It's hard to distinguish between the good and the unfounded.

I'll try to remember these factors when I criticize the administration on their handling of the programs, which I'm sure I will.

Hemp Insurance and Bureaucracy

Farmers.gov has a page on the announcement of hemp insurance and other aspects of growing hemp.

They note the need to report acreage to FSA, including their hemp grower registration number.  I searched on that and found this page for Virginia.  Virginia, of course, requires its own series of acreage reports

IMO this is a classic instance of how bureaucratic silos develop.  Something new comes up, and existing bureaucracies are assigned the job of implementing rules/laws. But since it's likely that the new responsibility doesn't fit neatly within the scope of one bureaucracy, we get duplication. 

I'd predict that 10 years from now the Virginia Hemp Growers Association will have formed and will be lobbying for a simplification and consolidation of paperwork requirements.

"Peak Document"

That's a term used in the title of the presidential address at the American Historical Association meeting. What McNeill is talking about is the surge of information coming not from documents but from science--especially genetics.

It's a valid subject, of course, but I admit when I first saw it my thoughts went in another direction; the change in sources in the current and coming eras because of digital media.  An example, when I was hired by ASCS people had improved the document management systems involved. The Commodity Credit Corporation board had a permanent secretary and an assistant, the board made decisions based on "dockets" which were systematically filed.  Most decisions within ASCS generated paper documents, memos and letters, all routed through clearance channels and eventually filed in the Secretary's Records or administrator's.   

As a failed historian I was intrigued by the processes.  The paper files didn't capture everything--there was a lot going on in the agency which wasn't fully  documented (particularly the political maneuvers) where the documents were like an iceberg, only a small part visible

By the time I left FSA, this picture was changing.  Partially it was the result of personnel changeover--the institutional memory of the reasons behind practices had been or was being lost.  Partly it was a change of norms--new people and new problems had new ways of doing things, often resulting in faster action but a diminished historical record.  Much of it had to do with automation, both the problems and processes of implementing policy with compers in the county offices and the new powers of communication conferred by new technology.

One example was the "wire notice".  Urgent messages to field offices would be sent by telegraph, which meant going through the telegraph office, therefore required official authorization, and permitted central filing of the message.  Once email arrived, it was possible for anyone to email anything to anyone with no central file. (Of course, this didn't happen immediately.) And for a number of years there was really no system for recording and filing such messages.  Supposedly after 30 years NARS has enforced systems in the agencies, but I'm dubious. 

The bottom line--in the 1970's a historan could look at the official files in the National Archives and do a reasonable history.  I doubt that's feasible for th 2000-2010 perioc

Lesson: In Washington Read the Footnotes

Notoriously, the request for the FISA court to approve surveillance of Page etc. included a footnote describing the Steele dossier.  The conservatives and liberals disputed whether a footnote was sufficient notice to the court of the possible bias of the dossier.

Now Just Security has a long description of the to and fro between DOD and OMB on President Trump's withholding aid to Ukraine, which was implemented by footnotes.  It seems that here DOD did read the footnotes, but it's not clear why footnotes were the appropriate vehicle for the notice from OMB to DOD--perhaps because other readers might be expected to ignore them?

I wonder: these days are budding scholars told how to use footnotes and trained to read them?

Discrimination in SS

Been reading Eleanor Lansing Dulles' autobiography (it was recommended somewhere in a survey of memoirs by women).  She was the younger sister of Allen Dulles (CIA) and John Foster Dulles (Sec. of State).  Born in 1895 she had a varied career, meeting almost everyone, working mostly in economics in varied positions, from WWI relief, research in Europe, college teaching, service in the government with the initiation of Social Security through reconstruction of Austria after WWII and then the State Dept, which is where I'm at now.

Anyhow on page 152 she comments on exclusions from the initial social security setup ministers and teachers.That's a reminder that social security was an innovation for America, and it was focused on wage workers in industry and services.  Its limitations were, as I've argued before, not particularly intended to discriminate against African-American farm workers, but to enhance the chances it could be successfully implemented.

I may blog later about Dulles' and sex--she struggled with discrimination.

Technocrats and Bureaucrats

Interesting post here, arguing that Robert Moses represented the peak of technocratic government. As some of the costs of technocracy became apparent (see Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro) progressives turned against technocracy

Beneath America’s deep frustration with government is something else: a deep-seated aversion to power. Progressives resolved decades ago to prevent the public from being bulldozed by another Robert Moses—and the project to diffuse power to the public has succeeded. But the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. The left’s zeal to hamstring government has helped to burnish the right’s argument that government would mess up a one-car parade. The new protections erected to guard against Moses’ second coming have condemned new generations to live in civic infrastructure that is frozen in time.

The piece traces the history of attempts to reinvent Penn Station and the surrounding area, attempts led by a variety of strong-willed people, each with a piece of power, but none able to get past the veto points erected by post-1960 reforms.

As a former bureaucrat, I'm instinctively sympathetic to technocracy.  But I also recognize that power without restraints, like Moses', can result in misguided dreams and worse misdeeds.

Cleaning Files and Voter Suppression

Jennifer Rubin in the Post cites a Brennan Center report on voter list purges. The report emphasizes that counties which are no longer required to pre-clear changes in their electoral operations under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act have increased their purge rates (roughly from 8 percent to 10 percent a year).

Rubin is concerned. 

I'm not, likely because I had some experience with the problems of maintaining lists in the past.  The bottom line: it's difficult to keep a list of name and addresses up to date because there's really no cost, no push to identify errors.  An example: one of my past employees resigned from ASCS relatively quickly--IIRC her husband in another agency decided to take an early out and they decided to move to Florida.  So her exit process was rather hurried and incomplete.  After I retired I would occasionally search the online USDA employee directory, just to see who still worked there.  For about 10 years, I'd still find Jane's name in the phone directory.

The way FSA counties were supposed to update their name and address list was to do an address check (not the right terminology) requested with USPS once a year..  I'm sure some didn't do it, and it wouldn't have been fool proof.  I gather that some purging of voter lists done differently, bouncing a voter file against another  database.  The problem there is using names to match. One of my employees noted her home county had a lot of people named "Johnson".

Although the color coding of the report is poor, some of the higher ranking states in purge rates are Maine, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin.  In some states (Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma, Wisconsin) the rates among counties are very similar; in other states (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi) the rates vary widely among counties.

Without knowing the process being used to purge the files and the history of past purges at the county level, I think it's dangerous to draw general conclusions.  As a good liberal I am, of course, a bit suspicious of the actions of those counties which used to be covered by Section 5.  But I don't think the Brennan Center proved any wrongdoing. 

A final consideration: purging voter rolls isn't very important IMHO--having a dead or moved voter on list offends my bureaucratic sensibility and it wastes computer storage, but is very unlikely to open the door for any voting fraud

Trump and Bureaucracy

A tweet:

So much of modern administrative law is premised on the “presumption of regularity”—an assumption that, all things being equal, government generally acts in good faith and follows its own rules.

A President with this approach to the law makes it hard to defend that presumption. https://t.co/1WzziYnrFh

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) July 21, 2019

Score One for Neustadt

One conclusion from the Mueller report is that prof. Neustadt, author of the classic book on Presidential Power, wins again.

His thesis was that presidential power was not automatic, not like starting a car and driving it, but it was a matter of respect and reputation.  Certainly Trump has little of either, hence his attempts at obstruction were foiled by resistance of his subordinates to carrying out his orders.  Nixon had his "Germans", Erlichman and Haldeman, who'd carry out his orders.  Not so Trump.

The Advantage of Two-Party Rule

This Govexec piece (originally in Propublica) describes an instance of how people can learn to game government rules, in this case the HUD rules for federally-subsidized housing. If it's worthwhile, people are ingenious enough and motivated enough to figure out games, whether it's the "Potemkin Villages" of the Czars or installing walls in a building to hide major defects.

With two-party rule you establish some incentives to find dirt on the other guys.  Even there is no dirt, there's the human incentive to make change, to throw out the bathwater because it was the pet project of the other party.

Silos: Culture Versus Change

I've written before on the problems of combining organizations--typically I've seen the problem through the lens of organizational culture--for example, ASCS and SCS had very different cultures when I was working.

But I saw something today which caused me to think of another consideration.  The story: I was doing my morning walk, coming through the Hunters Mills shopping center, which now is your standard strip mall. In a couple places I saw they'd placed cobblestones and fine stone next to the curb.  The places were at the corner of an intersection and the logic of placing the stones was to handle cases where the turning radius of a long tractor trailer was larger than the radius of the intersection, meaning the rear wheels of the trailer would jump the curb and put ruts into the grass.

I came up with a "just so" story to explain this:  back in the day when Reston's roads were designed, some 30-50 years ago, tractor trailers were shorter than they are now.  So you had one organization working on road design standards and other organizations designing tractor trailers to provide the most cost efficient transportation.  Each organization had its own focus and its own evolutionary history and impulses, their culture.  But what's important is the changes happening within the organization, not any cultural conflict between the two organizations. 

So, coming back to ASCS and SCS--the bigshots in USDA could look at them and see a static picture, meaning changes ordered by management would be the only thing going on (particularly when IT types were ignorant of programs).

Perdue Tanks USDA Morale?

From a Govexec piece on agencies with dropping employee satisfaction:

In March, the Agriculture Department announced that it was severely restricting its telework program, reducing the amount of time employees can work remotely from four days a week to one, or two per pay period. The policy change reportedly came after Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue was unable to find an employee in the office on a day that person was telecommuting.

I've some sympathy with Perdue.  He's likely had little to no experience with telecommuting (not that I have any, having retired before it was really approved) and it could have been a shock the first time you try to find someone who's at home, working.

I found this anonymous report from inside USDA  which provides an employee view of the importance of telecommuting, but disappointly has no juicy gossip about the inciting incident.

The real point is something Perdue as a politician should know--it's never easy to take a benefit from a taxpayer or an employee.

Sometimes You Can't Win: Bureaucracy

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution each day has a page of links. On Wednesday he had two of interest:

1. Has delegation in American government become much worse?
3. What made ARPA work well?

If you don't click, you'd think the answer to 1 is Congress is delegating a lot more to the executive and that is bad.  When you click on 3, you find part of the answer is lots of authority was delegated to ARPA.

Records Management in the Trump White House

This is--I lack the words.

The management of official records is a serious business, but one can only laugh.