The Doomed Quest for Clarity in Government

 The Senate has passed a bill to: "expand and update an existing law on plain language requirements for agencies" which is to apply to all writing which the public might read, i.e., contracts, applications, etc. etc.

Why do I say it's doomed?  We've had almost 55 years worth of campaigning on the subject with no claims of victory.

I remember Jimmy Carter, who had a drive for "Plain English". See this website.  At that time we had to include in the clearance package for regulations a certification that the regulation had been reviewed for plain English. It turned into a rubber stamp exercise.  That's the way it goes in the bureaucracy.  The bureaucrat is most concerned that the document be acceptable to those who clear it, to her bosses whether in the chain of command or with veto power (often the lawyers). Those people are years removed from a personal concern with the clarity of government forms. 

Bureaucrat Love

 Love to see this:

Over my years in the public and private sectors, I've had people tell me: If only the government could work like business.

Well, the team at @USEdgov and @USDS built a Student Loan Forgiveness portal that processed 8 MILLION applications in the first 30 hours without a crash. https://t.co/VaaoTMVycg

— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) November 15, 2022

Ken Feinberg

 Saw the movie "Worth", which is based on Kenneth Feinberg's work administering compensation for victims of 9/11, and his book.

They juiced the movie by focusing on people and incidents, as movies do, but both are good.

The book is interesting from a bureaucratic standpoint--though Feinberg doesn't say so, he goes through the classic steps of American bureaucracy (for a distribution program*), reading the law (very general), meeting management (Attorney General Ashcroft and DOJ), writing regulations, creating forms to gather data, then selling the program, accepting some as participants, disqualifying others, then dealing with the friction between the bureaucratic model and the real reality, and finally issuing checks.

Feinberg had some experience before 9/11 with mediating and doing compensation, but afterwards he handled many more such situations.  It's interesting, because he doesn't endorse the 9/11 process as an example, particularly the use of "economic value" of a life, an after-the-fact life insurance program.  

* My government professor, Theodore Lowi, had categorized government programs into: redistribution, regulation, and distribution.

Our Sacrosanct Public Servants

It probably says something about our times and society when I note:  Dr. Fauci's status as a public servant is equivalent to that of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles back in my youth.

The Ultimate File Cabinet for Bureaucrats

Via Marginal Revolution, this piece on the biggest, baddest file cabinet you ever saw.

Three Reports and the Bureaucrats in Them

My wife liked the The Report so we're watching it again, Dec. 13, the same week the Washington Post is doing their "The Afghanistan Papers" rollout, and shortly after the IG's report on the Crossfire investigation was released.

I've not read the IG report yet, nor the report which The Report describes, and I am reading the Post articles on Afghanistan.

There may be some commonalities, as follows:

• there are two groups of bureaucrats in The Report--the CIA people and contractors involved with the "enhanced investigation measures" (i.e., torture) and the Feinstein staffer, Dan Jones, and his assistants who did the research and prepared the report.
• in Afghanistan there's military bureaucrats and civilian bureaucrats with many roles over many years.
• in the Crossfire investigation there's FBI personnel.

For Crossfire, we're offered two choices--either the FBI agents were incompetent or they were biased against Trump.  I think there's a third choice: they were focused on a big task and developed the blinders almost inherent in doing the job.

 

I think in all of the above cases the bureaucrats thought their job, their objective, was important (people find ways to make that true), and devoted their efforts to doing it.  CIA wanted to stop terrorism; Dan Jones wanted to understand and reveal torture; the military and civilians in Afghanistan wanted to stop terrorism, build a modern nation, or at least not "lose Afghanistan" on their watch; the FBI agents wanted to prevent Russian subversion. That's an idealistic description: very likely on many days and for many people it was just a matter of getting through the day, putting one foot ahead of the other, but knowing when they wrote the story of their life it would have this idealistic sheen to it, ignoring the drudgery and the missteps.

But we shouldn't underestimate the addictive power of doing an important job.  The popular examples of this are from Silicon Valley, the nerds who work round-the-clock to develop software. As we learned in 2000 with the tech crash, very often their dedication was wasted on bad ideas, ideas that had no viable business model.  "Confirmation bias" is real, but it's only a part of what goes on in these cases.

FL Olmsted: Bureaucrat

Reading a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted: "Genius of Place"

He's known as the creator of NYC's Central Park, his first big project just before the Civil War,.   But judging by his career through 1863 when he resigned from the United States Sanitary Commission, which he had serrved as executive secretary through its creation to Gettysburg, his true calling was as a bureaucrat.

USDA Reorganization--ERS

Government Executive has a good piece on the USDA announcement of a reorganization of the economics people, including a move of ERS outside of the DC area.  I've no expertise in this area, but when has that kept me from commenting?

My first reaction to the move was negative, but then I read the rationale in the piece: the difficulty of getting professionals to move to the high-cost DC area.  That makes sense to me.  I remember the problems we had back in the 80's and 90's in getting people to move--one reason why we ended up hiring program technicians from county offices under SCOAP.  Single women had less difficulty moving than did married men with families, the usual targets for hiring as program people in DC.

My third reaction is triggered by the discussion in the piece.  Distance in bureaucracy is critical.  The problem in attracting professionals to DC is not limited to ERS or USDA.  Apparently the locality pay differential doesn't work at these levels, and also USDA hasn't gotten the authority to offer bigger money for such positions (like doctors in HHS/NIH or attorneys elsewhere get).

Bureaucrat Gets a Bust

Not many bureaucrats get immortalized in bronze, but Pearlie Reed did. The piece has a reference to his founding the National Association of Professional Black NRCS Employees.  When you search that website it seems that Louis E. Wright may also have been a founder, or maybe "the" founder.

The Bureaucrat and Politics: Reagan and Me

The DOJ IG report is out.  Pro-Trump partisans see it as helping him; anti-Trump partisans see it as confirming Clinton lost the election due to Comey's announcements.  Both seem to agree that the Strzok-Page emails were beyond the pale, particularly his reassurance to Page that "we'll stop him" meaning stopping Trump from winning the election.  The only evidence he did anything to back up the promise is the idea he didn't work on the Weiner emails issue for a month because he was working on the Russian-collusion investigation.  At least in the discussions I've read there's little detail on this.

In defense of bureaucrats being able to separate personal opinions and professional duties I'll offer a story from the Reagan administration.  I was strongly opposed to Reagan's election, and remained so throughout his 2 terms.  I was in the habit of referring to him as "the senior idiot", and a boss of mine as "the junior idiot".  Although I don't remember saying that to my co-workers, I'm sure most of them knew I wasn't for him.  In ASCS at the time, at least in the program areas one was pretty well identified as Democrat or Republican.  While I steered away from active involvement and wasn't then contributing money, the players within the bureaucracy knew my tendencies.

Anyway, comes fall of 1982 and the Reagan administration decides to implement a legally-questionable multi-billion dollar program to both reduce CCC-owned surpluses and crop acreages without budget expenditures--the program known as Payment-in-Kind.  Because of my background on the administrative side I knew the people who needed to be involved to create the forms and handle the directives and regulations to implement the program.  Because of my experience on the program side I understood most of the complexities of creating the program, writing the regulations and the contract (the contract the OGC lawyers insisted on to provide a legal fig-leaf for the program), and dealing with Kansas City IT players, I was a key player in the implementation (Had a chance to watch Seeley Lodwick, then the Under Secretary ramrod morning coordination meetings, giving me an example of what to do, an example I dearly wish Obama had seen when implementing ACA.).

The bottom line: I and a lot of other bureaucrats did a good job and PIK was implemented.  We did it despite our political leanings, whether pro- or con- Reagan.

I've written before on this question: Trump trusts people working for him to be good soldiers, if not lickspittles, and support his positions even if they're very different than what the workers used to support.  (See Mulvaney, see Bolton.) The same should apply to FBI agents.

Addendum: I admit there's a difference between the FBI behavior I've seen described from articles on the OIG report and mine.  Some of the agents were more open in expressing their opinions to each other than I ever remember being.  That's a bit bothersome.   On the other hand, I'm sure many soldiers and marines involved in our years of recent wars openly voiced their adverse opinions, while still doing their jobs.

"The Bureaucrat You're Looking For?"

"My family and I have lived in Reston since 2001. My experience with the RA is probably just like the average RA Member’s. I’ve asked its blessing in buying, selling, and improving my homes. I’ve been dragged before the Design Review Board to straighten a few things out. Two sons were RA lifeguards. I am an FCPS substitute teacher and a Fairfax Dept of Family Services Volunteer. Mainly, though, I am a proud bureaucrat. I know from experience that cooperative bureaucracy is greater than the sum of its parts. As a Foreign Service Officer for over three decades, my own specific work fit the big picture of representing our country and advancing our national interest in Washington or at U.S. embassies abroad. When I then ran two embassies, it was my job to forge consensus among different USG agencies to promote common policy. I’m the bureaucrat you’re looking for"


How can I not vote for this candidate for the Reston Association Board? Both a sense of humor and a proud bureaucrat.

(From the candidates statements here.)

I'm Not Sane--per K. Williamson

Kevin Williamson has a column on institutions and the FBI, writing:

"And no sane person believes for a nanosecond that those “lost” communications represent anything other than willful obstruction of justice." 

Personally, I'd be willing to bet that the reasons the emails were "lost" can be traced to a long lasting gap in bureaucratic cultures.  Specifically, the records management people have always focused on paper preservation, and rarely have ranked high in the pecking in bureaucracies.  It's taken 20 years for NARA to start to accommodate electronic records, and I suspect they've yet to achieve full integration.  

The IT folks, on the other hand, have a culture focused on the future and a bit on the present, but rarely on the past.  C.P. Snow in the 1950's had a book entitled "Two Cultures", arguing that science and the  humanities didn't talk to each other, and they should.  Today's divide between archives and IT is worse.

In the middle of all this are the people who have to implement IT rules and archive requirements--the users.  These are the people who leave their passwords at the default, or use admin1234. 

Toss in Murphy's Law, and I'll bet there was no willful obstruction of justice.

Not the First Time--an Exception

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to a piece of his on the development of nuclear missile subs, triggered by problems India is having. 

"In retrospect, the George Washington class SSBNs were a fabulous engineering success, entering service quickly, with few problems, and packing a huge punch. All of the NATO boats were relatively quiet and could threaten the USSR from long-range. On the other hand, it took the USSR nearly a decade to produce a meaningful deterrent boat. It has taken China nearly three decades, despite extensive experience in both countries in submarine construction and operation."

He omits the credit due one of the greatest bureaucrats we have ever produced: Admiral Hyman Rickover.   So an exception to my "Harshaw rule" (you never do things right the first time): "unless you're Hyman Rickover"

Bureaucracies Across the World

The World Bank blog has a post on a survey of bureaucracies, 5 points, remembering these aren't US bureaucrats but those the World Bank deals with:

1. Bureaucrats aren't old.
2. Older bureaucracies aren't massive
3. Bureaucracies aren't overwhelmingly male
4. Bureaucrats aren't undereducated
5. Bureaucrats aren't underpaid

Drum and the IRS Oversight Issue

Kevin Drum posts on the IRS oversight of nonprofits I visited earlier.

IRS Bureaucrats Did Some Things Right

According to a Politico report the IG, IRS bureaucrats applied heightened scrutiny to some liberal nonprofits on much the same basis as they did to conservative ones: looking at clues from their titles and connections.  The conventional wisdom, as I understand it, is this is wrong, wrong, wrong.  Every nonprofit should get the same amount of scrutiny, and using clues is akin to racial profiling.

This is the issue the Republicans made hay out of in the Obama administration, doing several Congressional investigations,  forcing Lois Lerner to retire, and calling for criminal prosecutions.  I didn't spend much time delving into the details, but I still want now to state two positions:

• if you don't have unlimited resources, it's good bureaucratic strategy to focus your efforts.  That's the theory Obama used in establishing DACA, and it applies for more than just prosecutorial  work. So to me it was perfectly rational for the IRS bureaucrats to devote more attention to groups linked to the Tea Party and to Acorn, than a nonprofit set up to fund local recreational facilities, for example.   I agree it would be bad if the bureaucrats showed a partisan bias, but based on the Politico report it seems they didn't.
• the problem, as it so often is, is Congress in writing a bad law, made worse by bad decisions in the past.  As I understand it, nonprofits can receive tax-exempt donations only if they're not "political ."  What does "political" mean--Congress didn't give a definition and IRS has in the past permitted "some" activity which would seem to a layman to be political, expanding more recently to be less than 50 percent.   That means IRS has to examine the nonprofit in depth, which requires resources, which gets back to the need to focus their attention.

Seems to me it would be better to  worry about interlocking directorates and size of the effort.  Go after the big boys.

Bureaucrat of the Day: S. Petrov

Applying the term loosely to any one who holds a position in an organization and has to follow rules, or who makes the rules for others.

Farewell, Stanislav Petrov, with obits in both the Times and Post

The Best British Comedy Ever Made

The best British comedy series ever made is about bureaucrats.

The Importance of the Bureaucracy

Vox says the White House failed timely to book a Hamburg hotel.  Just a reminder that smooth operations depend on lots of people doing their bit, people called bureaucrats.  We don't know where the breakdown was.  I could imagine someone being turned off by Trump and not taking the initiative to remind the chain of command that booking a hotel was necessary.  I could imagine a vacancy in the usual chain of command for travel arrangements, perhaps a failure of liaison between the White House and State.  I could imagine a Trump appointee in the White House just not knowing, not having been informed, or forgetting to book a hotel, just because it's their first time and the Harshaw Rule is: Never do things right the first time.

Types of Bureaucrats

World Bank has a piece on types of bureaucrats in developing countries, applying a typology from an old board game.

Players may select one of four lifestyles, each with its own advantages and disadvantages: lifer, over achiever, empire builder, or hustler. To be promoted from level to level, a player will need the required number of promotional prerequisites and that's where the fun comes in. All sorts of things can happen. Players may be demoted. They may be involved in scandals. They may become involved in power plays. They may have to go before a Grievance Committee. A player may even go bankrupt and have to start all over from the bottom again. There is no one sure formula for success. Players will have to stay out of trouble and use all their cunning to succeed.