Ben Franklin on Lead

My father had to switch from chemical engineering to farming because of lead poisoning, so this letter by Ben Franklin, in a post at Boston 1775, is of particular interest.  The old bureaucrat was one of the smartest men ever.

The Right Stuff and Bureaucratic Reports

Was Chuck Yeager a "bureaucrat"?  I guess I'd go too far to call the exemplar of the "right stuff" such, but this laconic bureaucrat's report of his breaking of Mach 1 is worth noting.

(Incidentally, I'm not sure why the National Archives website is still up.)

Bureaucrat of the Day--Michael Hoffman

He's head of the NY Passport office and seems to be doing a great job. 
The full Slate article is interesting, seeing a balance of autonomy within the standards of the larger organization as critical.

Question:  when will Yelp have profiles of the various USDA field offices?

[Seriously, I expect never, because the clientele of these offices doesn't change very often, so there's not much point in posting something on Yelp.  Then again, these days you never know.}

[Updated to add reference to Slate.]

Concrete Canoes and Leadership

What makes a concrete canoe float?  That question, along with some others, is answered in this NYTimes article today. 

Who knew the civil engineers had a whole competition among colleges to make concrete canoes?  And it's been going on for years? 

Buried in the text is the observation that success in the competition takes a combination of leadership and finding people willing to do the drudgery, like sanding down the concrete so the canoe moves well through the water.   Leadership and drudgery are the keys to success in many things, IMHO.

On Public Service, Bureaucrats and Libraries

Neil Irwin at Wonkblog has an interview with Paul Volcker on his new ideas for governance. 

One exchange led me to do a Google ngram, comparing the occurrences of "public service" and "bureaucrat".  In American books the frequency for the two started out with "public service" more frequent and "bureaucrat" less, but the two lines cross about 1976 so we now think more of "bureaucrats" and less of "public service".  "Public service" peaked in 1920 or so.

That's bad.


But I'd like to recognize a very good bureaucrat, Ginny Cooper, the retiring head of the DC public libraries.  Among other things, in 7 years she tripled the number of books checked out.  I remember using first the Mt. Vernon building, then the MLK building on G street a lot in my years in the city.  Libraries to my mind are more important than schools--you know some of the students in the school are not interested, but you know all of the people in the library are interested.  (Except for the homeless, which is a problem in Reston as well as DC.)

FCIC, Fraud, and Pigford

Sen. Hagan of NC got an amendment to the farm bill passed, allowing some use of the crop insurance fund to look for fraud.  Her actions were inspired by the biggest crop insurance fraud yet discovered, located in eastern NC. (Not sure whether it was the biggest in money terms ($100 million), or in the numbers of people involved.  .  I was led to these articles:

• biggest crop insurance fraud
• Stokes

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this is a reminder that fraud is an equal opportunity temptation.  Also a reminder that whenever there's a new program, or a steep increase in an old program, the incentive to defraud is raised, and bureaucrats would be well advised to increase their counter-measures.  

Bureaucrats Suck at Prediction

The release of the notes from the Federal Reserve Board's deliberations in 2007 causes one blogger to conclude:

One lesson here is that our public officials, even the hard-working, highly intelligent ones, are far from demi-gods. They have the same blind spots and tendency toward analytical failures of anyone else. Secrecy allows public officials, whether in the world of monetary policy or others like national security, to create a Wizard of Oz like illusion of holding great power, of maneuvering levers with information in hand that mere mortals can only dream of. When reporters interview a high official, there is often a subtext the high official aims to convey: If you knew what I know, you would understand the supreme wisdom of my actions.
Seeing what the Fed officials were saying privately, to each other, in 2007 is a reminder that this isn’t always so, and just because a person has more information, it doesn’t mean he or she has the right answer.

The Oscars and Bureaucrats

The papers today note some of the top movies are favorable to DC figures, although the Post calls them "bureaucrats".  I don't think Lincoln qualifies as a bureaucrat, he was a politician and a good one.  The heroes of "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty" could be called bureaucrats I guess, and since they'll never make a movie, good, bad or indifferent, about a USDA employee, it's about the best we can do.  (I enjoyed "Lincoln" and "Argo", haven't seen ZDT yet.)

Bureaucrats and Civil Servants

Other English-speaking countries seem not to have the prejudice against bureaucrats we have in the US.  Based on Google alert, in the US it's a pejorative term, while in other countries it's more descriptive.

In India, there's even a horoscope for bureaucrats (hat tip Marginal Revolution).

Thank Goodness Washington's Not Battleground

I see the great bureaucrats in Washington state have now succeeded in counting 58 percent of their ballots. 

The Dispersion of Takent and Character

Barking Up the Wrong Tree has a post on a study showing how widely dispersed are talent and character.

What they found is that in low complexity jobs, workers’ outputs do not vary much, and the best worker is usually not much better than the average worker. As the jobs become more complex however, there’s more and more variation, and the difference between the best worker and the average grows. For example, in low-complexity jobs the top 10% of workers produce 25% more than the average, and 75% more than the bottom 10%. For high-complexity jobs, such as professional and sales jobs, the difference is much larger. The top 10% of workers produce 80% more than the average, and 700% more than the bottom 10% (8).

That's no surprise to any manager.  Unfortunately it makes performance appraisals, which are difficult in the best of circumstances, even more difficult.  

Bureaucrat of the Month: Mr. Masao Yoshida

Who is this Yoshida and why does he matter? 

According to this NYTimes article, he was a manager at the Japanese nuclear reactor site hit by the tsunami.  The article reports on a set of videos just released which document the chaos at the site over some days.  But, if I read it correctly, Yoshida was onsite, doing his best to direct workers, getting bad advice and orders from big shots who were ignorant, and generally being a good bureaucrat by this definition: when the environment the bureaucracy was designed to handle goes berserk, a good bureaucrat does her best.  Two paragraphs:

At one point in the videos, as conditions at Reactor No. 3 are deteriorating, raising fears of an explosion, Mr. Yoshida sends a team of workers out from the bunker with this message: “I’m truly sorry. Please proceed with the utmost care.” 

He later suggests that if the situation does not improve soon, he and some older workers will consider “a suicide mission” to pump water into the reactor, a decision officials at headquarters said they would leave to him.

I Was Wrong About Pearlie Reed

I posted about Mr. Reed's retirement, speculating that the Republicans "would be all over this".  Maybe the Republicans got lazy, or maybe they did due diligence and found there was nothing there, but Google doesn't show any new news pieces on him.   Good news for him. 

Pearlie Reed Resigns

Government Executive piece on his resignation for "personal reasons", though the piece notes an audit of the grant management process in the Office of Advocacy and Outreach. (Washington bureaucrats are often cynical about such coincidences.)  Supposedly there's no connection and Vilsack was supportive. However, the audit found procedures weren't followed and stated:

In summary, we are recommending that OAO not award grants to the 57 applicants at this time. We maintain that an independent review panel should reevaluate the applications to ensure that the most deserving applicants will be awarded grants. Due to the sensitivity of this issue and the timing of the proposed awards, we are providing our preliminary results to you for immediate corrective action. This issue, along with any others identified during our fieldwork, will be consolidated into a final report at the conclusion of our audit.

OIG was requested to do the audit in April, so there must have been some backstory to this.   Reed signed the response to OIG, essentially agreeing with it. In defense of the head of OAO he notes she was new and is identifying weaknesses in the office.  Of course there's a long history of GAO/OIG reports critical of the Departmental administration in this area.  Since Reed has been the big boss for 3 years, it's perhaps fair to ask what previous corrective actions he had taken.

The audit is critical of the "approving official"in OAO, but I'm not clear who it was.   It mentions: "The official also solicited input from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Administration and the Office of Tribal Relations."

Mr. Reed is still listed on the USDA biographies page as Assistant Secretary for Administration, but the link to his bio is dead.  An out-of-date bio is still available by searching: link  There's no press release noted on the USDA site.

I'm sure our Republican friends will be all over this.

Google Employs Bureaucrats

That's the theme of this Times piece. Of course it's true, in any organization you do what you can and you don't do what others are hopefully doing.  It's called "division of labor", as Adam Smith dubbed it. The bigger the organization, the more likely that leads to things falling through the cracks.

Bureaucrat Started as GS-5?

The article "Master of Bureaucracy" doesn't say, but it's likely Bob Gates started as either as GS-5 or 7.  Government Executive runs a long interview with him:

• when he became Sec. of Defense, he didn't bring any assistants with him.  (That's amazing for anyone who's seen a transition at the top of a cabinet department.)
• kept quiet in meetings
• gave others credit
• fired people
• says DOD plans for war, isn't good at waging war, so had to go to task forces to accomplish things.

Recommended

Distinguished Lawyer/Bureaucrat: Ralph Linden

According to this Government Executive post, Ralph Linden is one of the USDA winners and one of 54 Presidential  Distinguished Rank Award winners. (If I remember, the "Rank" honors a former bureaucrat Ralph's in OGC--used to be the main attorney for FSA matters. The detail in the story doesn't include a description of his special accomplishments, though I'd suspect it's for his cumulative career. 

A good man.

Great Bureaucrats: Bob Mondloch

Bob Mondloch and I (and Les Fredrickson) worked together in the early 70's on the MAP (Management Analysis Project--think Business Process Reengineering 20 years before that buzzphrase came in existence). Bob was a good man, sharp, hardworking, good judgment, sense of humor.  He'd been detailed from whatever the conservation division was called in those days--must have been when Nixon and Earl Butz were trying to kill the Agricultural Conservation Program to MAP as its executive director. At that time he was either assistant to the director of the conservation division or deputy, but he may have become director right before he died. He died very young, or so it seems to me now, probably in his early 40's, I think of a heart attack, and probably before 1976. 

Bob was one of a group of youngish men who moved from the field to DC in the 60's to replace the generation which had run the agency since the New Deal days and WWII.  Some found other jobs as the Republicans downsized ASCS and the boom in commodity prices seemed to be making the agency obsolete.  Some stayed on and led the agency through the 70's and 80's.

Anyhow, I ran across a reference to Mondloch House and tracked down this page, which offers a side of Bob I never knew about, but which is no surprise at all.  A notice of the marriage of a son in 1991 says Bob's widow was chaplain at Mount Vernon Hospital.

Great Bureaucrats: Willie Cooper

The USDA blog has a post on the career of Lousiana SED Willie Cooper,  who celebrated 40 years on the job yesterday.  That's 40 years as state executive director, a job which is usually a political appointment, and 55 years as an FSA employee.

To be blunt, the fact that Willie survived both Republican and Democratic administrations is a measure of how capable he is, not that the blog could say so, but I can.

Firing People

Via Tyler Cowen, a Bryan Caplan post about why they haven't been fired, the "they" being employees of dubious worth (I clicked there expecting something about firing executives of financial companies but it's just employees who aren't pulling their weight). 

The bottom line to me: bosses in the private world have the same sort of problems in firing as those in the public world.