Poorly Performing Bureaucrats

Some would argue that my title is an anti-oxymoron, a redundancy. But today's Federal Diary in the Post discusses (Is the Annual Performance Review the Goof-Off's Best Friend?) a proposal from a Harvard man, Robert Behn (see his newsletter here):

"Behn argues that most agency managers have only two choices when trying to fire employees who don't pull their weight: Launch an all-out attack using the full powers of the personnel system, or shrug off their lackluster performance and give the employee a passing grade, such as 'meets expectations' or 'satisfactory.'

Agency managers are not dumb or incompetent in their handling of poor performers, but they understand that there is only so much time in the week, the month and the year, Behn says. Managers can focus on a few important problems and try to make a difference on behalf of taxpayers, or they can go to war with employees who know the workplace rules and are 'willing and able to use them' to protect their jobs, Behn writes."

I agree with the analysis. I'm dubious of the proposal, which is to eliminate yearly reviews and just rely on letters of commendation. The bottom line is that managers, like other Americans, don't like face to face confrontations (in the blogosphere is okay, but not where it counts). So they need strong incentives to manage people well.

Hedgehogs at the White House

Via Dan Drezner an article from the Wall Street Journal--WSJ.com - The Numbers Guy (free)--on Professor Tetlock's book, Expert Political Judgments. He used Isaiah Berlin's categories:

"Foxes [those who know many small things] outperformed hedgehogs [those who know one big thing] in nearly every measure, Prof. Tetlock said. That suggested that those with flexible thinking were better equipped to make forecasts.

Foxes were better, by about three times, at adapting their predictions to world events they hadn't expected. This relates to another failing of hedgehogs: they tended to be more likely to engage in 'hindsight bias.' In other words, hedgehogs were more likely to err in their own favor when asked to recall past predictions -- and if they couldn't recall their own mistakes, how could they be expected to learn from them?"

See Louis Menand in The New Yorker for a fuller discussion, including the points that people make their information fit their preconceptions, discounting opposing information, and that the premium is on "experts" to offer new and different predictions. But hedgehogs can be spectacularly right (particularly scientists).

IMHO our President is a hedgehog (most politicians are, regardless of ideology, although Bill Clinton could not have been), so it's not surprising that it takes a while for bad news to sink in.

How Government Really Works IV

Following up on yesterday's them, Slate has this article--
Lobbying and Laziness - It's not just about greed. It's about loafing. By John Dickerson:

"The more effective scenario, [ than exchanging money for votes] for everyone concerned, involves the lobbyist becoming friendly with members of the Congress member's staff, who research issues and advise him or her what to do and how to vote.

When the member of Congress goes to staff for information, he wants it fast. A staffer can read all available material on the issue, think through the policy, and balance what's right against the member's political interests—or he can call his friend Smitty the lobbyist. Smitty knows all about this complicated stuff in the telecommunications bill. He was talking about it just the other day at the Wizards game, which was almost as fun as the Cointreau-and-capon party Smitty hosted at his spread in Great Falls over Labor Day.

Smitty has a solid, intellectually defensible answer to every question. He also knows how an issue is likely to play out politically for the member back in his home district. In a hectic day, Smitty makes a staffer's day easier. That's almost as appealing as the skybox and the free drinks. It's easy to rationalize relying on lobbyists for this kind of help. In asking lobbyists to help them understand technical issues, staffers are doing the same thing journalists do every day—and in fact, journalists often call the same lobbyists for the same reason. They find someone who understands the issue, figuring that they're smart enough to use the information that rings true and discard the spin."

I.e., like the President with his slide briefings, Congress members and staffs are dependent on others for information. And it's true that most every issue can be given a reasonable justification.

How Government Really Works III

A Big Government Fix-It Plan for New Orleans - New York Times:

"The passage of the bill [a proposal for the government to buy out LA homeowners] has become increasingly important to Louisiana because the state lost out to the greater political power of Mississippi last month when Congress passed a $29 billion aid package for the Gulf states region. The package gave Mississippi about five times as much per household in housing aid as Louisiana received - a testimony to the clout of Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Senator Thad Cochran, chairman of the Appropriations Committee."

How Government Really Works II

Dan Drezner links to a Mickey Kaus observation on a Newsweek story about a slide presentation given to the President showing an al Qaeda/Iraq link. Kaus expresses incredulity that a slide presentation would be very significant in decision making. Drezner explains why it could be:

"The second thing is more mundane but nevertheless true -- the higher you go up the policy food chain, the less detail in the memos. The reason is that the most precious commodity of cabinet-level officials is time. They're scheduled to within an inch of their lives -- the last thing they have time for is 'assessing the veracity of the underlying raw intelligence.'


This is why stovepiping is so dangerous. [The allegation is that the presentation bypassed normal staffing and went up the stovepipe to the President.] Even with a decision as momentous as going to war, a president is rarely going to devote the time to assessing the accuracy rate of intelligence briefings. More likely, they'll assume that if it gets to their desk there must be something there there.

I'm not saying that there wasn't a willful blindness in parts of the White House about this intelligence. But never underestimate the cognitive limitations of policy principals that time crunches create."

I agree with the perspective, but would amplify. The intelligence community has often been viewed as in-bred and biased, a "stovepipe" (or set of stovepipes) in itself. There's a long history of attempts to bring a different perspective to security issues (the Gaither Commission in 1950's which came up with the "missile gap"; the Team B effort in the 70's). Cheney and Rumsfeld had Feith do a shop in DOD that ended up pushing the al-Qaeda/Hussein link.

In a broader sense, any executive needs to avoid becoming the captive of her bureaucracy, relying only on the information coming up the stovepipes. FDR was famously disorganized, setting up competing agencies, talking to everyone, with the result that he wasn't captive of any bureaucracy.

But today shows the flip side of the coin. If you go outside the stovepipe and are wrong, as the Iraq intelligence was, the bureaucrats in the stovepipe get very, very pissed off. Or, using a positive spin, they believe that leaders who have proven their incompetence should not have a monopoly on the information presented to the public. Hence the leaks.

How Government Really Works I

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy discussing the James Risen Book on NSA eavesdropping -. The background is that DOJ issued a memo apparently conceding that the program violated FISA, but Kerr's not sure. He raises the possibility that the DOJ public affairs shop did the document without thoroughly understanding the issues:

"That is, the DOJ memo may have been written by people who knew less about the monitoring program than we now know thanks to Risen's book. (This may seem odd to you if you have never worked in the federal government; my guess is that it will seem less odd to those who have.) "

Yes, outsiders to an institution believe that knowledge is like blood in the body--it's everywhere, so what anyone in the institution knows everyone knows. Makes it easy to demonize.

"Creative Destruction" and New Orleans

One of the favorite phrases of economists is Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction":

the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. [Schumpeter sees it as a virtue.]

But non-economic forces do the same job of revolutionizing structures. Following Katrina/Rita there have been a scattering of media reports on people who are settling into new lives in new places and doing better, finding the schools are better, jobs better paid, etc. The NY Times today has an article on the New Orleans school system, pre-Katrina one of the worst in the country, post-Katrina being converted to mostly charter schools. Of course, I think a conservative economist should argue that people should have left New Orleans before the hurricanes if they could find better lives elsewhere. And politicians should have pushed the charter schools if that's the way to better education.

But the reality, often not recognized by economists, is that people get in ruts and don't act rationally, at least in the terms that economists can calculate and count. They like tradition and community, they fear change, they find it simplest to do today what they did yesterday. Hurricanes, like economic change, uproot. The law of averages says that some people end up better off, some end up worse off. Over two centuries farm children have been leaving the country for the city: some made fortunes, some failed miserably. (That's an example of Schumpeter's creative destruction--moving resources from uneconomic uses to higher uses. ) By the nature of media, we tend to hear more about the successes than the failures. We must remember both sides: good and bad came out of the disaster, just as good and bad come out of the migration to the city.

Pornography and the Bureaucrat

Sorry, the title's misleading. My interest in porn has waned over the years.

Today in the Times Nick Chiles attacks black "street lit" in Their Eyes Were Reading Smut -:

"As a black author, I had certainly become familiar with the sexualization and degradation of black fiction. Over the last several years, I had watched the shelves of black bookstores around the country and the tables of street vendors, particularly in New York City, become overrun with novels that seemed to appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures - as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner."

(He reminds me a bit of the reaction to "Peyton Place" in the '50's.) If he's correct, publishers have discovered that young black women will buy racy books. Presumably the bodice busters of the Barbara Cartland school are too tame, but books with "street cred" appeal. [Warning: I'm so out of it the phrases in quotes may be totally inappropriate.]

How's this speculation: pornography is often linked with masturbation, the topic that got the great bureaucrat Dr. Jocelyn Elders fired. Masturbation is often correlated with a lack of sexual intercourse. Lack of sexual intercourse is correlated with a lack of partners. Young black women lack partners because racial prejudice tends to limit their choices to young black males, a huge proportion of whom are locked up. (There's also the possibility that women prefer to marry above themselves, see my blog on Tierney's column.) So young black women turn to porn on Saturday nights as a result of our drug laws and culture. (If this extended chain of argument has any validity, porn in India and China should be exploding among the men.)

NSA and FISA--Bureaucracy at Work?

I've followed the discussion of the NSA's efforts with interest, both in the NYTimes and by Orin Kerr at Volokh.com. (Orin's a law professor who has mixed opinions about the legality of what Bush authorized. See his new discussion of James Risen's book (Risen being the reporter who got the story originally) and search the site for a number of interesting posts and comment threads.

Today the Post and Times report this development: Files Say Agency Initiated Growth of Spying Effort - New York Times: "The National Security Agency acted on its own authority, without a formal directive from President Bush, to expand its domestic surveillance operations in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to declassified documents released Tuesday." Adm. Hayden briefed Congressional members and Rep. Pelosi challenged him on whether he had Presidential authority to broaden his eavesdropping after 9/11.

Perhaps influenced by Kerr, I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to the NSA (full disclosure--I passed their test in 1964 for employment, but the draft intervened). As I understand it, the Reagan administration in 1981 laid down the rules for what NSA could do in this area and the rules were followed until 9/11. Right after 9/11 NSA expanded their efforts on their own authority and then Bush authorized an expansion (not clear whether he authorized what NSA had already done, or whether it's separate expansions).

But the question that arises is, if the current expansions are legal and constitutional, why didn't the Reagan administration, no shrinking violet itself, authorize the steps in 1981? I have to think that Reagan thought Communism was a deadlier foe than most believe Al Qaeda to be, so it wasn't lack of motive. DCI Casey prided himself on breaking rules, so why play on a narrower field than you have to?

I suspect what happened is in the nature of bureaucracy. As my old calculus teacher would say, it's the "delta", the change. In 1981 we still had vivid memories of the 70's investigations into abuses by the CIA and FBI. Reagan's bureaucrats wrote the executive order grabbing all the authority they thought they could get away with. That became the normal order over the next 20 years. After 9/11, by definition the bureaucracy needed to do something more and different so they did. There's no way the bureaucracy could testify before Congress that they were doing "business as usual". One change (9/11) had to be met by another change.

Of course, another answer could be that in 1981 the bureaucrats thought today's authorities were unconstitutional or illegal under FISA.

Results of Democracy and a Test for Iraq

The Washington Post's Federal page, carries the following excerpt in full:

VERBATIM: "Fred Schwien, the Department of Homeland Security's executive secretary, has sent out a new manual for correspondence standards and procedures, a portion of which follows:

4.3 Statement of Lateness (Note: Not in use until on or about Feb 1, 2006)

If a component response does not meet the five-day deadline for returning correspondence to the ES, a statement of lateness is required. The memorandum should be addressed through the component head to the Secretary or Deputy Secretary as appropriate, and signed at the office director level (normally the first Senior Executive Service level official in the chain of command). Proposed responses will not be accepted without the Statement of Lateness if the deadline has not been met and a valid extension has not been granted. At times, however, there are legitimate reasons for a response being delayed, e.g., a major decision affecting the response is about to be announced or the information simply not available. Workload and component priorities are not valid excuses. As stated previously, for the DHS employee tasked with preparing an item for the Secretary or Deputy Secretary signature, there are few, if any, higher priorities."

The Post seems to mock the content. I've mixed feelings. Based on my experience, most of this correspondence will be letters from Senators and Representatives, usually transmitting a constituent's letter. It is a truth universally acknowledged on the Hill that a person who is in possession of a seat must focus on constituent service to retain it. Thus the Hill believes that responding to their correspondence is the most important duty of every bureaucrat in the executive branch. And every executive assistant in every agency struggles to implement procedures that will ensure prompt answers.

We will know Iraq has become a representative democracy when such rules start popping up in their executive departments.