I am completely in favor of the proposal that President Obama made in the 2011 State of the Union for a complete review of the structure of the executive branch with the aims of making it work better and cost less. Like any other human creation I don’t think it’s perfectible but I do believe it’s improvable. Indeed, I think that should go without saying.
However, comments like this one cited in E. J. Dionne’s recent column fill me with dread:
But this cannot mean just moving around government’s boxes, shifting this agency from one place to another, or merging that department with another. Max Stier, president and chief executive of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, likes to cite the Sept. 11 commission report’s observation that “the quality of the people” in government is “more important than the quality of the wiring diagrams.”
“Washington is a city that likes to focus on the wiring diagram,” he said in an interview, because changing the diagram “feels like they’re doing something concrete when, actually, they’re avoiding the problems.”
If this is to be interpreted as “just hire the best people and give them the authority and latitude to work”, could anything be farther from the objective cited by John Adams (he was quoting James Harrington) and enshrined in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780?
In the government of this Commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: The judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.
However well intentioned a government of men rather than of laws will inevitably be a tyranny and corrupt. The objective of reform should be to produce a better government regardless of who is working for it not a government that requires the best and the brightest to function.
I read his column before I read your post above, and I didn’t get the interpretation of “just hire the best people” that you note. I thought he was saying, “Don’t focus solely on the wiring,” which does seem to be what we do. In an ideal world, you optimize both. Obviously we are not in an ideal world, but I think the lack of attention to hiring competent, ETHICAL people is troubling.
Well, let me put it this way, Jack. If you can accomplish one thing well, you’re ahead of the game. You can put solid structure in place, you can put solid procedures in place, or you can hire good people. Expecting to be able to do all three would be nice but it’s a lot to hope for.
I don’t think there is such a thing as ethical people. I think there are people who behave ethically and that given the right (or, perhaps, wrong) conditions most people will behave badly. There are exceptions of course. People who are very religious. People who are obsessive-compulsive. People with a very strong sense of honor. Just to name a few. I think those are hard things to put into a procedures and policies manual for hiring.
The objective of reform should be to produce a better government regardless of who is working for it not a government that requires the best and the brightest to function.
This is my main thought on education reform. Our fixation on Superstar Teachers and empowering the great teachers we have to do their thing sounds great… until you realize that there are millions and millions of teachers in this country and most of them are not going to be superstars. More effort needs to be expended getting better results from mediocre teachers rather than relying on (and trying to emulate) the great ones.
The objective of reform should be to produce a better government regardless of who is working for it not a government that requires the best and the brightest to function.
Your conclusion can be translated to the following: Outcome in terms of results is the important thing. How we achieve the outcome is not as important.
Generally there are two broad ways that management can implement in order to work towards a desired outcome. The first is to emphasize process by focusing on tightly constraining the behavior of the employees. The rule book shows the way. The second method is to emphasize the discretionary power of the employee and trust their judgment and actions are furthering the desired outcome.
The second method requires more effective personnel than the the first method. Higher levels of intelligence in the workforce yields higher levels of performance. The first method doesn’t really require that the workforce have a high level of intelligence, in that the intelligence is embedded in the regulations which govern employee conduct.
The Federal Government’s hiring processes today rely less on civil service exams than they did in the past because the racial disparate impacts were very large. As the Federal Government relaxed hiring standards the number of black employees hired skyrocketed to the point that today blacks have a very disproportionate role in the civil service.
So how are you going to produce better outcomes if you set out to reform the system? You have two choices – better regulations which guide the conduct of federal employees or hire more intelligent employees and give them more discretionary latitude in how they perform in furtherance of achieving the desired outcomes.
There are going to be consequences which arise from either of these reform initiatives.
“In an ideal world, you optimize both.”
Indeed, but that is a world with which I, and I suspect most, are not familiar.
I do note that here in Chicago we at least have Carol Mosely Braun, pillar of optimization, calling out her “crackhead” Mayoral opponent.
Now THAT’s entertainment……..
Well, I agree with Dionne about wiring diagrams. The problem with Congress is that they do excessively focus on the upper-level structures and the intelligence community reforms are a good example. The intelligence failures from earlier this decade were not the result of poor intelligence organization – at least not primarily. Although I think the reforms resulted in a better IC than what existed previously (especially ending the CIA’s role as the gatekeeper to the President and community manager), fundamental problems within the community still exist. A lot of these have to do with culture and leadership as well as training, interoperability and a host of other things that are necessary but don’t grab headlines. In leadership, in particular, people matter a great deal. Pat Lang wrote an essay on that particular topic that I agree with completely.
The problem here is that there are books, articles, dissertations, and studies done on the problem of incentives. Even if you get great people, highly unlikely if you are hiring a large number of people, you might still not end up with the desired outcome because of bad incentives.
Government is big and unwieldy and much more importantly than any other hierarchical structure in our world government has a legal monopoly on force and violence. This is why all the prattling on about corporations is nonsense (with the obvious exception of when in a representative democracy corporations team up with government–i.e. you have a corporatist government). You absolutely must have a clearly designed set of rules and understand the incentives those rules create. And to be clear the more you ask government to do, the more you are asking it to use its monopoly on force and violence. Which automatically makes the whole discussion of ethical government behavior very awkward to say the least.
The problem here is that there are books, articles, dissertations, and studies done on the problem of incentives. Even if you get great people, highly unlikely if you are hiring a large number of people, you might still not end up with the desired outcome because of bad incentives.
I apologize for not making my point clearer. I’m aware of the Principal-Agent problem and I’m not advocating a system where government officials administer their fiefdoms based on whim.
You absolutely must have a clearly designed set of rules and understand the incentives those rules create.
Yes, but all through the hierarchy positions come with some managerial discretion. The quality of the personnel will have an impact on job function and outcome. One way to mitigate the bad effects of poor individual decision making is to codify further and further so that individual government workers have less decision latitude.
The US Military is an organization that is very rule oriented, so they meet your criteria of having clearly designed rules and yet they find that outcomes are improved by having more intelligent people implementing the rules:
My point is in response to what Dave wrote “I am completely in favor of the proposal that President Obama made in the 2011 State of the Union for a complete review of the structure of the executive branch with the aims of making it work better and cost less.“ I’m saying that a reform will have to take one of two approaches, either improve the quality of the people who staff government or embed the intelligence that they lack into better designed regulations which guide the conduct of the bureaucrats. Note this last bolded statement. Regulations and laws apply to the public but each agency has policy manuals which detail all sorts of procedural minutia on how the staff must perform their jobs as they manage the regulations and laws.
When civil service exams are eliminated due to racial disparate impact concerns this does have a consequence on how well government functions. See US Military example above.
So the upshot from my perspective is that President Obama’s pledge to reform the bureaucracy in order to make it more operationally and fiscally efficient is likely doomed to failure for he won’t do what needs to be done to achieve the goal.