Management

I'm not qualified to say whether government managers are, on average, better or worse than those in private industry. I've spent my entire career in one agency in the Federal Government. However, I can say that management in that agency has not, on average, been good. I read a recent article that blames the Bush Administration's failure to recruit enough competent top-level executives on the pay disparity with private industry; I don't think that's the problem. For those political appointees, there is no shortage of smart, dedicated, and willing people who are itching to implement the agenda of the President. It's just that this President doesn't seem to be able to pick the ones that will do a good job. I attribute this to bad priorities: this White House prizes personal loyalty first, party loyalty second, and ideological purity third. Competence is way down the list.

In any hierarchical organization, the tone is set at the top. A friend who had a high-level job at FEMA recounted how Joe Allbaugh (G W Bush's first FEMA Director) wasted no time alienating the staff with his arrogance and ignorance of the job. He then proceeded to make decisions based primarily on politics. Michael Brown (forever to be remembered as "Brownie") continued in the same vein. These are not stupid people; they are just incompetent at running organizations, and were never focused on the agency's mission. The Homeland Security reorg sealed the fate of anyone who was relying on FEMA to ameliorate the effects of the next big natural disaster. At Interior, another friend reported that Bush's appointees were uniformly sharp, but concentrated on implementing an agenda set not by Congress but the Western States' Legal Foundation. Not only have the nation's parks and natural resources suffered, but there has been a political backlash from ordinary Westerners who have just started to wake up to the true meaning of all that Fed-bashing financed by the timber and mineral extraction interests.

Ideally, the President would choose good administrators who understand and are dedicated to the mission of the agency they'd head. It's pretty simple. Such people exist, too, although when the President opposes the [i]raison d'etre[/i] of an agency, it's unlikely that such a fit will be discovered and maintained. (Christine Whitman did fairly well at the EPA but had to leave when it became clear that Bush did not support the agency's mission.) Politics leads to some spectacularly bad choices, like Bush's first Education secretary. And of course this President's penchant for allowing the White House staff to make all the policy has made cabinet posts less enticing to excellent people. Put it all together and you have a paucity of inspirational leadership at the top levels of government.

Below the political appointees is the Senior Executive Service (SES). They are usually highly responsive to the desires of the political appointees, which can be bad or good depending on those appointees. That's because they don't have the full Civil Service protections, being executives. Unfortunately (and I imagine it's the same in the private sector), these tend to be the people who consider their careers to be their number one priority. They are generally masters at office politics but have little devotion to the mission. That has to be impressed upon them from above, and we already covered why that isn't happening. Left to their own devices, SESers will reorganize themselves into better jobs, throwing their agencies into turmoil, at the first excuse. They will think up flashy projects to make their marks and reputations, and will leave their jobs before they have to deliver. They will try to impress potential future employers in the private sector by throwing them large contracts. They're not dumb or crooked or evil; they're just personally ambitious.

Middle management consists of a mixture of SESers-in-waiting, burnouts, and good competent managers. They too will usually respond to SES direction. Unfortunately, that direction often takes the form of telling them to implement the SESer's self-aggrandizing ideas. Line managers are all too often good technicians promoted into a job they dislike and aren't good at so they can make more money, but there are a lot of good managers here, and some with ambitions to be in middle management or higher. Line managers are not as responsive to direction, on average, due to their proximity to the employees in the hierarchy whom they have to get to do the actual work. It's not easy to be a line manager anywhere. In the government, they are faced with our personnel system, which makes it extremely difficult to hire, fire, or move employees. Most take the easy way out and give everyone great evaluations, and assign the work to those who will do it while allowing the slackers to coast without penalty.

Like I say, it has to come from the top. I'm skeptical that personnel "reforms" will do much good as long as the entire bureaucracy is seen by its boss ( the President) as a necessary evil which may as well be staffed by loyalists with questionable credentials. But there is no doubt that it is just too hard to discipline employees for nonperformance, and too cumbersome to hire people. By the time we get around to selecting someone from outside, they've already found another job in the private sector. So my prescription boils down to: electing a President who takes government very seriously and who will prize competence and dedication to the agency's mission above personal loyalty; get busy on hiring a raft of good young people who will be the backbone of the Federal bureaucracy in the coming decades; and instilling a dedication to the agency's mission to the entire hierarchy. Basic stuff, but it isn't common today.