OMB Watch has been doing great work on this tendency (which is hardly a new one, of course) for a couple of decades now.

I don't really have a point except to say hooray for OMB Watch.

All them political appointee regulatory watchdogs are communiss.

I keep saying this, but this has a tremendous resemblance both to the way the Soviets planted sientifically-ignorant political commissars in science research institutes to watch and control the scientists, and also to the way the Mafia planted their reps in mobbed up unions.

If you look at the many specific examples of this kind of thing so far, you'll see that Bush doesn't place competent people with Republican views in these roles, but pure political operatives with no knowledge of anything. For example, the guy who was censoring government climate reports didn't even have a bachelor's degree, and the classes he had taken weren't science classes.

The only criterion is loyalty to the machine, and incompetent people owe everything to the machine and know it. Even conservative ideology is a lesser factor now -- Bush has grossly violated that both on trade and on fiscal policy.

Didn't Jack Balkin post something about this a few days ago?

I'm not taking one side or t'other (or are there even two sides?) here, since this isn't my area of expertise. Maybe if the White House was trying to exert greater control over federally-funded stem cell research (*cough*) I would pipe up.

I'm not sure I have the time to completely read and grok the differences between Megan and Balkin -- but it does seem like the latter should be in play, here. JB's clearly no Bush apologist, right?

Balkin is somewhat non-committal. He's not a Bush apologist, but he's a process guy with a legal background. He's sort of asking something like "If a generic OK president did this instead of Bush, would it be OK?"

To me it's wrong to have a HS graduate censoring scientists, or to mandate the sale of creationist literature at the Grand Canyon National Park, and those things really did happen. I have no real opinion about the law and process isues.

Though of course sometimes the political appointees are right.

(My own field of something like expertise is foreign affairs. Much as I love my many friends in the diplomatic corps, sometimes the political people are right. Sometimes a carefully crafted balance among the interested parties is not what the people ultimately in charge want. Not always, maybe not even a majority of the time, but sometimes.)

The only criterion is loyalty to the machine

which is tied to the inability to deal with conflicting views n tand evidence. "The Decider" can't decide and so works to make deciding unnecessary. That's almost guarantees getting blindsided somewhere down the road.

I dunno. It's so common a reaction I'm thinking it's built-in and served some useful purpose back at the dawn. It's maddening, tho', when one is the Cassandra.

This comment may seem off-topic but please bear with me.

Venezuela's National Assembly has given initial approval to a measure that would grant President Hugo Chavez the power to rule by executive decree for 18 months.
> The Venezuelan Assembly has actually only opened up hearings on the proposed law.
> If approved, Chavez would be limited in what he could "decree," basically overseeing the functions of executive branch agencies. These are the same rights any U.S. president has.
> These powers are already granted by the Venezuelan constitution.
This is not the first time such powers have been exercised. In fact, the last president of Venezuela, Ramon Jose Velasquez, activated the same powers but no one raised an eyebrow.

So let's put this into proper context. Bush exercises powers he does not have or should not have. Bush accuses Chavez of abusing powers he does have. Chavez has powers similar to those of any American president, but Bush accuses Chavez of tilting his country towards dictatorship while reserving for himself [Bush] the mantle of "Defender of Liberty and Democracy." The hypocrisy and propaganda from the White House these days is truly astonishing.

5: Not to say a word in favor of appointees pissing all over anything. But even in theory, you do need political appointees at some levels, otherwise the elected executive can't direct change. (See Yes Prime Minister.) Of course, the balance of political/career was established long ago as part of the vanquishment of patronage, and it's that balance that is being assaulted.

Or Yes Minister, even.

I think that this is really important, but it does seem that there has to be, as Minivet says, a role for political appointees. Otherwise we wouldn't need politicians other than legislators.

I don't think that you need psychological explanations of why the big Movement Republicans are Movement Republicans. There's a lot of money sloshing around, and most of those guys are low-credentialed, low-skilled guys who know that they couldn't do anywhere near as well in honest work.

It's nothing new. There's this, from Harry, "Poor Ike. He's going to come in, give an order and think it's going to be carried out."

Sooner or later, any bureaucracy sees its job as maintaining (or expanding) itself and needs to be swatted. I'll grant you the current idiots in power pick particularly weak reeds to do the swatting.

I agree with 6,9,11. There's a tension between believing, as I do, that having competent people dealing with issues "on the ground" is most of the time the best was to achieve desirable outcomes and believing that introducing politics to parts of our society both messes them up and, ideally, introduces transparency.

Reflexively I tend towards the side of the bureaucrat (partially because that's closer to the role I play in my own work, and I have plenty of examples of how clueless bosses can mess things up). But I think there do need to be mechanisms to expose government to political pressure.

Think about all of the criticisms (from both the left and the right) of the WTO or the world bank.

"Sooner or later, any bureaucracy sees its job as maintaining (or expanding) itself"

S/B

Any bureaucracy sees doing its job it job

The Bush administration should contribute to retiring some of the anti-bureaucratic cliches.

"Any bureaucracy sees doing its job as it job.

15: It's a cliche because it's true and it's an omni-partisan truth. Bureaucracies proliferate and expand so everyone can get his or her 15 minutes of Alpha.

The problem with protecting the bureacracy is that in a few years President Obama will be elected and desire/need to undo or redo all the the Bushite destruction. So, in principle, go politics!

Yeah, but when someone like Bush suppresses scientific information, you suddenly realize that bureaucracies are not all bad. How much thought goes into the anti-bureaucratic cloganeering we've seen over the last decades?

The head of the us patent office got his job because of his good work on the Clinton impeachment:

http://www.uspto.gov/biographies/bio_dudas.htm

I saw him in a meeting. He doesn't inspire confidence.

The patent office wanted to get new regulations through that would have radically changed the patent process.

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/dapp/opla/presentation/focuspp.html

The changes may or may not have been a good idea. To some extent they were a good faith effort to reform the patent process, but they were substantive changes that really should have been statutory. The changes would have been favorable to certain large companies (but not uniformly, the changes would be very difficult for pharmaceutical companies) .

http://promotetheprogress.com/archives/2006/04/the_invisible_h.html

Patent attorneys almost uniformly hated the proposal. They would have made it much easier to commit malpractice. There was booing in the meetings.

Luckily, the new congress is now proposing meetings on the issue and the changes are stalled.

I haven't studied the history, but my sense is that part of what gives the anti-bureaucratic sloganeering (as you put it) it's force is that when the "liberal consensus" was breaking down in the late 60s, early 70s there were lots of examples of trustworthy, reliable, bureaucracies that had been excluding major constituancies in their trustworthy reliable ways.

As I've said, my emotional sympathy is with the bureaucrats, but when I think about, for example, "The Republican War on Science" it helps to remind myself of the feminist battles with the medical profession in the 70s and about how much can be hidden behind "professional standards." I think the two battles are recognizably different (where' Berube or Burke when we need them to clarify a complicated bit of liberal history) [batsignal] but I think it's important to remember that it used to be the liberals attacking bureaucracies and conservatives defending them.

One other important thing to add.

I think it's worth identifying areas of society where the primary problems are lack of efficiency, communication, and reliability vs ones in which the problem is that society is fundamentally doing the wrong thing or not doing the right thing -- in which case increasing efficiency won't help.

I agree completely with these comments from Megan's post:

The fish passage office at Fish and Game has a stunning amount of knowledge about what fish passages structures work and which ones are expensive failures. No one else, not professors or consultants, has seen as many fish ladder installations over such a wide geographic range as these bureaucrats. . . . You want a twenty-year bureaucrat to set specifications for paint quality for road markings.

But these are not areas in which there is a lot of controversy about our goals. We want fish to be able to spawn and road markings to be visible and not need to be repainted frequently.

I think that most of the decisions that the government (and business) bureaucracies make are like this.

But I think there are cases in which the public needs to say, "we're not interested in the most efficient way to build roads to move people from point A to point B, we're interested in how many people we actually want living here." (growth is a hot topic in my part of the country). And I believe that it's common that when people try to get involved they feel like bureaucracies are stubborn and hard to deal with.

I guess I'd be curious to know how Megan's experience lobbying for parks affects her opinions.

NickS, a lot of those decisions are to be made by passing laws and funding bills, not by jamming political hacks into the bureaucracy.

One especially bad thing in this case is that the imposed hacks are not mostly oriented toward serious policy, they're paying off political blocs and political donors. And yes, there is a difference.

NickS, a lot of those decisions are to be made by passing laws and funding bills, not by jamming political hacks into the bureaucracy.

Absolutely. In practice I fear this follows the Republicans strategy of destroying the bureaucracy as a way to kill public support for it -- see FEMA for a controversial example.

I think I come down on Balkin's and the Agitator's side on this issue, although I think all of Megan's points in her rebuttal are important. The fact is, political appointees already head administrative agencies, as they should. Look that the ways in which the Bush Administration has gutted the Clean Air Act over the past six years, without any major legislative changes. The executive order simply adds another layer of executive control over regulatory bodies with reference to specific guidence documents. Congress, of course, has the power to control the content of the regulations themselves, it has simply abdicated that control over the years.

I think the real problem with the executive order is this: "The directive issued by Mr. Bush says that, in deciding whether to issue regulations, federal agencies must identify 'the specific market failure' or problem that justifies government intervention." This clearly goes far beyond enforcement of the regulation-enabling statutes passed by Congress, and basically imposes a certain political ideology on areas of the law that were not passed in order to further that ideology.

I think this is one of those 'I know it when I see it' issues. Of course, bureaucrats are there to carry out laws passed by politicians, in the manner prescribed by other politicians, and there can certainly be 'Yes Minister'-type problems with resistant bureaucrats stymieing needed policy change.

But Megan's point, that politicians don't have a hope of actually doing anything right, is also a strong one. They can tell bureaucrats what needs to be done, but actually doing it is usually going to require real expertise that a political appointee hasn't got time to develop. So, countervailing needs.

And anyone who looks at the last six years of goverment and thinks that the problem that needs to be corrected is out of control bureaucrats ignoring the reasonable orders of their political masters, rather than idiot political appointees doing a heckuva job screwing things up, is, well, GWB.

Limited government and checks and balances seem to be this constant precession, as the solution to one problem becomes the new problem within a decade or two. By now the anti-tax / anti-regulation / anti-bureaucracy / anti-welfare state sentiment and its various institutional embodiments, are bigger problems in themselves than any of the problems they claim to solve.

He's not a Bush apologist, but he's a process guy with a legal background. He's sort of asking something like "If a generic OK president did this instead of Bush, would it be OK?"

I was trying to answer that at first, because I didn't think the question of whether Bush appointees would be ignorant dogmatic jackasses would be a particularly interesting one.

The problem with protecting the bureacracy is that in a few years President Obama will be elected and desire/need to undo or redo all the the Bushite destruction. So, in principle, go politics!

This actually can bring me to tears. When I think about all the tedious, complicated plans, for things like cattle quotas on grazing lands, that have tangible consequences on the ground and will linger for years after the Bush administration, I feel hopeless. It will be so hard to fight those battles. They're so boring.

lots of examples of trustworthy, reliable, bureaucracies that had been excluding major constituancies

Yeah, industry capture and entrenched pointless programs are a genuine problem in bureaucracies. I'm in favor of periodic purges, and re-evaluation of agency goals, conducted according to my values, of course. Actually, California is heading for a purge soon. A third of the state civil service is eligible to retire within five years. We will lose a lot of deadweight and some incredibly valuable knowledge.

5

"... or to mandate the sale of creationist literature at the Grand Canyon National Park, and those things really did happen. ..."

According to this it didn't happen (or at least not as reported).

Huh. That one did seem too bad to be true.

Apparently, the creationist book is still being sold at the grand canyon bookstore.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2007/0123peering.asp

You know, I distinctly remember learning about the growth of civil service, the spoils system, the gradual growth of federal agencies with real knowledge, the impact of the World Wars, New Deal and cold war, the ideological divide and general consensus, in high school. Both US history and American Government. It was a topic in both. Anomaly?

I've mentioned it to Megan before, but Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is one of the great books about (in part) the clash of knowledge, government and politics in the West. I'd have my high schoolers read it; they'd learn a lot.

You see, the Civil Service was a solution to graft and the spoils system. One of the problems with Bush is not ideology, but graft. The deficits are the result of massive vote-buying and tradeoffs for campaign donations.

This is probably a relevant book; I'd be reading it if my copy weren't on the other side of the country.

eb!

BG!

Things I would like to thank the spaghetti monster for: the British civil service. Here's to Mr Northcote and Mr Trevelyan, and may they have another 150 years of meritorious bureaucracy.

Was 36 making fun? I'm just glad to see you after an absence, eb.

For the record, this is a bad idea no matter which party were doing it, and is amazing to me, that Bushco can't seem to grasp that some day we may have Democrat as the President again. Second, as Megan describes, regulations aren't written and issued by a lone bureaucrat in a cubicle. There is a process, which provides ample opportunity for members of the public and interest groups, including political interest groups to have their say. Third, trust me, fish ladders are incredibly controversial to some people out there.

38: Not making fun. I was just saying hi right back.