Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (51 page)

The extent of this layering is suggested by the titles that are open for occupancy by senior (and not so senior) officials, titles that Gilbert and Sullivan would have parodied. Dear reader, I’ll bet that you did not know that there are now many federal officials who are denominated “deputy deputy assistant secretary,” “associate deputy assistant secretary,” “deputy associate deputy administrator,” and “chief of staff to the associate deputy assistant secretary,” and that this thickening has occurred in almost every department. As Light notes, “Once established somewhere in government, titles spread like kudzu as departments and agencies copy each other at will”—what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “the iron law of emulation.”
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“Bluntly put,” Light writes, “you are nobody in Washington, D.C., if you do not have a chief of staff.”
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This layering would merely be amusing fodder for Jon Stewart, talk radio hosts, and other bureaucracy bashers were its public policy consequences not so grave. Citing the examples of NASA’s
Challenger
and
Columbia
tragedies and the FBI’s failure to heed its low-level agents’ warnings about specific terrorist threats before 9/11, Light attributes these calamities to bureaucratic thickening and implies that these are only the failures that come to public attention, surely just the tip of the iceberg.
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He finds that in those categories of frontline federal positions providing the most important public services (e.g., air traffic controllers and IRS agents), employees in 1996—almost twenty years ago—reported upward through
sixteen
layers; on policy and budget questions, “the average federal employee received guidance through nearly
sixty
layers of decision makers.”
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One expert on political leadership notes considerable tension between top civil servants and political appointees, as they seek to convince each other to adopt their different perspectives on policy making. Leaders’ openness to technical expertise, he finds, declines as the layering between them and their career subordinates increases, citing the inability of C. Everett Koop, the Surgeon General under President Reagan, to get through to him on smoking and public health policy issues.
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Layering may
explain why the chief digital architect of the Obamacare website was unaware of a subordinate’s report on serious security risks.
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Reorganization can actually magnify this thickening. Light finds that splitting an existing department “can produce a hierarchy greater than the sum of its former parts.”
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Even in the administration of president Bill Clinton, which reduced overall federal employment significantly (largely through the post–Cold War peace dividend), the middle levels of government grew relative to the lower levels, which impedes a fair allocation of accountability for failure and credit for success.
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It also increases the career service’s sense of isolation from the important developments in their agencies.

Compensation, status, performance, and morale
. A lively debate rages over how well federal bureaucrats are compensated compared with their private-sector counterparts, with much disagreement over which private counterparts are appropriate for comparison, which levels of the bureaucracy are being compared, which aspects of employment should be included, and what effect unmeasured variables—say, motivation and creativity—have on the comparison.

The evidence sheds some light on these questions. Federal employees have greater job security and more valuable benefits than comparable private-sector workers—guaranteed defined-benefit pensions (very rare in the private sector today), retiree health coverage, and other fringes.
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Except at the top levels, they are paid more than they would earn in private-sector jobs requiring comparable skills. Census data on workers who switch between federal and private-sector jobs indicate that those moving from federal to private incur an average salary reduction of 3 percent, while those who move the other way receive a salary increase averaging 9 percent.
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Moreover, an analysis of annual time use data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that full-time federal workers work 2.7 fewer hours in a typical workweek than their private-sector counterparts do—the equivalent of 3.8 fewer forty-hour workweeks per year.
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The analysis, however, produces a different result when high-level public and private employees are compared. With a far more compressed pay scale in the public sector, top federal managers are paid significantly less
than their private-sector counterparts can earn, particularly in today’s talent-seeking market.
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In large part, this compression at the high end results from constraints imposed by Congress, which fears political blowback if it raises its own members’ salaries; as Kennedy School of Government professor Jack Donahue notes, “Just as no building in Washington, D.C. can be taller than the Capitol dome, so too (by law or by custom) a congressperson’s salary sets the ceiling for all but a handful of federal jobs.”
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Finally, a recent comparison of compensation (including benefits) of federal employees with their central government counterparts in other OECD countries finds that U.S. officials are paid significantly more both in absolute terms and as a share of average compensation in the respective countries. (As with comparisons to private sector counterparts, this pattern does not hold at the very top levels due to compression.
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)

Light assesses the status of the civil service by asking, “Do the
right
young Americans want a federal job?” His answer—based on his surveys of college seniors, alumni of the nation’s top public-service graduate schools, and presidential management fellows who entered the federal government through its most prestigious recruitment program—is no: “The federal service comes in last in almost every indicator, from the motivation to make a difference to organizational resources.”
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College seniors preferred nonprofit organizations as an instrument for their public service career goals. Public-service graduates who took jobs in the federal government were harshly critical of the sector, appeared far less willing to stay, and were least likely to say that they wanted their children to pursue a career in public service. Kennedy School masters of public policy students preferred nonprofit and business careers; in 2005, only a quarter started in the federal government. The presidential management fellows—in Light’s words, “the very best and brightest the federal government can recruit”—were deeply dissatisfied with their experience: “Although some indicators improved over time, almost every indicator of job satisfaction—quality of work, access to resources, respect for their peers, and trust in their own organization—fell over the two years of their fellowships.”
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How well do civil servants perform their jobs? The short answer is that we don’t know and are unlikely to find out. The government and others have periodically attempted to establish performance measurement regimes, but these regimes have failed, usually for reasons specific to the government’s structure. Given the diverse bureaucratic tasks within the government, standard performance metrics are difficult to devise and apply. Moreover, the assessments that these regimes produce generally have no bite—not because of the agencies’ recalcitrance but because political factors obscure the measurements and dilute their usefulness. Political scientist Beryl Radin, for example, notes that the budget process is driven by political factors whose force would utterly dominate efforts to use employee performance assessments as incentives. These factors are far less significant in the private sector, where conducting and using such assessments is easier because of the profitability criterion, which has no real counterpart in government. Indeed, such assessments are also easier in parliamentary democracies where only the executive wields effective power over the bureaucracy and where some sanctions for poor performance—“name and shame,” for example—are more effective because government agencies have better reputations in the first place. In contrast, the public and politicians constantly disparage the federal bureaucracy; a bad report card from the OMB is less likely to count for much.
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As the earlier discussion of federal workers’ attitudes toward their jobs suggests, morale in civil service is very low. Light’s survey data on civil servants’ attitudes toward their work indicates that although they were satisfied with most objective aspects of their jobs, including benefits and job security (but not pay), they were far less satisfied than their business and nonprofit counterparts with their opportunities to develop new skills and to accomplish something worthwhile, and with public respect for their work. Their morale is lower than that of their private nonprofit counterparts. None of the resources needed to perform their jobs well are sufficiently available. Especially at the middle and lower levels, where most of the work of government gets done, they criticize the competence of their own colleagues and rate their organizations unfavorably in terms of spending money wisely,
helping people, acting fairly, and being worthy of trust. No wonder, then, that they say they work for the government for the pay, benefits, and security rather than out of a sense of public spirit; that for Americans entering the job market, federal services “come in last in almost every indicator, from the motivation to make a difference to organization resources” well behind private nonprofit organizations; and that this chorus of criticism by these most knowledgeable people has increased over the years.
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Disciplining incompetent workers
. No organization can function effectively unless it can terminate incompetent or misbehaving employees. Yet it is almost impossible to fire, demote, or suspend civil service employees. It occurs only when a superior is prepared to invest a great deal of time and effort in the attempt to persuade the Merit Systems Protection Board to terminate the employee. It can take one to two years to fire a federal employee,
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which helps to explain why the federal government fired only 0.55 percent of its workers in 2010—11,668 of its 2.1 million employees; in comparison, the private sector fires about 3 percent of workers annually for poor performance.
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Civil servants, as a practical matter, have lifetime tenure. As noted above, this problem of indiscipline has applied to the SES as well.

Light reports that when he surveyed federal employees on how good their organizations are at disciplining poor performers, only 9 percent answered “very good,” while 67 percent answered “not too good” or “not good at all.” This is one reason for low morale in civil service.
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The ineffectiveness of employee disciplinary procedures may grow even more frustrating under the Whistle Blower Protection Act of 1989, which will make managers even more reluctant to discipline their workers for fear that this will trigger lawsuits claiming retaliation against workers for reporting their superiors’ misconduct.

Senior Executive Service
. As noted earlier, the SES was established to create an elite corps of bureaucratic leaders—roughly comparable to the highly trained graduates of special schools of public administration traditionally staffing the top levels of the French government—whose expertise, compensation, accountability, and performance
would be equivalent to comparable executives in the private sector and well above their civil service subordinates.

Unfortunately, the SES has not worked out nearly as well as expected. A 2002 National Academy of Public Administration report found that while private-sector compensation increased substantially, that of the SES did not keep pace; the vast majority of workers were bunched at or near the statutory pay ceiling. Indeed, SES officials at one agency earned less than junior analysts employed by the agency’s private contractor; the disparity, of course, has only increased since then. Virtually no SES officials lost their positions due to poor performance, job dissatisfaction was widespread, and 75 percent of them believed that the experiment had not achieved its goals.
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To Donahue (writing in 2008), “[t]here would be more grounds for optimism here if the SES experiment had fallen short because of obvious errors in design or implementation. But the initiative has probably turned out about as well as could have been expected, given a maelstrom of political, economic, and managerial forces that can frustrate even well-intentioned and carefully crafted campaigns.”
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Securing bureaucratic compliance
. James Q. Wilson emphasized that the effectiveness of policy design and implementation depends critically on an agency’s ability to secure policy compliance by its lower-level officials. It is especially difficult, Wilson noted, for agencies to cultivate a sense of purpose, status, or solidarity that could induce them to carry out the agency’s mission. Management’s ability to accomplish this most basic of bureaucratic tasks, he explained, depends on whether the agency is, in his terms, a production, procedural, craft, or coping organization. In production organizations (his examples are the IRS
*
and Social Security), managers can observe both the work and its results and thus evaluate workers on the basis of their effectiveness. In procedural organizations (examples: inspectors in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and in the military), processes can be observed but outcomes cannot, so higher-level officials must manage on the basis of process rather than
outcome. In craft organizations (examples: the Forest Service, Army Corps of Engineers, and Justice Department, where workers adhere to professional norms), managers can evaluate and reward operators on the basis of the results they achieve even if the former do not know how the latter are achieving them. In coping organizations (examples: academic and police agencies), neither outputs nor results are observable. There managers and operators will be in constant conflict; the former will focus their efforts on the latter’s most easily measured activities, and effective management is almost impossible.
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These four categories are not airtight, of course, but they can help us predict how particular agencies are likely to perform.