Why is this? Have we, in fact, become a “hollow state” in which public agencies have little ability left to do anything other than rubber stamp corporate activities, many of which seem irresponsible if not downright destructive? From the reconstruction of Iraq to the Big Dig in Boston, we no longer seem to be able to control spiraling costs or ensure top quality in the results.
In fact, the related managerial trends of privatization, decentralization, and deregulation have combined in the past couple of decades to reduce government’s capacity to act effectively in these instances. The Government Accountability Office reported that while the amount of federal contracting rose by 11 percent between 1997 and 2001, the size of the federal workforce devoted to managing contracts decreased by 5 percent. This phenomenon has certainly been true at the state and local levels as well.
The late academic scholar Larry Terry pointed to a loss in “institutional memory” in government due to the departure of “institutional elders–those individuals who possess extensive knowledge, expertise, and valuable information about an organization’s history…” Some of this governmental loss in capacity is the result of downsizing trends in government that took root in the Reagan years and continued during the Clinton years and during the presidencies of Bush 1 and 2. The New Public Management, which was promoted by the Clinton administration, promoted “market driven management,” which advocated increased privatization of government services and the use of private sector practices and technologies within government.
Meanwhile, countless politicians, from state legislators to presidents, have built their political careers on criticizing government as too big, bureaucratic, and ineffective. The result, however, is that we now have a government in this country that may be a little less big, but still seems bureaucratic and even more ineffective.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t undertake great projects anymore or that government is doomed to impotence in controlling oil spills and other disasters. Take the oil spill in the Gulf. Government still has the capacity to act effectively in situations like that. It simply has to act smarter.
First, political leaders and public managers must resist the temptation to muddle through these crises with ad-hoc decisions that seem to change each day on the basis of news reports and polling. The president needs to establish an environmental crisis team that can respond immediately to situations such as the oil spill, similar to the crisis team that advises him during national security emergencies.
When an environmental crisis occurs, the president and his team must immediately develop a coherent plan for dealing with it. That process must involve a careful analysis and definition of the problem the team is facing. The president and all team members must constantly question their presumptions about the problem and its possible solutions. From day one, such a team could have held a series of meetings in which they asked themselves: what methods of stopping the oil leak are likely to be the most successful and to stop it the fastest? BP engineers and executives as well as outside oil industry and environmental experts should have been called in to the meetings.
Many collateral issues should have been explored in the meetings as well, including the best options for cleaning up the already-spilled oil, the safety of the chemical dispersant being used by BP, and how the oil-capping and cleanup activities would be financed.
The project plans that emerged from that process would have clear scopes of work for BP and others to accomplish as well as clear penalties for failure to meet the specifications. Then, once the plans had been put into effect, the president and his crisis team would be well-positioned to monitor and assess the project activities in accordance with the plans.
Both public and private-sector organizations have always suffered from a lack of systematic approaches to dealing with complex projects and sudden crises. It’s all the more imperative that such approaches be developed and used by our current downsized public sector in our increasingly fragile world.
I have a question about this:
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p>I’m not sure it’s so much a problem of whether it’s “institutional elders” or the more recent “use of private sector practices and technologies within government.” I think the problem lies with the moral standard of who we are putting in charge. Are they a principled and honest person, who has a genuine interest in serving the country/state and it’s people? Or, are they a competitive person seeking personal gain, with no regard for the risks they take or how their decisions will affect interests of the people they are supposed to be serving?
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p>I ask this because of my support for Mike Lake for Auditor. His intention is to bring our state auditing services into the 21st century, using “best practices” (sometimes I hate that term) to find ways to reduce waste and promote a more streamlined system. My only concern about this is, as you claim, in a computer/numbers/bottom-line driven system, there can be extremely negative consequences when lead by an unethical, dishonest, and self-serving person.
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p>So I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s not necessarily what system is in use, it’s more important the moral standard of the person in charge. This has been the problem we’ve been having in politics. Conflicting purposes between what’s best for the state/country, and what’s best for the person leading the charge. It matters less about which system is being used, modern or ancient; it matters more if the person in charge is corrupt or self-serving.
We should clean house at the MMS, and Timothy Geithner and some his colleagues need to be let go. This sort of change would solve so many problems in our country. This is what we need to address.
but the nature of the system is critically important as well. If governmental functions, incuding oversight, are reduced or eliminated, the risk of corruption will increase no matter who is left in charge.
Because at times privatization is promoted and implemented because of corrupt self-serving officials in our government.
They will privatize based on how it will benefit their favored corporation and their own financial/political future, not how it will benefit the taxpayer or the overall health of a state, region, our country.
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p>It seems to me that there is still plenty of government oversight, the agencies are just filled with corrupt individuals who need to be replaced. Who’s holding up the cleansing process?
I think most people in government are honest and are there to do the public’s business. But there will always be a relatively small number of people in both public and private sector organizations who are in it for their own personal gain. It’s doubly unfortunate if these people are in leadership positions in their sectors. But that’s all the more reason that protections are built into those systems to prevent corruption. In many cases, government itself, through its oversight functions, serves to prevent corruption in the private sector. I’d argue that that oversight has been steadily reduced in the past few decades, leading to situations ranging from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown to the oil spill disaster in the Gulf.
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p>Pointing toward that evil era of 1992 (NAFTA, carbon exempt China,financial de-regulation) puts the Illuminati Plan to Destroy America in a better context. Even if an institution survived in name it’s function would be gutted.
It really is Satanically brilliant.
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p>That’s a good point, but there’s a pretty simple reason why this has happened: people don’t want to pay taxes, but they still want the services that government provides. Contracting out services helps achieve governmental objectives without seeming like taxpayer money is being used. And the result is often a giant mess.
The government could never pay me $300,000/yr to do advanced scientific consulting, even if my work was worth millions per year in avoided costs. Yet, it could easily pay my consulting shop $800,000/yr to do the same task.
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p>Somehow, gov’t salaries are kept low, but gov’t contracts aren’t. As a result, I wonder if we pay what the market requires but we don’t get the same oversight and control over the workers that the private market would demand.