Chapter 6:
Living With Government:
Bureaucracy and Politics
Chapter Objectives
By reading this chapter you should learn:
1. Why is it difficult to get citizens to think about bureaucracy, in spite of its profound importance in today's society.
2. Why it is difficult to get the attention of large organizations, governmental or private, for nonroutine problems, and what individuals can do when government agencies give them a brush-off.
3. Why bureaucratic organization, in spite of its unpleasant aspects, is more efficient than the alternatives, and why "red tape" may be a highly desirable thing.
4. The key differences among cabinet departments, independent regulatory agencies, and government corporations.
5. In what sense government acts as a wholesale contractor, and why wholesale contracting has greatly increased in recent decades.
6. Why bureaucracies are forced to make and observe rules rather than deciding each individual case on its own merits, and how rule-making can be analyzed in terms of R ---> X + Y.
7. How growth in total government employment raises fundamental questions about labor-management relations as well as about democracy.
Key Terms
bureaucracy
interstate
commerce
standard operating
procedures
disestablishment
ombudsman
Executive Office of
the President
R--->X+Y
St. Dapiaclautee
span of
control
voucher system
government corporation
staff agencies
(distinguished from "line" agencies)
WASP
gravy-train
ratio
wholesale contracting
independent regulatory agency
Any government has essentially two ways of accomplishing an objective whether it be building an interstate highway system or raising an army. It can expropriate the required tools and compel construction men and others to work until the job is finished or it can purchase the goods and manpower necessary to complete the job.*
WORKING WITH BUREAUCRACY
As we turn from the president to the bureaucratic machine he heads, let us begin with a simple story:
Once upon a time a farmer wanted to haul his mushroom crop in to market. He loaded the mushrooms into saddlebags and put them on the back of an old donkey he had recently bought. Out on the highway, the donkey obstinately sat down and refused to budge another inch. The farmer, not used to donkeys, didn't know what to do.
By and by, someone pulled his car off to the side of the road. "What is the matter, my friend?" he asked the farmer.
"I can't get my donkey to go," sighed the beast's discouraged proprietor.
"The only way to deal with donkeys is to treat them with great love and kindness," advised the motorist. "Let me show you." And he hopped out of his car carrying a baseball bat, walked lovingly over to the indolent donkey, and cracked it smartly over the head with the bat.
The donkey promptly got up and began walking toward the town. Scratching his head, the farmer said, "Thank you. But I thought you said a donkey must be treated with love!"
"Oh, of course. But first you have to get his attention."
This story contains many images useful in analyzing bureaucracy. The farmer, not knowing donkeys, is advised by an "expert." Most people who work in bureaucracy are specialists. Like the farmer, a specialist is an expert in some things but ignorant about others.
The baseball bat the motorist uses to get the donkey's attention is a tool that cannot be used subtly. To a great extent, the same is true of bureaucracy. Graham Allison, Dean of the Kennedy School of Public Affairs at Harvard University, puts it squarely: "Organizations are blunt instruments." Footnote 1
Finally, bureaucracy presents three kinds of "attention" problems: First, it is difficult to get citizens, even those interested in politics, to pay attention to the phenomenon of bureaucracy. Second, it is hard for the average person to get the attention of large organizations, especially if his case is unusual. Third, even the president finds it difficult to get attention and cooperation from bureaucratic organizations.
We Often Do Not Notice Bureaucracy
As a powerful single individual doing interesting things, the president is the most likely part of government to be called to our attention. The American mass media--newspapers, radio, and television--are mainly privately owned, profit-seeking organizations. Revenues derive mainly from fees charged to advertisers, whose willingness to pay depends on audience size. Everything else being equal, the various media organizations will therefore seek programming that maximizes audience appeal in a very competitive market.
Compared with the president, the large and complicated Congress is usually dull. The best way for it to get media attention is to get into a fight with the president. Many congressmen--such as Representative Peter Rodino and Senator Sam Ervin-- became national household words during the Watergate investigations. The Supreme Court is even harder to get people excited about. But the bureaucracy appears to be the most uninteresting part of government of all.
Paradoxically, however, bureaucratic organizations are the part of government with which the average person is most likely to have personal contact. Chief executives and Congressmen are so prominent that they are bombarded with messages and requests from their constituents. They must either ignore most of these communications or be swamped with work. The bulk of communications from common people (those not in a position to do any great political favors or damage) will be dealt with by the prominent person's staff. A "personal" letter from the president or a congressman will probably be drafted by a staffer, typed by a computer, and signed by an autopen machine. But the staff itself is an organization, so we are dealing with bureaucrats even when technically we are doing no such thing.
We Meet Bureaucracies Every Day. What government people have you dealt with lately? Do you have a driver's license? These are issued by a bureaucratic organization , part of your state government. Do you pay taxes? Federal taxes are collected by the Internal Revenue Service, a large bureaucratic organization. Have you ever been on welfare? Then you certainly dealt with bureaucrats from the agencies administering these programs. Do you get mail?
Directly or indirectly, you have been dealing with government bureaucrats all of your life. In most places in America you cannot even drink a glass of water without dealing indirectly with the government organization that finds, purifies, and delivers it.
Most people are poorly equipped to think about or deal with bureaucracies. Bureaucratic organizations are not only "dull," but they are probably the most difficult part of government to understand. Their sheer scale--nearly three million people in the federal civilian bureaucracy alone--staggers the imagination. This scale is totally unprecedented. The ancient Chinese Empire was governed with a full-fledged bureaucracy for thousands of years. But before modern technology, no society could afford to release much of the working force from producing the absolute material necessities. In the United States of 1900, already highly industrialized, farm workers still accounted for 37.6% of the civilian labor force, an outrageously low figure by historical standards. By 1975 that figure was down to 3.3%. [Footnote 2] During the same period the proportion of the civilian work force holding government jobs at federal, state, and local levels went from 4.5% to 18.5%, more than a four-fold increase.
Bureaucratic organizations and the tasks performed by their members are incredibly complex. With maximum contact and minimum understanding of these organizations, it is no wonder that the average citizen is immensely frustrated by bureaucracy, to the extent he perceives it as a distinctive phenomenon at all.
Because of bureaucracy's complexity and unfamiliarity perhaps we should begin by looking at it from the perspective of an average citizen.
Difficulties in Getting the Attention of Large Organizations
Bureaucratic callousness and indifference to human suffering found in totalitarian foreign countries is well known. Nazi extermination camps systematically killed six million European Jews during World War II. Alexander Solzhenitsyn graphically depicts Soviet concentration camps in both his fiction and nonfiction.[Footnote 3] Some American penitentiaries and "mental hospitals" treat their inmates outrageously. But even the average American, not despised by the community because of criminal activities, emotional problems, or ethnic differences, can receive very shabby treatment at the hands of large government organizations.
I shall use myself as an example. I am a WASP--a white Anglo Saxon Protestant--emotionally stable by professorial standards, and have never been accused of violating any laws except for one jaywalking offense. I am not inarticulate or unable to present my case coherently to a large organization. I have, however, twice run, afoul of government bureaucracies.
Case 1. For some years I have read all decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court. Each semester I select some of the most interesting cases and use them as reading and discussion material in a course, Recent Supreme Court Decisions, which meets just one hour a week. Since the cases used each semester are entirely new, some students have taken this class several times.
For the first few years of my Supreme Court project I subscribed to the Preliminary Print of the U.S. Reports, published by the Government Printing Office (GPO). The term of court for which a year's subscription runs normally begins in October and runs through the following June or whenever the Court commences its long summer recess. Like any other publisher, the GPO sends a bill when it is time to renew one's subscription. One year I received the bill for the Preliminary Print and promptly sent the money in along with the computer card used as the subscription renewal notice.
In due course the previous subscription ran out. The Supreme Court resumed its work in October, but some months later it dawned on me that no decisions were coming through. I wrote a short letter to the GPO explaining my situation and asking them to clear the problem up. After delay of over a month a reply arrived from the GPO. It was a form letter and had nothing whatever to do with my case. I wrote another letter. The reply to this one was equally nonsensical. No Supreme Court decisions arrived. By now it was spring, and the Court had been in session for many months. Efforts to communicate with the offending organization were being brushed off and nothing was happening. But they had $55 of my money, so I was not disposed just to forget the matter and subscribe to a private reporting service. What would you do if faced with a similar problem and it was not worth your while to go personally to Washington, D.C. to settle it?
I finally got my subscription to the Supreme Court reports straightened out. It was very simple. I wrote a letter to Senator Robert Griffin, attaching copies of my correspondence with the GPO. Less than a week later a GPO troubleshooter telephoned from Washington, D.C., to explain what she had found out: My renewal payment had been sent too promptly! The GPO had credited it as payment for my previous year's subscription, which had already been paid for once, but no matter! My written inquiries were therefore regarded as a brazen attempt to get a year's free subscription to the Preliminary Print, and were ignored. Just to be doing something, or to keep me off balance, someone sent me the form letters.
In the process of recovering my subscription, I looked into private publishers and found that the Lawyers Cooperative Publishing Company regularly delivers Court opinions much faster than the GPO and charges half as much for a year's subscription. When my renewed GPO subscription ran out, I changed over to the private publisher. Service has been excellent.
Case 2. On January 23, 1977, my wife and I filed our joint federal income tax return. We were due to get a substantial refund. In due course, our state income tax refund arrived. But no word from the IRS. By April it appeared that something might be wrong. On April 9 I therefore wrote the following letter:
April 9, 1977 Internal Revenue Service Center Cincinatti, Ohio 45298 Dear Sir or Madam: On January 23, 1977 1 filed a joint return with my wife, Doris Stringham deLespinasse, on a 1040. A refund of $406.40 was due to us. On the same day I mailed off our Michigan state tax return. The state refund arrived many weeks ago, and many of our friends have received their U.S. refunds, but we have not received ours. Would you please check into this, as we would like to have the money that is due to us as soon as possible. My social security number is [deleted] and my wife's number is [deleted]. Sincerely, Paul F. deLespinasse 1142 College Avenue Adrian, Michigan 49221
The reply of the IRS, dated April 29, 1977, was as follows:
Dear Mr. & Mrs. DeLespinasse: We are sorry to learn you have not yet received your refund check for $406.40. We share your concern and hope the check reaches you soon. Our records show that the Treasury Regional Disbursing Office issued your check on Feb. 18, 1977. We have therefore forwarded the information you sent us to the Treasury Bureau of Government Financial Operations, Check Claims Division, Stop-Pay Branch, Washington, D.C. 20226, for appropriate action. We regret the delay involved when a check must be traced, but if an unauthorized person has cashed the check, or if it has been destroyed, a time-consuming investigation must be made before a new one can be issued. If the check has not been cashed or was not destroyed, you will, of course, receive your refund sooner. If you move before you receive your refund, please file a change of address with your former post office so they can forward the check to you if mailed to your previous address. Thank you for your cooperation. Sincerely yours, Chief Taxpayer Assistance Section
Accompanying the IRS letter was a toll-free telephone number to call if we had any questions. However, the number appeared to always be busy, when I tried to dial it in early July after hearing nothing more about the refund. By dialing repeatedly, I was finally able to get through to the IRS. However I kept getting cut off in mid-conversation and never got the same person twice. One person was going to call me back, but never did. Another informed me authoritatively that it always takes a minimum of six months before a lost check can be replaced. We waited.
Seven months later, November 1977, still no tax refund. At this juncture I once again invoked the good offices of Senator Robert Griffin:
November 14, 1977 Senator Robert Griffin Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. Dear Senator Griffin: On January 23, 1977 1 filed my federal income tax return for myself and my wife, Doris. A refund of $406.40 was due to us. When we received no check, I wrote on April 9 to the IRS (copy enclosed) inquiring. In a letter of April 29 (copy enclosed) the IRS said our check had been issued on February 18, and that an appropriate investigation would be commenced. A toll free number for phoning the IRS was included with this letter, but our calls to that number have resulted only in runarounds and nonsense. We still have not received our refund, and it is a good thing that we do not live so hand to mouth that we would have been greatly harmed by this delay. However I am beginning to get good and irritated, especially since I suspect that the government will pay us no interest for this delay which in no way was our fault. If we were late in paying money due to the IRS interest would be charged as a matter of course. If there is anything your office can do to expedite our receiving our tax refund, we would greatly appreciate it. Also, perhaps something could be done to allow for tax refunds to be deposited directly in the taxpayer's checking account, as is now possible with Social Security stipends, so as to reduce the danger of the check being ripped off while in the none-too- dependable clutches of the U.S. Postal Service. Sincerely, Paul F. deLespinasse cc: Internal Revenue Service P.O. Box 552 Covington, Kentucky 41012
The following letter came back promptly under Senator Griffin's signature:
November 22, 1977 Dr. Paul deLespinasse 1142 College Avenue Adrian, Michigan 49221 Dear Dr. deLespinasse: Thank you for your recent letter. My office is presently making an inquiry on your behalf and as soon as information is received, I will be back in touch with you. Sincerely, Robert P. Griffin U.S. Senate RPG:mbb
On December 2, 1977, Ms. A. telephoned from the IRS. She asked if we had ever received and signed an authorization to stop payment on the old (lost) check. We had not. She said that we should have and she would look into it. She also said we should have squawked when we did not hear anything after six weeks!
The promised stop payment authorization form finally came on the last day of 1977. We signed it and mailed it back promptly. A few days later we got another phone call, this time from an IRS troubleshooting office in Detroit. Mr. B. asked if we had received the form. Finally, on January 16, 1978, ten months after the original check was issued, we received our tax refund for the year 1976.
How Some Problems Occur. Looking back at these two cases, we should call attention to several points: First, in spite of many similarities, there was an important difference between the problem with the GPO and that with the IRS. The GPO is operated by government-as-contractor and has no monopoly of the right to publish Supreme Court opinions. Consequently, people not finding GPO service satisfactory are free to take their business elsewhere. To some extent, then, the GPO faces competition, which forces it to refrain from becoming too disorganized. The IRS, on the other hand, is an agent of government-as-legislator (at best) or of government-as-bandit. People cannot discontinue paying their taxes if they do not like the service!
Second, big governmental organizations are by no means the only ones that are hard to communicate with. Difficulties with the phone company or magazine renewals are legion. If the organization is governmental this can compound the problem, as the IRS case shows, but to a great extent, government organizations are hard to deal with because they are big, not because they are governmental.
Third, today a computer is probably involved when we have trouble getting an organization's attention. It is tempting to think that the problem is caused by the computer and that if everything were done by people the "human touch" and flexibility could be restored. Nothing could be further from the truth. Computers only follow instructions, and they can employ only information actually made available to them. Within these limits computers are highly reliable. But they also comply with ruthless efficiency when told to do the wrong things.
How Problems Can Be Solved. Of course, I did not know Senator Griffin personally, and the Senator probably never saw any of the correspondence involved in these two cases. Nevertheless, writing to him produced excellent results after repeated contacts with the GPO and IRS failed. Like most senators, Mr. Griffin had a large staff of competent assistants. Upon receiving my letters, the responsible staff person either wrote to or phoned the appropriate person across town at the GPO or the IRS. These bureaucrats dug in and cleared up the problems.
There are two reasons why a senator's staff produced good results when a private citizen got nowhere. First, staff members deal with these problems all the time and have expert knowledge about the internal organization of various bureaucratic agencies. If they do not know who can best handle a problem, they undoubtedly know someone they can call to find out whom to call. When dealing with large complex organizations in which each employee is a specialist and responsibilities are minutely divided, a complaint that lands on the wrong desk will probably be ignored or mishandled.
A second reason senatorial inquiries produce results is that staff members represent someone with leverage over the bureaucracy. Agency appropriation requests go to Congress every year, and few bureaucratic opportunities to cultivate Capitol Hill are neglected.
A final comment about the GPO and the IRS cases: In both instances I was asking only for what was legally due. The government, having accepted payment, was obliged to deliver a year's issues of the Preliminary Print, and the government must refund overpaid taxes when a tax return so requesting has been properly filed. In neither case did the government or its bureaucratic agents have a legal right to deny the author's requests. This fact puts in perspective the problems faced by people--even presidents--trying to get an agency to exercise its discretion in their favor.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY
General Characteristics of Bureaucracy
The classic analysis of bureaucracy was written just before World War I by a German sociologist-economist, Max Weber. Weber noted five general characteristics of bureaucratic organizations.
1.
"There is the principle of fixed and official jurisdictional
areas, which are generally ordered by rules.
2. "[T]here is
supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones. Such a system
offers the governed the possibility of appealing the decision of a
lower office to its higher authority, in a definitely regulated
manner."
3. "Office management . . . usually presupposes
thorough and expert training."
4. "[Olfficial activity
demands the full working capacity of the official.
5. "The
management of the office follows general rules, which are more or
less stable, more or less exhaustive, and which can be
learned." Footnote
4
Although the modern ear tends to hear "bureaucratic" as a bad word, Weber argued--quite probably correctly--that bureaucracy was the most efficient form of organization:
The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. The fully developed bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non- mechanical modes of production. Footnote 5
Strangely enough, as Weber noted, "paid bureaucratic work . . . is often cheaper than even formally unremunerated honorific service":
Honorific arrangements make administrative work an avocation and, for this reason alone, honorific service usually functions more slowly, being less bound to schemata and being more formless. Hence it is less precise and less unified than bureaucratic work because it is less dependent upon superiors. . . . Honorific work is less continuous than bureaucratic and frequently quite expensive. This is especially the case if one thinks not only of the money costs to the public treasury--costs which bureaucratic administration . . . usually substantially increases--but also of the frequent economic losses of the governed, caused by delays and lack of precision. Footnote 6
Or, as Anthony Sampson described the advantage of the head of ITT (a private bureaucratic organization) who somewhat overpaid his top executives: "He's got them by their limousines." Footnote 7
Hierarchy can best be visualized with the aid of a diagram (Fig. 6-2). [Omitted in hypertext version posted on World Wide Web.] Each circle represents a single member of the organization. The higher a person in the diagram, the higher his position in the hierarchy." Each person supervises the work of several subordinates, the exact number being limited by the "span of control" considerations discussed in Chapter 5. Conflicts between subordinates can be resolved by their common superior. A conflict between persons #5 and #6 could be resolved by #2, whereas conflict between # 5 and # 9 might have to go clear up to 1.
Basic Organization of the Federal Executive Machinery
Federal executive machinery consists of several staff agencies in the Executive Office of the President plus three basic types of line or operating agencies:
1.
Departments (some headed by cabinet members)
2. Independent
regulatory commissions and boards
3. Government corporations
A staff has been defined as "that portion of an administrative organization which has mainly investigatory, advisory, or planning functions, in contrast to the line organization which is engaged directly in administrative action." [Footnote 9] As applied to entire organizations, a staff agency is one dealing mainly with other government bodies, while line agencies deal mainly with the public. The "staff " organizations in the Executive Office of the President are basically bureaucracies resting on top of other bureaucracies. Agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Council on Environmental Quality are efforts to magnify presidential leverage over the rest of the vast bureaucratic body.
The Departments. The oldest executive branch organizations are the cabinet departments, of which there are 13. However, new departments have been consistently proposed and occasionally created since the present Constitution came into force in 1789. Only four of the departments can be traced back to President Washington's administration.
Some years ago the following mnemonic was created to aid people studying the Cabinet: St. Dapiacl Each letter in this name stood for a department as things were at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration in 1953:
State
Department
Treasury Department
Defense Department
Attorney
General (head of the Department of Justice)
Post Office
Department
Interior Department
Agriculture Department
Commerce
Department
Labor Department
Not only did the mnemonic express the seniority of each department, but it also summarized the order in which cabinet members stood in the "line of succession" to the presidency under the Act of 1947.
In any organization it may be vital to assure that key offices do not remain empty. This is particularly true of the American presidency, whose occupant holds the "button" that could blow up the whole world. If both president and vice president died or were killed at the same time, the next person in line to the office is the speaker of the House of Representatives, and after him the president pro tem of the Senate. Since the House can always choose a new speaker, the president pro tem of the Senate would have little chance of becoming President were it not for the atomic bomb. If Washington, D.C., were destroyed the line of succession could be wiped out if it stopped with the president pro tem. With Congress destroyed, even the Twenty- fifth Amendment provisions for filling vacancies in the vice presidency would be unavailable. It was just as well that in 1947--year two of the Atomic Age--Congress left the cabinet secretaries in the line of succession when it amended existing law to place the speaker and the president pro tem at the head of the line after the vice president. The cabinet secretaries are great gadabouts; if Washington is wiped out one of them is bound to be out of town.
Addition of new cabinet departments has made the once convenient mnemonic increasingly unwieldy. By the end of the Eisenhower years it had become:
h St. Dapiacle w
thanks to creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. And by the end of the Nixon administration creation of new Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and of Transportation made it:
hh St. Dapiacleut wd
except for one further complication: conversion of the Post Office from a cabinet department to a government corporation. At this juncture the mnemonic, which still had its uses, could be saved only by bracketing the P and adding another E to represent Carter's addition of a Department of Energy:
hh St. Da(p)iacleute wd
But clearly the mnemonic jig was about up. In 1979 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was divided into two departments. A separate Department of Education was created, and what remained of HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services:
hh St. Da(p)iaclautee hd s
Expansion of the Cabinet. Historical expansion of federal government responsibilities can be seen in the order the cabinet departments were created:
1.
The basic functions of diplomacy, finance, military defense, and
criminal prosecution are performed by the four oldest departments:
State, Treasury, Defense, Justice.
2. Government's expanding role
in managing national resources and the economy produced the
departments of Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor, between
the years 1849 and 1913.
3. Since 1953 the federal government has
become more involved in the cities, with their welfare, housing,
transportation, and connected energy problems. During this period the
departments of Health and Human Services (HAHS), Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), Transportation, Energy, and Education were
created.
Hierarchy in the Departments. Except for the Department of Justice with its attorney general, each department is headed by a secretary. The secretaries, appointed by the president with senatorial consent, are removable by the president at any time and for any reasons.[Footnote 10] Internally, each department is divided and subdivided into smaller units. Commonly, the largest of these subunits are called bureaus, as in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is a part of the Justice Department.
Most presidents meet periodically with the Cabinet as a group to secure advice, announce policy, and coordinate the work of the departments. However, the American Cabinet is not an important body and does not make collective decisions by counting heads.
Departments Outside the Cabinet. In addition to the departments whose heads are cabinet members, there are several independent agencies resembling them in most respects but whose heads are not in the Cabinet. The largest of these organizations is the Veterans Administration and another is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Independent Regulatory Boards and Commissions. Independent regulatory boards and commissions (not to be confused with the independent agencies) are the second major kind of federal bureaucratic organization. These agencies include the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), among others.
Transportation. How many people realize that it is illegal to truck other people's goods across state lines without obtaining a "certificate of convenience and necessity" from the ICC? Or that requested certificates are often denied in order to protect existing truckers and railroads from added competition? Or that a certificate often places detailed restrictions on where the trucker can operate, what he can carry, and the routes he must drive to get from one city to another? During the 1973 energy crunch, many truckers were driving hundreds of fuel-consuming miles out of their way and going one direction empty.
How many people know that the CAB and FAA (Federal Aviation Agency), established to protect the public, have often protected the airlines from each other and from the public? In the 1960s two existing airlines carried passengers between the Hawaiian islands. Tickets cost about twice as much as for equal distances elsewhere in the United States. But these airlines were the only public transportation from one part of Hawaii to another. A new company tried to offer "sky-bus" service between the islands for about half the prevailing charge. Since their sky-bus would not cross state lines, there was no interstate commerce involved. The sky-bus proprietors therefore thought that they needed no federal certificate of airworthiness or other permission to fly the proposed route. Under prevailing constitutional doctrine, federal agencies have no authority to regulate commerce purely within one state--intrastate as distinguished from interstate commerce. (Thus the ICC has no jurisdiction over truckers operating strictly within one state, as noted above.) Pressed by the two existing airlines, CAB and FAA argued that they did have jurisdiction in Hawaii. The islands are more than six miles apart, and once you get three miles out to sea (as the law on territorial waters stood then) you are over international waters. Therefore anyone on or over international waters without flying some national flag is a pirate, and the federal government can regulate anybody flying its flag.
The sky-bus people went to court and lost. The administrator of the FAA, visiting Honolulu, admitted that the sky-bus was in excellent mechanical condition but announced that his agency would refuse to issue a certificate of airworthiness anyway. Competition from the sky-bus might cause the existing operators to lose money, making them unable to keep their aircraft in airworthy condition. Therefore, no certificate of airworthiness for the admittedly airworthy sky-bus!
The prevailing approach to regulating airlines has had dramatic effects. Runs between Los Angeles and San Francisco, unequivocally intrastate, have never been regulated by the CAB/FAA. The trip costs about half as much as one from Chicago to Cleveland, a federally regulated run of equal distance. Low prices, of course, are not necessarily good.
Hierarchy in the Regulatory Agencies. Departments are headed by a single individual. Regulatory agencies are headed by committees of three or more members, appointed by the president- -with senatorial consent--for fixed terms. One of the commissioners or board members is designated by his colleagues, or in some cases by the president, as chairman. A "permanent" administrative head of the agency may also be chosen by the commissioners. But basic issues of policy and application can be appealed to the board as a whole, just as decisions by subordinates in cabinet departments may ultimately be appealed up to the secretary.
The regulatory agencies are independent in the sense that their decisions cannot usually be appealed to the president and he cannot remove board members. But they are not independent in any stronger sense. Their jurisdiction, funding, or existence can be destroyed by Congress, with or without the leadership of the president and his Office of Management and Budget. Their rules can be challenged on legal or constitutional grounds in the ordinary courts. And their applications of those rules to specific cases can be appealed to the courts alleging noncompliance with the Constitution, acts of Congress, or the agency's own rules.
Government Corporations. The third major category of federal organizations consists of government corporations--the U.S. Postal Service (previously a cabinet department), the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporations (FDIC), and so on. Like all corporations, these are headed by a board of directors. But these directors are not chosen by private stockholders--for there are none--but by the president. As usual, Senate consent is required for these appointments.
Government corporations generally produce and distribute goods or services much as private corporations do. They are strictly manifestations of government-as-contractor. Unlike Cabinet departments and independent regulatory commissions, they do not wield sanctions. Operations are largely financed by the sale of goods or services. Starting and growth capital comes from the government's treasury--i.e., the taxpayers--but government corporations can also raise money by selling bonds to private investors. The thing sharply distinguishing them from private profit-seeking corporations is that they sell no stock to private investors; they may owe money to persons who buy their bonds, but shares in the corporation are not owned by investors.
Differences Between Government and Private Corporations. There are, however, strong differences between the legal status of government corporations and private ones. Most notably, government corporations pay no income or property taxes. Since some of their activities have exact private sector counterparts, the public is often confused. For example, the TVA produces and sells electricity. So do many private corporations. The private corporations must pay taxes to state and local governments on their property and income, and to the federal government on their income. These are costs of doing business, exactly like costs of labor, materials, and capital, and like all costs they must be passed along to the people who consume the electricity. As a result of this extra cost "private" power has traditionally been more expensive to its consumers than "public" power. This fact has been seized upon by doctrinaire socialists as evidence that all electricity should be produced and distributed by government.
Of course, no such conclusion inevitably follows from the evidence. To the extent that taxes are not collected from government corporations, their consumers are subsidized by the taxpayers as a whole. But everybody cannot be subsidized by the taxpayers, for the taxpayers are everybody. On the other hand, the evidence does not support equally doctrinaire conservative charges that government operations are inherently inefficient compared with private enterprise. Aside from the difference in taxes, the costs of producing electricity are similar for private and governmental organizations.
Government corporations are thought to permit greater managerial autonomy, more freedom from political pressures, and a more businesslike operation than departments or independent commissions. But this is only a matter of degree. The U.S. Postal Service remained a political football even after being converted to a corporation during the Nixon administration.
Public Administration by Private Corporations: Government by Contract
Government-as-contractor can operate either at a "retail" or at a "wholesale" level. It can hire many individuals to work directly for it in various government agencies--departments, regulatory commissions, corporations--and this is what we usually think of upon hearing the expressions "bureaucracy" or "public administration." Here, the government hires people who conduct its operations directly.
Government, however, can also pursue its goals by making a few big contracts with private corporations. The corporations then hire individuals to perform the necessary services. The government operates at the wholesale level, while the private corporations handle the retailing function. The last generation has witnessed a vast increase in wholesale government contracting. Defense contractors and private universities receive vast sums." A single contract for a new weapons system may involve billions of dollars. Elements of the system used to send Americans to the moon were developed by private corporations under contract with the NASA.
Advantages of Contracting. Wholesale contracting helps avoid the appearance of an ever more bloated government bureaucracy. Individuals hired by private contractors are not counted as government employees when the public turns against "big government" every so often. This can be a major tactical advantage.
By hiring individuals indirectly rather than directly, government can avoid much of the inflexibility resulting from civil service rules regulating the hiring, firing, promotion, demotion, and compensation of government employees.
The prospect of a large government contract can cultivate political support for government agencies handling the deal. Support from corporate lobbyists is always welcome when agencies go to Congress for their annual budget allotment.
Wholesale contracting allows government to take advantage of existing organizations, with existing expertise and experience, rather than starting from scratch to assemble a government bureau to do a certain job. And unlike a government agency which, once created, is virtually impossible to destroy, the contract with a private corporation need not last forever. Nor do the individuals losing their jobs in the private sector when such contracts are not renewed have the right to "bump" government employees with less seniority from jobs in other areas.
Finally, wholesale contracting offers some possibility of reducing costs. The government deals directly only with capitalists, and will not make itself politically unpopular if it drives a hard bargain with a rich corporation. Stinginess in compensating individual government employees--who are part of the public government serves--is less likely to be regarded as an admirable trait even though it similarly benefits the general public. Of course, if government drives a hard bargain with a corporation, this will be reflected in the wages that the corporation can afford to pay its employees, but here the fault appears to lie with the corporation rather than with the government.
Disadvantages of Contracting. Increased wholesale contracting in may also have disadvantages. It may hinder effective public supervision of government operations by concealing the actual scope of governmental activity. Anything that confuses the public can only be regarded as an obstacle to meaningful democracy. Opportunities for corruption may also increase when large amounts of money are set aside for a single contract. Companies eager for government business may be quite willing to confer inducements privately upon officials responsible for awarding the contract. And while bodres requiring competitive bidding for government business have been effective in reducing corruption, the largest deals between the federal government and private corporations have not been put out to bid. Finally, employment instability may increase as corporations concentrate on a few large sales rather than many small ones.
Possibilities for New Contracts. No doubt many types of wholesale contracting remain to be explored. Allegations that the conservative Mt. Pelerin Society once debated whether the United States should have its own navy or rent one were not as wild as they seemed. The Constitution does authorize Congress to "grant letters of marque and reprisal" (Article I, 8, 11), licenses permitting private citizens to engage in certain acts of war. Is there any reason why such a license could not be issued to a private corporation?
Less extreme wholesale contracting might find a public school district hiring a private corporation to staff all its classrooms and administrative positions. Experiments with contracting out educational services have already been conducted.
Another way of reducing the number of government's retail contracting decisions is to decentralize authority to decide who will receive government funds for providing given services. For example, financing of primary and secondary education could be converted to a voucher system. Parents would receive yearly certificates (vouchers) from government which could be redeemed for a certain amount of cash by any school--public or private-- attended by their children. The system would break the near monopoly presently held by public schools (except for families who can afford private tuition after paying the taxes used to support public schools). Public schools would get only the same per-student subsidy that private schools get, so the public- private competition would be a fair one, and parents' liberty to pick the best school increased. The system would combine public financing of primary and secondary education with individual decisions allocating the money. Disestablished in this way, the public schools would no longer have access to the public trough even when they provide inferior service. The voucher- disestablishment system could also be used for higher education. Its predictable unpopularity among professors at public universities might be equaled by its favor among students seeking the advantages of smaller, private colleges but unable to afford the higher tuition. A more radical application would be to disestablish the post office. Although the Constitution gives Congress power to establish a post office, it does not explicitly require or authorize a monopoly. Under current law, the U.S. Postal Service has no monopoly on the right to transport packages, and the private United Parcel Service has been giving the Post Office good, healthy competition. It is generally recognized that UPS provides faster and more dependable service at lower cost than the Post Office. Letters, however, are a legal monopoly of the Post Office. Private operators trying to provide this service have been forced to stop under threat of fine and imprisonment. A first step in disestablishing the Post Office would be to repeal the pseudo- laws giving it a monopoly on first class mail. A second step would be to make any government subsidy of postal service available to all organizations, governmental or private, proportionately to the volume of business they handle.
RED TAPE: DIFFICULTIES DEALING WITH BUREAUCRACIES
Anyone who has ever filled in a form required by a public agency can appreciate C. Northcote Parkinson's satirical description of bureaucrats deliberately designing questionnaires that are impossible to answer. [Footnote 12] People trying to get action from a government organization often face irrelevant, contradictory, or duplicated requirements. Bureaucratic inertia and unimaginativeness are proverbial, as are agencies that ignore the very rules they impose on others.
Advantages of Red Tape
Is there a method in this madness? We tend to notice red tape when we do not like it, but one person's red tape is another's procedural protection. Do we really want to allow the state highway department to tear down houses blocking a projected freeway without bothering with the procedures for orderly relocation of their occupants? One person's right freely to swing his fists must end where the other person's nose begins, and bureaucratic fists pack quite a punch. From the practical point of view, we must ask not whether the bureaucratic system is perfect, but whether there are any better possibilities. It appears that large organizations must inevitably be somewhat cumbersome if they are going to work at all. If everyone in the organization could do anything that seemed right in every particular case from his perspective, a shambles would soon result. Clearly, there are some things that a given organization cannot be allowed to do at all. Responsibility for the things that the organization can do must be divided among particular individuals. Literally, organizations cannot act--only individuals can act; but determining what things can be done by which people requires rules.
Again, if even individuals authorized to do certain things could do them at will, the results would be intolerable. Government employs hangmen, surgeons, bomber pilots, and disbursement clerks, among hundreds of other specialties; but it obviously would not do to allow the executioner to hang anybody he wanted to, or the surgeon to remove tonsils or to sterilize people at will. The U.S. Air Force and Navy have complicated fail-safe devices and procedures to assure that atomic bombs are not dropped by a disgruntled or emotionally disturbed officer. Elaborate procedures prevent government money from being disbursed to people who have no right to receive it. Internal auditing divisions in each department are in turn audited by the General Accounting Office (GAO) headed by the comptroller general, America's top accountant. As my own experiences with the missing tax refund indicates, these procedures can be frustrating for people with legitimate claims; but the alternative would be worse.
Rules not formulated with typical cases in mind will be too complicated for anybody to understand. Those designed for average cases may produce fine results most of the time. My tax refunds came through in good order for the 14 years prior to the problem. But we tend not to notice successes because we take it for granted that things usually will go right.
Bureaucracies are also forced to use rules to avoid floundering in the many specific decisions they are called upon to make. Like contracts, decisions can be made at retail or at wholesale. Individual decisions can be made on their own merits, taking into account goals, circumstances, and probable side effects. We have expressed the relation between the basic elements of these retail decisions as A ---> X + Y. But decisions can also be made at a wholesale level. Considering the goals and side effects likely to be produced by deducing specific decisions from various possible rules, one picks the rule promising the best ratio of benefits to costs.
We can express the relation between the elements of a wholesale decision as follows:
Under circumstances C, rule R - - - > A
The dotted arrow expresses, not a cause and effect relation like that between an action and its consequences, but logical implication. Under circumstances number one, rule R implies action Al, under circumstances number two, action A2. Making due allowance for expected circumstances, one can project the probable aggregate consequences X and Y of adopting rule R and compare these with the consequences of alternative rules R1 , R2, and R3. We can simplify the formulation by omitting the dotted arrow of logical implication:
R ---> X + Y
Of course, a given rule produces given consequences only if observed. Actions in accordance with the rule produce the consequences apparently attributed, in the simplified formulation, to the rule itself
A high percentage of organizational decisions must be made at wholesale, for the various reasons discussed above. (By wholesale we mean "taking the form of general rules that can be applied to a variety of specific situations.") One consequence is to provide an additional basis for specialization within the organization: some people can specialize in making rules, and others in applying them to particular cases. That this type of specialization should be employed is an ethical conclusion of the separation of powers theory and, as such, is reflected in the Constitution.
In terms of the A ---> X + Y formula of the elements of retail decisions, offices, roles, and rules can be regarded as circumstances within which individual bureaucrats act. Offices can be seen as collections of roles, and roles as the expression of rules. Some of the rules are formal and explicit; others may be based on habits and on other people's expectations. Thus, one can distinguish between the formal organization, as supposedly described by an "organization chart," and the informal organization, which may be quite different. Footnote 13
The actions of the individual bureaucrat are sharply limited by his organizational circumstances. But these very limits, on himself and others, make it possible for his actions to contribute to meaningful and effective "action" by the organization. Limits may actually enhance opportunities for creative action. The philosopher Kant told of a bird which was unhappy with the air friction preventing faster flight. But the same air friction limiting its speed made the flight possible in the first place. And so it is with bureaucrats. If everyone at NASA had been free to act at will can anyone believe Americans would have reached the moon?
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPS)
In order to avoid hopeless frustration and unproductive indignation, citizens dealing with bureaucracy "from below" need to understand the nature of and reasons for red tape. A president or cabinet secretary dealing with bureaucracy "from above" should understand Standard Operating Procedures. Like electronic computers, organizations can "do" only those things they are organized or "programmed" to do. While an old organization can be taught new tricks, this takes considerable time. Organizations told to do something they are not prepared to do will react with great confusion. Responsibilities have not been allocated, procedures have not been established, the organizational rules and roles are not pertinent, and necessary expertise may be unavailable in current personnel.
The immense inertia of organizations presents few problems when the organizations are called upon to make large numbers of similar decisions. Operations such as processing millions of Social Security checks each month or forecasting weather for the next 24 hours can easily be made routine. But a president is more likely to be interested in massively redirecting a few government organizations. As commander-in-chief, he might want to direct the military to do many different things in different parts of the world. The United States has many conceivable combinations of allies and enemies.
An immense organization, such as an army, however, cannot improvise. Cooperation and coordination are required to deliver the right men to the right place at the right time with the right equipment and supplies. It takes time to work out this coordination. Since a military emergency or surprise attack may not allow the necessary time, all modern armies try to develop contingency plans for every major problem that may develop. Since the number of possible contingencies is practically infinite, these plans often consist of standard operating procedures (SOPs), "routines for dealing with standard situations," [Footnote 14] which can be put together on short notice to constitute an operation.
When Standard Operating Procedures Do Not Work. On the other hand, when something comes up for which standard operating procedures are inadequate, great problems result. Suspicions that the Soviet Union was introducing guided missiles into Cuba produced a high level decision in 1962 to send a special U-2 spy plane to photograph possible installations; but a jurisdictional dispute between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Air Force produced a ten-day delay in this urgent mission. Normally, such flights were made by a CIA pilot in civilian clothes. This time, though, the Air Force got the ultimate nod. But the Air Force U-2s were not adequately equipped for such a flight, and finally an Air Force pilot made the flight in a CIA plane. [Footnote 15] The developed pictures proved existence of Russian missiles capable of hitting the U.S., and the Cuban Missiles Crisis ensued. The ten-day delay could have been critical.
World War I may have been due in part to lack of contingency plans in Russia and Germany for partial mobilization of the reserves. As Dean Allison notes, "Government leaders' decisions trigger organizational routines." [Footnote 16] But the routines must exist before they can be triggered.
Bureaucrats: The People in Office
As the A ---> X + Y formulation indicates, what people do depends on what they want. What do bureaucrats want? Presumably, bureaucrats are no different from other people. They want purchasing power in order to be able to live. They would like to wield power of one kind or another, because power is the ability, when we have enough of it, to get some of the things we want and we would all like to get what we want. They want accomplishments, for a sense of meaningfulness is important, and they may wish to gain a reputation. Perhaps there are certain governmental goals they would like to help achieve.
Bureaucrats, thus, want many things. And they share the common predicament of being unable to get everything they want. Accordingly, they make trade-offs between various goals and the side effects of pursuing them.
The Subordinates. There are always many more people at lower levels of a hierarchy than there are at a high level. If all information gained by one bureaucrat's subordinates were passed along to him, he would be swamped by it. Consequently a normal duty of subordinates is to protect their superiors from information by transmitting it to them selectively. If the subordinate is completely loyal and if he knows which information is important and which is not, he will select for upward transmission exactly what the boss and those higher up need to know in order to do their jobs properly. But these are extremely big ifs.
It is not always possible for subordinates to fit information into a larger picture. Its importance may only emerge in the light of other facts which it is not their responsibility to gather. People higher up can combat this problem by telling subordinates general types of things they want to be told. They may also send word that if specific information shows up they want to know about it immediately. But the top people cannot always anticipate what they might want to know, and mistakes are bound to occur even when subordinates are completely loyal to their country, their organization, and their boss.
Not all employees are loyal, of course. For private or public- spirited reasons, they may wish to destroy their boss. They may feel that he is a bad administrator, or they may merely want his job if he loses it. Perhaps they only want to manipulate his behavior. Very commonly, subordinates refrain from bringing bad news for purely personal defensive purposes; they are afraid their boss will take out his unhappiness at the news on the person bearing it.
One further obstacle to communication is the nature of language itself. Words can be very ambiguous, so that one message is transmitted and quite another received:
Joan had gone to the movies with a young man who brought her home at a respectable hour. However, the couple lingered on the front porch longer than Aunt Mildred thought necessary. The little old lady was rather proud of her ability to deal with younger people, so she slipped out of bed, raised her bedroom window, and called down sweetly, "If you two knew how pleasant it is in bed, you wouldn't be standing out there in the cold." Footnote 17
Under bureaucratic circumstances, with many specialists dealing with each other in complicated ways, an additional problem is co-called "gobbledygook." The proverbial bureaucrat never tells his girlfriend "I love you," but rather "Complete assurance of maximum affection is hereby implied." Fancier ways of saying the simple imply greater status and expertise, and many words emitted by bureaucrats appear designed more to impress than to communicate.
Oddly enough, one of the best introductions to bureaucratic behavior is a spoof, C. Northcote Parkinson's Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration. Parkinson notes that bureaucrats want to multiply subordinates rather than rivals. Their organizations tend to grow at about 6% per year even when work load is constant or decreasing. (Six percent compounded interest is not to be sneered at; at this rate, today's nearly three million federal civil servants could have grown from a bureaucracy of only 45 people in 1789.) But each individual bureaucrat keeps busy because "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion, " [Footnote 18] and bureaucrats make work for each other. Says Parkinson, a big organization needs no input of work from outside; its members are fully occupied reading each others' memos. Parkinson makes the serious point that the private interests of bureaucrats may produce public consequences desired by nobody.
PUBLIC PERSONNEL POLICY: HOW GOVERNMENTS HIRE AND FIRE EMPLOYEES
For almost all individuals who work for American government, the association is a voluntary one. Exceptions include conscripted soldiers when there is a military draft and compulsory jury duty.
Employees of the Federal Bureaucracy
The federal government directly employs about five million people: 2.2 million soldiers and sailors and 2.8 million civilians. Most individual employees are rated for particular specialties they can handle and also for the hierarchical level at which they can work. Military ranks are indicated by names-- private first class, major, colonel, etc. Civil service ranks are generally indicated by GS numbers--GS 7, GS 13, GS 15--with higher numbers indicating higher status. (U.S. Foreign Service officers, however, have lower numbers for higher rank.)
Military and civilian services have elaborate procedures for appointing, evaluating, promoting, and removing individuals from their ranks. Both provide in great detail for the compensation which will be received by each kind of employee, including salary, fringe benefits consumed currently (medical insurance), and fringe benefits accruing for future years (retirement pay).
The Civil Service
We will concentrate here on federal civilian employment. Generally, applicants for federal civil service take a test designed to evaluate general or specific abilities. A college or law degree may be required before one can even qualify to take a test. If the applicant is a military veteran, a veteran's preference bonus is added to the actual test score. Those receiving the highest scores are interviewed and final selections are made.
The federal civil service with its nearly three million employees is an important part of the general employment picture, for the government is the largest single employer in the country.
Since the 1930s the federal government has been very interested in employment relations generally, not just in its own policies as an employer. The prime focus of government's interest from the 1930s to the 1950s was labor-management relations and unionization. During the 1960s another prime concern emerged, the abolition of employment discrimination against black people (first), women (next), and ultimately a long list of other disfavored groups. Both concerns were manifested in organizational form: the first, in the National Labor Relations Board (1935), the second, in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1964).
The general premises of federal labor policy appear to be as follows:
1.
Employers are big, powerful, and bad.
2. Individual workers are
little, weak, and good.
3. "Inequality of bargaining power"
allows the big, bad employer to exploit his workers and pay them less
than they really deserve.
Based on these assumptions, federal policy since the 1930s has been to encourage unionization and to pass pseudo-laws prohibiting less than a certain hourly wage. Supposedly, when workers unionize, their joint strength will be greater than that of individuals and will help redress the "inequality of bargaining power" otherwise existing, The so-called "minimum wage laws" are a straightforward attempt to increase the purchasing power of poor people by outlawing low wages.
Problems in Public Employment. We will examine the adequacy of these policies in later chapters. For now, we must ask whether federal employment fits into the general philosophy upon which government policy toward the private sector is based. For example, is the federal government-as-contractor "bad"? (It most assuredly is big! And powerful.) How should the wages and other conditions of federal employees be determined? Should federal workers be allowed, even encouraged, to unionize so as to equalize an unequal bargaining power? Should they be allowed to strike? (Franklin Roosevelt, whose administration sired today's basic labor laws, did not think so.) Or should the government have unilateral power to set wage rates it is willing to pay for given services? If it is all right for government--the biggest and most powerful employer of all--to do this, why is it wrong for private employers? Should government organizations be participatory democracies run by and pursuing policies set by employee voting? If so, what then becomes of democracy in the larger system, the right of elected representatives of the whole country to determine how government is going to act? Should civil servants be, in fact, masters?
Certain trends do seem to have developed in the federal civil service. As with other government employees in states and cities, there is a trend towards unionization. Federal pay scales, once considered relatively low, now are higher than equivalent private jobs except at top executive levels. It has become extremely difficult to fire anybody from a civil service job.
Serious questions are raised by any possibility that civil servants are overpaid. If they are underpaid, they are entirely free to seek better opportunities with other employers, or to keep their government job if they feel advantages such as job security outweigh disadvantages. But if they are overpaid, who will protect the public, whose money is being unwisely spent? It has been said that a liberal is a person who is generous with other people's money, but the propriety of liberalism in this sense is most debatable. Do not our elected leaders have a duty to drive a hard bargain on the taxpayers' behalf when they buy bombers or hire civil servants? Is the present civil service really made up of the best people money can hire? Must government always hire only the best people-and pay accordingly, or should it retain the option of hiring less talented people to do an adequate job at lower cost?
A Close Look at Government Employment Policies. Before we respond uncritically to the question by replying rhetorically, "Why not the best?" we ought to think for one moment about unemployment. To what extent does government contribute to unemployment? And to what extent can government-as-contractor, the proprietor of the civil service, operate to reduce unemployment?
One way that government-as-contractor could help to reduce or eliminate unemployment would be to act as a residual employer, hiring everybody who cannot find a job from any other employer. But if anything, the tendency has been to lay some government workers off in hard times, thus aggravating rather than reducing unemployment. Of course, the issue of stability of government employment is a separate one from that of the proper level of that employment. As we saw in the previous chapter, a cohesive minority can often swing elections by providing the difference between a narrow loss and a narrow victory. Federal government employees are distributed as significant minorities in every state. These people are all, or virtually all, voters, and most will naturally favor candidates with a liberal outlook toward expanding and compensating the civil service. Although taxpayers who are not government employees have an equal interest in keeping government employment and compensation scales down, this interest is divided among more people, while that of the civil servants is concentrated and therefore more likely to be reflected in votes. The principle of differential mobilization--widespread interests are more difficult to mobilize than concentrated ones of the same magnitude--will return to the focus of our attention when we consider economic regulation in Chapter 9.
Let us call the relationship between the number of people "feeding at the public trough" and the number of other taxpayers available to support them the gravy train ratio. The present gravy train ratio for the federal government is 1 to 16. That is, for every person employed by the federal government, there are 16 other employees who do not work for that government and whose taxes are available to support the one federal employee. However the gravy train ratio for the country as a whole, including state and local government employees, is only 1 to 4.7. Comparable figures for past years are:
1900 1/23.7 1910 1/20.3 1920 1/14 1930 1/13 1940 1/10.3 1950 1/8.8 1960 1/6.9 1970 1/5.3
The trend in government employment is unmistakable. How long it can continue is another question. If the trend of the last 70 years continues, we can figure that by the year 2050 the gravy train ratio will be 1/1. Every nongovernment employee will be supporting one government employee. However, it is hard to believe that before that date some countertrend will not have emerged. California's notorious Proposition 13, adopted by direct vote of the people in 1978, may be the first dramatic sign that the countertrend is developing.
SUMMARY
Most people do not find bureaucracy very interesting, but it is impossible to understand modern government without considering this subject. Citizen contacts with government are largely with its bureaucratic organizations, and most government decisions are made by bureaucrats. Despite the widespread impression that bureaucrats are incompetent paper-shufflers who cannot write or read plain English, bureaucratic organizations are extremely efficient. Their very sluggishness in dealing with nontypical cases is a side effect of the rules by which they deal efficiently with routine problems; and one person's "red tape" is another person's protection from arbitrary treatment by powerful government officials.
Governments increasingly are contracting with private organizations to provide public services. Even so, direct employment by American government has broken new records in recent decades. As public employees become substantial parts of the electorate, elected officials may become more sensitive to their particular interests, such as higher salaries, at the expense of the general but less well-organized interests of taxpayers. At some point the "gravy train ratio" may get high enough to ignite a taxpayers' revolt, but the exact point at which this will happen remains to be determined.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Try to list all of the ways your life is influenced by or comes into contact with government in a typical single day. How many of these involve bureaucracy?
2. Explain why we may have difficulties in dealing with: a. big private organizations b. big governmental organizations
3. What is an ombudsman, and who now performs the functions of ombudsman in our national government?
4. What political implications might we expect from the fact that federal employees are not covered by Social Security and do not pay Social Security taxes?
5. List the pros and cons of a possible rule "requiring that all communications to any government department . . . be answered within three days of receipt." (Noser Igiehon, To Build a Nigerian Nation, p. 278.)
6. Explain the difference between retail contracting and wholesale contracting by government, listing some of the possible advantages and disadvantages of each.
7. Exactly what would have to be done, and by whom, in order to "disestablish" the Post Office. What groups would oppose such a move, and what political resources might they have?
8. What is the strongest possible argument that can be made in favor of red tape?
9. Explain the difference between decision-making as expressed by A ---> X + Y and R ---> X + Y.
10. Explain why organizations are blunt instruments and how this fact is reflected in standard operating procedures.
11. What is a yes-man, and why is he a problem for organizations?
12. Is there any inherent limit to the gravy train ratio? Can you see any connection between this question and the principle of differential mobilization?
13. How high a salary must we pay to assure that there will be no corruption in the civil service?
14. Describe an organization that is the opposite of a bureaucracy as described by Max Weber.
*************
Footnotes
* The Report of The President's Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force (Washington: G.P.O., 1970), p. 23.
1. Graham Allison, Essence of Decision, Boston: Little Brown, 1971, p. 93.
2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Bicentennial Statistics, Washington, D.C., 1976, p. 386.
3. See Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy, New York: Grove Press, 1964; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, New York: Harper and Row, 1973; and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, New York: Bantam, 1963.
4. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber.- Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 196-198.
5. Ibid., p. 214.
6. Ibid., p. 214.
7. See Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State of ITT, New York: Stein and Day, 1973.
8. C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1960), writes satirically of a "lowerarchy" in Hell, presumably the converse of a hierarchy. In Hell, high is low!
9. Edward C. Smith and Arnold J. Zurcher, Dictionary of American Politics, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1955, p. 355.
10. Myers v. U.S., 272 U.S. 52 (1926).
11. Don K. Price, The Scientific Estate, New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, pp. 21-56.
12. C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration, New York: Ballantine Books, 1957.
13. Private Meek, a character in George Bernard Shaw's play Too True To Be Good, dramatizes the distinction. He explains how he has resigned his officer's commission because he found it easier to run the whole army camp as a private.
14. Graham Allison, "The Power of Bureaucratic Routines: The Cuban Missile Crisis," in Francis E. Rourke, Bureaucratic Power in National Politics (2nd ed.), Boston: Little Brown, 1972, p. 89.
15. Ibid., p. 95.
16. Ibid., p. 83.
17. See Sidney Mailick and E. H. Van Ness (eds), Concepts and Issues in Administrative Behavior, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962.
18. Parkinson, p. 15.
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