On Thursday, I attended an event at Cato where the authors of a new book, What Washington Gets Wrong, presented some of their findings. They had the cute idea of doing an opinion survey of Washington insiders, to find out what they think about the public and to find out how well the insiders’ views correlate with those of the outsiders. I purchased the book and at some point I will check out its contents. Meanwhile, I found myself more stimulated by a conversation I had afterward with Cato’s Mark Calabria, who has experience as a Senate aide.
What Mark believes, and it sounds right to me, is that we have the Administrative State (in which unaccountable and un-elected bureaucrats make important decisions) because Congress wants it that way. For Congress, making the actual policy decisions has more down side than up side. Constituents whose families or businesses are adversely affected will cause a lot of trouble.
Thus, the Administrative State is an adaptation that emerged with the purpose of moving decisions away from a body that is relatively responsive to the people (Congress). You may not like it, but there it is.
There may even be reasons to believe that this adaptation is a feature rather than a bug. That is, you might want decisions to be made by people who have expertise and who are focused on the general interest rather than the particular interests of constituents. This was the view offered by a (non-libertarian) guest speaker at the Cato event.
If what you want is an organization that is accountable to its constituency, then I would argue that you want is a market process rather than a government process. While the government process adapts to diffuse accountability, the market process forces businesses to be accountable to their customers.
In the 1980s and 1990s, many American businesses discovered that their bureaucracies were undermining the firm’s responsiveness to its customers. Under competitive pressure, businesses reformed by adopting “business process re-engineering” and other management tools to ensure a better customer experience. Prior to this wave of reform, a customer’s problems would get buried in the corporate bureaucracy, with no one taking responsibility for finding a solution. Following these reforms, customers encountered businesses that were capable of solving problems, and better yet, anticipating the customer’s wants and avoiding causing problems in he first place.
Government agencies are capable of making these sorts of organizational changes. The guest speaker cited the passport office of the State Department as having become much more responsive in recent years. In side conversations afterward, a couple of Cato folks admitted that the infamous Department of Motor Vehicles in DC is better than it was twenty years ago. But I think you get improvement more rapidly and more reliably when there is market competition.
What Mark believes, and it sounds right to me, is that we have the Administrative State (in which unaccountable and un-elected bureaucrats make important decisions) because Congress wants it that way. For Congress, making the actual policy decisions has more down side than up side. Constituents whose families or businesses are adversely affected will cause a lot of trouble.
That was obvious as far back as the 1970s when I went to law school. We read lots of cases where the court was trying to figure out “the intent of Congress” because that determined who won and who lost. Often there was a whole line of cases stretching over decades where the statute could be read in various ways and judges basically made the law. At any point, Congress could have amended the statute to tell the courts, “this is what we mean” but they almost never did.
At first it was puzzling, “Didn’t Congress make the laws and the courts interpret them? Why was Congress letting the courts get away with deciding so many important matters?” But if Congress kept letting them “get away with” that, maybe Congress wanted it that way. (The way Congress kept letting the president send troops and make war wherever and whenever he pleased was another big piece of evidence that Congress thought there was too big a downside to taking responsibility.)
Is it really possible for Congress to make more than a minimal share of the policy decisions for one fifth of the economy? And wouldn’t it disable a federal agency’s ability to be responsive if Congress made those decisions?
I agree that market processes will make change and in most cases improvement at a more rapid rate. But the difference, I think, is that market participants are free to keep pursuing the profitable avenues (or drop out)… whereas with government initiatives, there’s an intention to provide a settled level of service, where you don’t get to just drop the non-profitable aspects. But at the same time I do understand the tendency of government initiatives to just keep going with almost no forces in place to end them if there’s no actual benefit being provided.
I just finished Mises’ ‘Bureaucracy’ in which helps clarify thinking regarding bureaucracies and the trend toward such management due to government interventionism. On significant point is that government can’t avoid the bureaucratic management system, even if it is evil. Private enterprises succeed when they use the profit management system and falter when they turn bureaucratic.
One major societal problem is that kids grow up in a bureaucratically managed system, schools, and many never experience real management in a profit system. If you work for the government, you are in a bureaucratic management system, and many government contractors have to adopt such systems so as not to freak the government employees out. And the regulatory agency employees can’t comprehend the profit-based management system so almost all regulations are designed to instill the bureaucratic system.
The way it used to be, the private citizen was limited only by what was prohibited and could do all that was not prohibited. The government employee is limited to only what is authorized and could not do what was not authorized. This has become flipped in recent decades where, in fact and in the public’s mind, the private citizen may only do what has been authorized, but the government employee can do anything not specifically prohibited (more recently likely to be prosecuted). It’s all very European.
Back in the 1980s, I read ‘On the Wings of Eagles’, which was based on Ross Perot’s efforts to get his executives who had been arrested as a negotiating ploy on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. What struck me was that in the midst of one of the most disruptive changes of power in recent history, the bureaucrats in the Iranian ministries held their power. It was from this book, that I realized first the inherent evil in bureaucracy and that our founders made a terrible mistake not taking this fourth branch of government into account in the Constitution. Perhaps we are due for yet another conflict and the production of another document in the English-speaking progress to less tyrannical government. Next up would be limitations on the courts and the bureaucrats. But is such possible in the modern era?