Elizabeth Leyne and Yvette Nonte write,
For the IC [Intelligence Community] customer dataset, there was a stark dichotomy between the highest-level customers at the Cabinet level, who offered glowing praise for the IC, and customers a few echelons below, who gave the IC mixed to poor reviews.
Pointer from Larry Catá Backer.
Pleasing superiors while producing low-grade work is something that can happen in any organization. But in the private sector, this behavior will be weeded out, either by smart top executives or by the Darwinian competition of the market.
“and customers a few echelons below, who gave the IC mixed to poor reviews.”
This is a really misleading way of putting it. When I started to dig into the Survey, the “lower-echelon customers” weren’t actually complaining about low-grade work at all. They were of two types, with different complaints.
1. Senior Officials who were playing the old game of trying to lobby for their current or former position to have *tasking authority* (which is perceived as having ‘real power’ in USG IC), and which also provides a lot of CYA for past mistakes and bad decisions, “Well, if I had had *tasking authority*, then I wouldn’t have been overwhelmed by the need to spend all my time intelligently filtering through a tidal wave of intel reports unrelated to what I really cared about.” That is also mostly a complaint about one’s own intel staff and personal management of that staff, not the grade of reporting.
2. Congressmen who don’t read things in general* and who especially don’t want to be bothered by having to go to the enormous hassle of going into a SCIF and reading through mountains of dense jargon, even if they are literally on intelligence committees or their assignments rely on reviewing lots of highly classified materials.
In other words, the Survey authors are presenting #2 as if observing the behavior allows us to infer a revealed preference which in turn can be interpreted such that these customers must consider the IC products to be poor quality.
Nope. You can think that something is of the highest quality, yet, not worth the trouble of acquiring because it only makes a marginal contribution to the things you *really* care about, instead of the things you are officially *supposed* to care about.
*This is a part of the general trend in our post-literate-society, and is especially bad since government reports are going the other direction and keep getting more numerous, longer, and more prolix, such that the common joke is, “I need the executive summary to the executive summary.” There is currently zero “bandwidth control” to impose harsh word limits and distill matters down to the essence, and so thousands of man-hours are spend making reports that look professional and flashy with high publication-industry production values, but which nobody ever reads.
There are 12 regional Federal Reserve banks all issuing mounting numbers of reports, let alone at HQ. No one read any of it I suspect.
Can the Fed get it right? Can the IC community? If they get it wrong, will there be radical reductions in staff?
No.
No need for ‘radical’. How about ‘any’?
How about even a “Washington Cut”, which is just a reduction in the rate of growth. After some fiasco, the people involved will say, “we didn’t have enough resources”, and if anything, they get more people, not fewer, and then get promoted to train, supervise, and manage those new people.
The question is always “Who got fired” or “Who got held accountable for this mess?” If the answer is “Nobody” then you will get nothing but more messes.
This. Nothing bad is allowed to happen to the permanent residents of Pan-Em. Not ever not no how.