Improving Government Operations 2: Re-organization

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One way to improve government operations would be through re-organization. I once wrote,

the total number of executive entities is 157. I cannot think of any corporation in which the CEO has so many direct reports. This number ought to be fewer than ten.

I proposed consolidation. Ideally, this would be done through legislation. However, if Congress balks, the President could informally choose to make some Cabinet officials and agency heads subordinate to others. My ideas for agencies:

1. Defense. With NSA and CIA incorporated into it. In today’s world, intelligence is as important as any branch of the military.

2. State Department.

3. Financial Operations. This would include Treasury and OMB and would administer Social Security, Medicare, and all government financial guarantee programs.

4. Infrastructure. This would include the electric grid and communications spectrum

5. Economic opportunity. Attempt to coordinate and rationalize all of the many means-tested government transfer programs. Maybe someone would figure out that a Basic Income Grant would be less bad than what we have now.

6. Science and Statistics. Some functions of Commerce, Labor, and Agriculture go here. Many of their other functions disappear.

7. Consumer safety. This would include consumer protection in the financial arena.

8. Homeland Security. Smaller than it is now, with more resemblance to the old FBI.

11 thoughts on “Improving Government Operations 2: Re-organization”

  1. I don’t see why Homeland Security should exist at all. It’s entirely redundant next to defense.

    Also I think HHS may be the best cabinet post to subsume the various stray entitlement distribution agencies.

    • Actually, DHS is a prime example of what Kling is recommending, a conglomerate of semi-related components that were once mostly independent and which now gives the President and the rest of the bureaucracy one Secretary as a focal point of interaction.

      There are the administrative upsides Kling mentions but also more subtle downsides, in that it makes it easier for a President to impair certain law enforcement activities.

      • At first blush, it is not obvious why it is worse to have 200 directors reporting to one President than having a pyramid of 10 superdirectors each of whom has reporting 20 directors. I mean, what is the job of the superdirectors other than to filter out the emails of their reports? Isn’t that what staff is for?

        • Dave,

          Have you ever managed a team? Having so many people to interact with, to whom you must give direction is a nightmare.

          The idea is that your subordinates can help roll up the decision making and provide you with fewer decisions to make. You do lose something in the process; you lose the finer-grained understanding of what is happening. But, at the level of the president, you cannot afford to be involved in those sorts of details.

        • The job of the super-directors is to filter, simplify, and coordinate among their reports.

          This isn’t what staff is for. These are high-level functions. It’s what executives in any industry get paid lots of money to do.

          I presume there are management books that lay out guidance for building orgs and you would find more functional and procedural arguments there. But I think I think the most compelling argument is to just look at the organization of successful institutions. My observation is the proliferation of reports to manager tends to only happen at the bottom rung where the reports are more akin to mechanical turks in the sense that they don’t own any strategic decision-making.

  2. I would go with 4 Executive entities – National Security, Economic Security, Human Resources, and Natural Resources. Move or delete entities as appropriate.

  3. NSA is a part of DOD, a combat support agency with a national intelligence mandate, as are seven other members of the IC (8 if you count the Coast Guard when detailed or deployed). It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to put Treasury, FBI, DEA Intel collection strictly under DoD. Anyway, ODNI is (usually) the office through which intelligence is aggragated, coordinated and deconflicted for the whole of government when necessary.

  4. I think a good start would be combining:
    1. the EEOC, NLRB, and some aspects of OFCCP into the Labor Department;
    2. the FTC, FCC, CFPB, CPSC, CFTC, SEC, FMC (Federal Maritime Commission), ITC, STB, and NTSB into the Commerce Department
    3. the Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, NRC, NASA, and the parts of the Department of HHS that deal with contagious disease into the Interior Department, then rename it the Department of the Environment and give it a new mission to protect humanity from the environment, including existential threats

    And that’s to say nothing of combining the things Arnold identified.

  6. I’m not sure what efficiency you get by lumping together disparate organizations. Unless these are cookie-cutter organizations who operate according to well-defined metrics under limited uncertainty, such aggregation will quickly run into the limits of size of administration.

    No CEO has over a hundred executives reporting to him because the business world is not a proper analogy for government. Such initiatives just feel like they are reaching back for advise from Frederick W. Taylor or Max Weber in which straight-line hierarchy and zero-redundancy were the goals.

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