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Organizational Rot – and Its Cure
Today in the UK, a vaunted and respected police unit dedicated to protecting children from abuse was credibly accused of making up evidence and issuing cautions (tickets) to people they knew perfectly well were innocent. Such corruption, of course, is hardly uncommon.
Defenders of the Public School systems look back to the heyday of the institutions, when teachers were great, and students learned. Any argument on the future of public schools invariably calls on this Golden Age, and seeks to use it as proof that public schooling is an obvious good.
This pattern is repeated for every single government bureaucracy ever formed. The EPA gave us clean water and air – albeit in the 1970s. NASA brought us to the moon! The FBI got John Dillinger, don’tcha know? The National Park Service created Yosemite! The FDA makes sure there is never another Thalidomide. Every single agency and bureaucracy has its Golden Age, but that age is always – always – in the past.
Sowell puts it simply: If you want to change the outcomes, you have to change the incentives. Every one of these organizations – and every other one as well – starts with the best of intentions, with clear “do-good” mandates, with young and energetic team members fired up to make a difference with their lives.
But the incentives are toward self-preservation, not mission preservation. It has always been thus. And the safest way to preserve yourself over time is to grow your staff, your importance, your authority, and the perceived righteousness of your cause. Thus is born the Deep State, a multi-headed hydra whose primary and instinctive hunger is always to preserve what it has, and undermine all those who would reduce that power.
So now we have an EPA that went from regulating “navigable waterways” to issuing fines over the occasional puddle in your backyard. NASA spends and spends, but is hopelessly incapable compared to a fired-up newcomer like SpaceX. The FBI tells us they are critically important to our safety – but at the same time, they are not allowed to actually enlighten us as to all the good they have done – National Security, of course. Homeland Security harasses every commercial aircraft traveler with endless stupidity, claiming that it protects us all – yet the TSA has not caught a single person, in all its years, who was actually seeking to hijack or blow up an airplane. The National Park Service is a pox on our rural communities, plaguing good people with the closed fist of righteous stupidity. The FDA kills millions by refusing to allow people to make their own choices, from stifling innovation and ensuring the existing drug monopolies are protected from disruptors.
The single most definitive text on how organizations bloat and seek self-preservation at all costs is Parkinson’s Law. I cannot recommend it highly enough. A data point: Parkinson points out, for example, that the Colonial Office in the UK managed a global empire in 1936 with 372 staff. By 1954, it was 1,661 staff – yet there was no empire left at that point. The US has done the very same: In World War II we had one admiral for every 24 ships. Now we have 1.3 admirals per ship!
In order to address this problem, we have to recognize that in the history of mankind such bureaucracies offer virtually no example of deep reform or rejuvenation. Like the Public School monstrosity that now, when it teaches at all, corrupts the minds of children across the land, it is now obvious to all but the ignorant or the willfully stupid that teachers and administrators exist primarily to perpetuate themselves and accrete power, not to teach children. This is true for every single established government bureaucracy in the land, even the military (as the Afghanistan debacle so tragically demonstrated).
The Deep State is no conspiracy. It has no mastermind or master plan. Instead, the Deep State is the instinctive desire of government employees and contractors to protect themselves from external threats, including reform, defunding, oversight, and transparency. Anyone who so much as hints that a given bureaucracy does not deserve any more power becomes an enemy that the entire organization will seek to oppose in any way it can. This is not evil; it is nothing more or less than human nature writ large, as natural and predictable as the setting of the sun. Parkinson laid it all out for us, way back in 1957.
If there is no path to reform, then we have two options: we either swiftly and deeply act to change the incentives, or we abolish these organizations outright, seeking to start the cycle anew with a newly chartered replacement.
What incentives would do the trick? First off, we should make the organizations, and the people inside them, insecure. Move the HQ of the Bureau of Land Management to Eastern Oregon or any other place populated by locals that for good reasons hate the Feds – and do the same for every single DC bureaucracy. Remove the job protections and a payscale and pensions scheme that dwarfs what private industry will pay for the same skills. Offer a tender method whereby a private contractor can replace government employees and organization if the “customer” so chooses – and do it from schooling (charter schools and vouchers are both forms of this), to the post office to the acquisition of military hardware. Always prioritize freedom: in the same way that FOIA forced some degree of government transparency, individuals and companies should be able to use self-regulating organizations to replace the government, as long as those organizations similarly conform to the written law (think of Underwriters Laboratories for product safety). Allow companies to test drugs on citizens who waive legal remedies, letting the individual and their family judge when the balance of risks makes it worth it.
A retreat in Federal Power would, of course, also help. The Local Deep State is not necessarily any better than the National Deep State (as school boards are showing us across the land), but at least there are faces and names, at least the oppressing bureaucrat does not live thousands of miles away; they have to face the angry parent. The reason a retreating Federal Government would help is that it would enhance the ability of states to compete with each other for citizens, a tax base, employers, etc., free from blanket tyranny from Washington.
Is any of this possible? If it is not then we are totally screwed. But I hope that the creeping secession we are starting to see in the country will continue to pick up steam, such that the Deep State loses the ability to actually enforce its power across the land because the local states and communities simply will not stand for it any longer. I don’t think this is inevitable by any means, and I am sure it will require a national spark of some kind, a leader who champions the idea and makes it into an open cause, either crippling the Deep State, or forcing our beloved country into a split, preserving the ideals of freedom in one of the remnants.
Published in General
Only two? I knew you were an optimist, but I didn’t realize it went this far.
Corrected.
Application of a sundown provision might be a good requirement for each organization – and no “continuing resolutions”.
Perhaps a required rotation of locations for each organization, determined by lottery.
Can you think of a single example of where this has actually happened?
I keep thinking of toll roads and bridges, each of whom was going to have the tolls removed as soon as the construction was paid for. That was a colossal joke on the voter.
Lift up thine eyes and look Texasward. See if our sunset provisions have done much good.
They may well have, but maybe they haven’t. I don’t know. Bedtime here, and Epicurus, Stoics, Kant, and Mill are looming in the morning. Good night, all.
Brilliant post. Absolutely top notch.
So, so true.
But the civil rights movement gets bigger and stronger, via Black Lives Matter et al. And a large, powerful, well-funded organization of people who are convinced that they are on the side of the angels, but they lack an obvious task at hand – that is a dangerous organization.
Ok, take that, give it the power of government, give it unlimited revenue, and give all its workers high-paying jobs with good benefits. Then wait 20 years and see what you’ve got.
You’ll end up with something that was beneficial at one point, but is now a menace.
How many taxpayer dollars are poured into such organizations every year? It boggles the mind.
NOTE: There is a related post on Powerline today. I think I may have to read the books he mentions…
Again, brilliant post, iWe. Thanks.
Move agencies to the Mexico border.
I think outsourcing is a good idea. Better yet, if all 50 states has an equal agency then pull the plug on the federal agency.
The March of Dimes was originally established for private funding of care and research regarding polio. Evidently they chose poorly unlike say cancer research. Polio was cured. So now the mission is birth deformities, something that is likely to occur for as long as
womenbirthing people continue to give birth just as cancer will be with us as long as cells divide.Your ideas may apply to the civilian sector, but they don’t to the military. How would you outsource this? Or why would you? Same with any law enforcement. You want civilian control over this. They need to be thoroughly purged. That was Trump’s biggest failure.
Also the notion of secession is one that should bring horror. Our future would be as bloody as Europe’s with enormous meddling of foreign powers, which happens far too much because of ability of foreign governments to hire lobbyists. Not that the elites will willingly allow this lucrative source of income to dry up.
There have been two periods in U.S. history when centralized government got stronger (meaning enforcement power) than all fifty states combined.
The first was the FDR administration, which lasted from 1933 to 1945–12 long years. All those federal agencies that were created during those years have never gone away and in fact have gotten even bigger and stronger. Many got married and had babies that in a short time came to rival and then exceed their parents in strength. The EPA is a really good example of that. When it was created by JFK, all he did at first was simply pull together quite a few disparate, relatively weak agencies.
The second was the era of mainframe computers. In the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s, states could not do what the feds were doing in terms paying for system design and data entry.
The conditions in which the U.S. federal government became a country unto itself have not existed for decades.
At some point, the state governors are going to get sick of sending all of their citizens’ tax dollars to Washington when they need those dollars locally and can duplicate the federal government’s meager and diluted services for less money.
“Credibly accused?” Where have I heard that before?
For things that MUST be done by the government (military and law enforcement being great examples), the problem is knottier.
Law enforcement needs to be more localized. The population (and populated area) of Minneapolis-St. Paul are both larger than the original 13 colonies. Large metropoli need to have their law enforcement become much smaller and local in order to be more responsive to civilian control and local feedback.
Military.. Pentagon reform is as hard as State Department reform. I don’t see any way, short of reconstituting with no previous employees allowed to apply. Not going to happen. A purge is fine, and the ranks are fine. But the Pentagon and bureaucracy has been broken since before the Vietnam war.
I disagree. Both sides now see value in a split country. Self-governance is a human right, and our country is too large (and unfederated) to deliver it.
Trump started this process. Of course, Biden has just come in and reversed it.
The split would come as a result of war. If it persisted, the two sides would constantly be trying to conquer the other.
And then states’ compliance is mandatory to receive your now-federal money back, and when you do, strings are attached.
Nixon created the EPA. But it was more than simply pulling disparate groups together. The Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act were enormous increases in percentage terms which followed quickly on the heels of the creation. Most of the money for the Clean Water Act went to municipalities for upgrades to their water and wastewater treatment plants. The funding was 90-10 with the feds picking up the 90%. At some point it turned 85-15. It worked for removing carbon and a lot of nitrogen. Phosphorus was another story for how detergents were reformulated. With industry both for air and water, there is a very mixed record with air pollution problems being turned into water problems all below the radar. With a lot of shady deals.
Good point.
That’s interesting. I have always heard JFK credited following his reading and supporting Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962.
However, my main point stands, that it was formed out of other existing organizations:
The tolls on GA-400 from mid-town Atlanta to the far northern suburbs were removed a few years ago (2013?). A decade or so later than promised, but did happen. Was a big issue in multiple governor’s races, and voters held them to it.
Yes, someone on R> even wrote about it:
https://ricochet.com/1058912/advice-to-the-next-r-president-if-you-would-shrink-government-move-it/
Ahem.
A thousand times this.
This is my obsession lately. Every COVID imposition on public schools is a blessing in disguise imo. Nothing is more dangerous to our children (and therefore the future of the country) than the education establishment. It is soul-killing, if you ask me. I know there are good teachers (not just competent, but good people) trying to do the right thing. I’d say it’s mainly in rural areas where they have the freedom to pray with the kids and talk about (real) virtues (I have family doing this), but they’d find a way even if the feds had nothing to say about education.
I’m begging people to take their kids out of regular public schools (charters can be excellent, especially if Hillsdale is involved). If they don’t have students, they can’t get funding (this may have changed under COVID, which is another disaster of “remote” education). We must destroy the education establishment (at the universities too) before it destroys us. It may be too late already.
Agree. You beat me too it, so ditto.
The Air Quality office was in Los Angeles back in 1960. Kennedy made a deal with Terry Sanford, the Democrat nominee for Governor, that he would move the office to North Carolina if he was elected if Sanford would and other delegates would switch from Lyndon Johnson to Kennedy. The office was moved and was a big boost to the Research Triangle Park.
I really have to start reading the main feed when I haven’t read the member feed for a day or so. I miss the stuff that gets promoted.
The private sector is no different, but if a firm can’t reform and modernize it dies. State institutions can’t reform and modernize. They have to be replaced or just killed, not moved. Move them they’ll just develop additional branches. We can’t replace them either as the old will continue to milk and others will grow and do more harm. Now the giant private firms have achieved some of the same problems, they’re so big they control their environment and don’t have to compete. There is little escape within the 50 states. We can let them have Washington, LA. NY city et al and begin a new Republic on the old constitution. We won’t of course, until we have the next election stolen, but it may be too late. That’s just the way civilization die, or rather, rot, decline and become replaced.