For a number of years I worked at the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, VA. FEI is the executive skills training and leadership development facility for the top levels of the career civil service. Founded by Lyndon Johnson, it was supposed to be the civilian equivalent of the Army and Navy War Colleges. It was a very frustrating experience for me. It was all we could do to persuade agencies to give our federal executives the time off to attend our one-month residential flagship program. Executive skills training was just never a high priority on any recent Administration's agenda be it Republican or Democrat. During my time at FEI, I was invited to spend some time at South Korea's equivalent institution, the Central Officials Training Institue in Seoul. I was very sad to see that, in comparison to the U.S., every career civil servant in South Korea is entitled to 2 full years of tax payer funded senior management training. Vociferous conservatives who accuse the U.S. federal government of hopeless incompetence ought to wise up and understand that, as with so much else in life, you get the government you pay for. If I had just one job I could do in the Biden Administration, I would want to run the Office of Personnel Management. From there, I would begin the unglamorous and thankless process of reforming and building a world class civil service for the U.S. It's way past time we realized Lyndon Johnson's human capital strategy for federal executives.
That's frustrating - I think management isn't valued as a skill in many orgs. A lot of times people get promoted for other abilities and just end up being a manager. But it's a really important skill
One thing I found interesting about the South Korean system was the sheer amount of transfer between different types of positions (e.g. fisheries to defense acquisition). I think there are some analogs to the U.S. military but was always curious whether that was a good idea. Maybe it had positive interactions with this sort of training or the like.
you see this in some other fields... i'm in libraries and it's not unusual for someone who's made it to the director level to transfer to a library serving a different field (this happens a lot in medical and sciences/engineering libraries). Once you have basic management skills the people who report to you can help fill whatever gaps you have in terms of subject matter expertise. (Of course it never hurts to have experience in that domain and in some positions it's essential.)
This is another area where it would be nice to see blue states lead, but I don’t know of any cases where this has happened. Civil servants are better paid, but you still have the transition and prestige issues (and they aren’t *that* much better paid).
Yes, back in the Progressive Era states like Wisconsin led by developing clearly superior public sector institutions which I don’t think you’d say is the case for present day New York or California.
It varies widely by state, but in healthcare, for example, there's actually a lot of expertise and creativity in state agencies. That's one good argument for expanding Medicaid into more than a means tested program. A lot of policy innovations that are now in vogue at CMS started in state Medicaid agencies.
Even blue states are starved for revenue. Illinois, for example, is dealing with one of the largest budget deficits in the country right now. The state has earned a reputation for being on the verge of bankruptcy. Because a progressive tax ballot initiative failed, it is going to have to make deep across the board cuts to public services.
That deficit? $6 billion dollars. Illinois is the 5th largest state by GDP. That's nothing to the federal government. I wonder if there's a political coalition that could support increased unconditional cash grants from the federal government to state governments.
In law, state AG and SG offices hire a bunch of high-end lawyers who might otherwise be working at DOJ. The Alabama, California, and Texas ones are all filled with SCOTUS clerks for example. It can work.
I think part of the issue is the social status of bureaucrats. The very word has taken on an unfortunately pejorative tone.
A beneficial aspect of Trump's election-loss tantrums has been the opportunity for state election bureaucrats to shine. See Tim Wu's excellent column in the NYT today.
The same was true of State Department bureaucrats during impeachment hearings.
I'd like to see a Foundation create a prize for bureaucrats who are courageous and impactful in pursuing their lawful duties.
Right. I live in France these days and here being a senior civil servant carries more prestige than being a private sector CEO. Same in Germany and South Korea from my experience. Not just a different set of skills. Also, the French seem to think that while a CEO only maximizes benefits for the company's stockholders, civil servants work to benefit the entire society. That deserves greater respect in their view.
Matt, this is the kind of serious Slow Boring work we're here for! Administrative competence may be our biggest ongoing crisis. It doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves, or any at all.
Disappointingly, I have many family members that supported Donald Trump. This was my biggest point of discussion with them. Changing their viewpoints on issues >> not easy. I would spend the vast majority of my holiday (usually civil) political discussions explaining that Trump and Republican members of congress were entirely unable to competently execute any parts of the agenda they claimed to support (judges and tax cuts, notwithstanding).
I'm reminded for the quote attributed to Fiorello LaGuardia: "There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets." I want some clean streets, and it would be nice if it was an issue we just took off the table as something to worry about.
New York and California are not leading the way on a good model for blue governance. Rhode Island may be a bright spot, but I fear that may be related to one particularly competent governor, and not entirely systemic.
Another unappreciated aspect of the US system is that it discourages ambitious people from becoming civil servants. If you're an ambitious young person and you know you can't rise to the level of assistant secretary without playing politics, why join the civil service? The pay is already not comparable to the private sector, so if you take away the potential for prestige, what's left?
It's extremely hard for the government to compete with the private sector for the "best and the brightest." Remember that over a third of Harvard graduates go into finance and related industries. These companies flood the job fairs at elite institutions and can offer graduates starting positions with six-figure salaries. Not much the government can do about that.
You don't have to compete with the salaries if you offer a career path to the upper levels of government prestige. You won't compete for all graduates, but there are some that would definitely forgo high starting salaries for this sort of career path.
That has certainly been the case in the State Department for many years whereby many young people sought to pass the daunting Foreign Service Exam. However, when I ask my students who wants to serve in government (outside of diplomacy), I typically hear crickets. (I teach in a political science department that includes public administration and public policy as two of its areas of study.) At best, some of my pre-law students talk about becoming prosecutors or judges. I should note that we have seen an increase in students who want to manage or work for nonprofits (we offer a concentration in nonprofit management). Nonprofits don't offer the highest salaries, but many students find their advocacy efforts to be attractive.
In fact the accepted wisdom at one time was that a career that alternated between private sector and the government, with progressive promotions on each side along the way, was a great way to go. It was said that you could really leverage your government promotions because there were many fewer levels between entry and the top in government. So you could return to the private sector at a much higher level than you would have reached had you stayed in the private sector full time.
And it has been observed by Harvard Business School faculty that the world would get along just fine without an investment banking industry. I would also add that Harvard's Kennedy School of Government was originally set up to train civil servants. The vast majority of its graduates now go into the private sector upon graduation.
Thanks, Kenny. Funny, the source I am looking at shows 25% government (22% federal, 3% state and local). My real point was that government service as a career choice for graduates has declined greatly over the years. Graham Allison, the founding Dean, once told me the original idea of the KSG was to create a school like the École National d'Administration in France to train top civil servants. Doesn't seem to have worked out that way. Pity.
There's really cool work you can do, for one. For two, job stability. And for three, if you do want more money, your experiences can translate into that at other employers. There are many constraints when it comes to who we hire; there's a lot we could do without touching pay or how far you can rise.
Agree, Emily. As someone who did do the alternating route between government and the private sector, I have to say, looking back, that the jobs in the federal government were much more interesting than the private sector ones. It’s just that they didn’t pay. I should add that my colleagues in the private sector simply couldn’t fathom why I had ever done any government service. They thought of it as a prodigious waste of time. I used to describe myself to them as a «recovering federal executive.». They didn’t get the joke. Sad, really. The idea of « giving back » something to the country that had given them so many opportunities was just incoherent to them.
Competence is indeed an important part of job performance. Lurking within your characteristically thoughtful essay is a deep unhappiness with the "revolving door," a model of dysfunction suggesting Evil Corporate Types exploiting their temporary government job for future profit. The threat is legitimate, but IMHO the left exaggerates it. For example, though I know nothing about railroads and their administration, it seems likely that a railroad corporate executive would know a great deal about the topic, unlike (say) a career politician, an academic economist, or an employee of an NGO.
On the contrary, I’m trying to push people on the left *off* their antipathy to the revolving door which I think is an inevitable consequence of the American system. Oftentimes it’s the best way to get knowledgeable people in office given the constraints of the system. But it’s not a very good system.
Thanks for your clarification. In my less-than-fastidious reading of your original essay, I confounded your own opinions with your view of the Progressive mainstream perspective. I nonetheless think you're excessively cautious in accepting the notion that the private sector's expertise could be useful. Perhaps the Progressive task should be to seek to reduce the potential for harmful consequences of the inherent conflict of interest, rather than to reduce involvement of the private sector in policy? In any case, I agree that strengthening the morale of career government employees is a Good Thing.
As a footnote, it is perhaps unfair to compare the organizational structure of US agencies with that of comparable Canadian agencies, given that Canada is economically much smaller, with more regional autonomy.
That may be so about Canada specifically, but it reflects general practice in other rich democracies, especially ones with parliamentary systems. Britain has a highly centralized system (what regional autonomy there is exists wholly at Westminster's sufferance) and a large economy (much smaller than the US of course but still one of the 10 largest economies in the world). It too has the pattern where there’s a very thin layer of political appointees—all MPs—over agencies composed of career civil servants. (If you’ve seen Yes, Minister, you know the setup.) Indeed the Canadians almost certainly got it from the Brits. That said, you see the same pattern even in countries without a Westminster tradition (e.g. Germany) and even in (semi-)presidential countries like France. The US really is an outlier among its peers in this regard. (As an aside, one of the reasons Armando Iannucci made the characters in Veep pathetic rather than assholes—as he had in The Thick of It—was that he was struck by the youth and, yes, amateurism of seemingly everyone in DC.)
Originally, each state had vast autonomy. The civil war was a turning point, followed by the 14th amendment. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the 14th amendment only gradually gained its current status in subordinating state law to the central authority. And now we have the vast financial and administrative power of the center.
I'm old. When I was a kid, segregation was widespread in the South, and the rhetoric of "states' rights" was weaponized to maintain Jim Crow. This political maneuver may have been crucial in discrediting the merit of regional autonomy.
The point here seems to be though that the competence would be better gotten, thicker, and beneficial to a functioning society if it developed internally to agencies. So, yeah, “the left” might complain about the revolving door, but the point here isn’t just “revolving door bad” but also “valuing civil service good”
Best: Career civil servants with long experience with the agency/issue they are overseeing.
Second best: Revolving door political appointees who have some experience inside the agency and some experience in relevant private/non-profit sector during administrations of the other party.
Third best: Career party operatives who have bounced from issue to issue and congressional staffs, as administrations have changed.
Worst: Personal loyalists with no political or issue experience.
Some of the focus on revolving door appointees will have the effect of pushing Democrats from the second best to the third best, rather than from the second best to the first best.
Sounds like an accurate summary. I'm not however convinced that professional civil servants are necessarily the best in all cases. Political accountability seems like a legitimate concern to me, and while the US is an outlier, in many respects America's private sector outperforms other countries public sector.
There's a lot of variability. Some outsiders come into agencies with a lot of expertise. Some don't. Some realize that while at the agency, their client is the public at large. Some don't.
OTOH having a freight railroad exec as the beneficiary of the revolving door might not be super beneficial to passenger rail. Alon Levy has written a lot about how our shitty passenger rail is in large part due to FRA. It's been several years since i read him on the topic, though, so maybe that's changed
This would be because shipping freight by rail actually makes money. And passenger rail in North America traditionally loses piles even with subsidies. Making the people who make money lose money by taking a back seat to passenger rail helps exactly no one. It just produces delays and drives up rail costs for both.
I admit my lack of expertise on this topic, but IMHO passenger rail in the US is an idea whose time should have ended 50 years ago, outside of the Northeast corridor. I find the case for passenger rail (outside that corridor) really poor.
Hi Peter, I actually wasn't referring to subsidies. Levy has described how FRA's regulations make passenger rail unnecessarily expensive in the US compared to in other countries. This is one of the more recent posts on the topic: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/20/fra-reform-is-here/ Hope this helps clarify the point i was making.
It does. That is definitely another problem outside of the main problem. One of the problems with fast longer range commuter trains of the high speed variety is that they really do require dedicated track suitable for ghigh speeds. Which the freight people do not require and they therefore have no particular reason to upgrade their trackage unless somebody else pays for it.
This problem has long historical roots. I'm studying environmental policymaking in the 1950s and 1960s, and most early air pollution control agencies were staffed by engineers who had served in industry. Not surprisingly, they emphasized cooperation with industry as the best means to reduce air pollution.
The U.S. has historically lacked prestigious educational programs that train future bureaucrats, unlike France with its École Nationale d'Administration. Of course, today, many universities offer degrees in public administration, and programs like SIPA at Johns Hopkins train future diplomats. However, many MPA students already work as civil servants and are just using the MPA for career advancement.
In any case, outside of diplomacy, the U.S. has failed to embrace the ideal of the civil servant, who has neutral competence and a loyalty to their program's mission, regardless of administration. Not surprisingly, Republicans have been able to frame civil servants as part of some sinister Deep State. I don't know how that will change.
A few non-partisan =) things to highlight on the Canadian system related to your article:
As someone else mentioned, Canadian governments are much easier to bring down through votes of confidence. Alternatively, Canadian governments (even minority governments) have it much easier to actually do something. This creates an incentive that narrows the political windows of both ministers and public servants. Libertarian burn-it-downers and full-blown socialists tend to either hide or lose their firebrand opinions very quickly once they enter the blob.
This tends to have downstream impacts in the sense that the two main parties don't have many ideological MPs and indeed, anyone too ideological ends up being an embarrassment for the leadership. The one exception is the leadership convention (our leadership primaries) where potential leaders tend to make cases for a party vision. But its worth thinking about how many Canadian MPs are as ideologically extreme as, say Rand Paul or AOC. This is not to say that there is huge partisan polarization or highly charged political issues.
I was at a presentation by a former Conservative Party of Canada minister and he made this little jab at the previous libertarian speaker on a particular topic, noting that he too read Atlas Shrugged in high school and got into politics to bring it all down. But once this former minister ended up in charge of a department that not only is indefinitely more complex than he thought but had to decide on tons of funding and policy, you tend to focus on running the ship and defer to the crew who know the in's and out's. This is also compounded by the fact that the hugest stakeholder for most departments is the provinces and territories, so any grand vision of shaking things up tend to run into transactional federalism.
Even Freeland, who was a famous econ journalist and probably has no shortage of interesting innovative, will and probably run into this when she tries to turn her favourite Yglesias blog post on Georgism into reality. What ministers often do is set the agenda space and keep highlighting to bureaucracies what burning issues keep them or the Prime Minister up at night.
Now if you are someone who is highly ideological and care strongly about changing the system, this system is bad! A lot of Canadians are extremely ideological and hold extreme opinions on these grand issues of capitalism, immigration, ethnic change, regulatory states, or corporate power, just like other electorates.
****Now if you are someone who is highly ideological and care strongly about changing the system, this system is bad!****
That's always been the big knock on the large, permanent civil services associated with the parliamentary model (viz. "Yes, Minister"). But it looks like an awfully attractive model from where I'm sitting.
Yeah, some worry about the stasis and the entrenchment of bureaucracies and bureaucrats since they don't face the market incentives of firms. A common point is that the political turnover in the US shakes up the administrative state and reduces its power to keep the status quo.
However, to use the market analogy, its not true that constant turnover or churn is all that conducive to innovation. If Thiel and Schumpeterian economists are correct, you do need quite a bit of slack to innovate and take risks. Always facing oversight or accountability doesn't make you risky, it makes you risk-averse both in the public or private sector.
And yet the job security guarantees enjoyed by civil servants theoretically should take a lot of the risk out of being innovative. But it doesn’t work that way in practice. I’ve never understood that.
Another issue that probably helps with this (forgot to add and can't edit), is that Canadian electorates are very cross-pressured for now (and hopefully stay that way) - including a large economically and ethnically diverse immigrant electorate, but also large regional and Anglo/French divisions. Parties that want to win and then do govern run into this a bricolage of supporters and stakeholders, which means you also just want to focus on wins and not be the vanguard to the right or left wing revolution.
Here is something to consider. I am sure the reason why a lot of these agencies were designed with so many Senate-confirmable appointees was Congress saw this as a way to keep oversight over the large executive branch. Whether or not this actually works in practice is a different story.
In Canada and other parliamentary governments its much easier to bring down the government if the prime minister isn't behaving. So maybe that's why they don't feel the need to stack these agencies with political appointees.
There may have been a time when committee chairs in Congress were powerful and ambitious enough to try to control the agencies they oversee.
But that doesn't seem to be true anymore, even on something as basic as insisting that positions that require Senate confirmation must be filled by with people who actually have been Senate-confirmed.
Presumably if this moderate party ever wins the Presidency, then they *would* be seen as reflexively for or against particular nominees or appointees. It might be an interesting idea though for there to be a moderate party that runs candidates for congressional office but never for governorships or the presidency.
If you're a smart, competent politician, why would you choose to affiliate yourself with a party that guaranteed you'd never be able to run for governor or president?
Right, but with 2 other parties also in the mix, the “against” would have a different flavor. More like you’re doing it wrong and my way is better, not just completely opposed. Now if the other side loses, you win, with 3 viable parties, that is no longer the case. And with both House and Senate so close, it would only take a few moderates from both parties to start a Moderate party now.
I work in a senior career staff role at an executive branch agency and interact with low-level political appointees every day. I can't endorse this post strongly enough. This administration has been especially bad, but even during previous administrations our political leadership has always had an incredibly thin understanding of the agency and what we do. Additionally, we take most of our marching orders from the White House, but we still have to brief our in-house leadership and make them feel important even though they don't have authority to make decisions about anything. All they do is get in the way and slow things down.
I also want to say that it's been my experience that the civil service workforce is very bimodal. Some people are incredibly smart, competent, and hard-working. Some people are here because its impossible to get fired. There is nothing in between. I think Trump's EO creating a new schedule F designation was clearly done for nefarious reasons, but in the hands of a more responsible administration it could be a good thing.
Considering the rising home prices in DC and the surrounding suburbs. Accumulating "time in government" to later "cash in" should be no surprise.
Especially when entry level jobs - exp. the Hill, start at 30k. Amazon HQ2, consultancies, and defense offer a great substitute. Taking talent away from government with government money.
I think a related issue is part-time governance. It is wild to me that in my home state of WA, the legislature adjourned on schedule in early March and has not reconvened during the pandemic.
The spend 60 or 120 days in session (depending on whether it's a budget year or not), and that's it. The result is a lot of really rushed decision making.
Here in Texas, I wish we had something like that! Instead we have a legislature that meets for six months in odd-numbered years, and gets paid $7200 plus a small per diem to house them in Austin during those six months. Not only has our legislature not met during the pandemic, but it hadn't met for six months before the first known cases in China!
WA might have a part-time legislature, but that legislature has a full-time professional staff, and obviously the state executive branch is full of normal full-time employees. I'm not sure that's really the problem. The governor has the power to underspend the budget, so unless you need budget adds or new laws the legislature reconvening in a special session isn't critical. Also, CA has a full-time legislature and they're not doing obviously better than WA.
However WA has had an excellent state response to Covid-19. I was rather tepid about Inslee pre-2020 but his covid management has been one of the best in the US. We were the first state to get cases yet have had far fewer fatalities than many other states. Whatever you think of his politics Inslee has listened to the medical advisers and acted. WA has an excellent state govt IMO.
I've thought about this for years and am glad you wrote about it. I think about it as paying for talent. I also think about how our political talent pool is shallow, which explains how we hand-wring our way through presidential primaries and often get truly unqualified people elected. Because if you're talented, why on earth would you choose that as a career? The US economy competes for top talent with high compensation, and being a civil servant or elected politician is a low pay proposition. On top of that, it's a low prestige walk of life and you have to put up with a huge amount of s--t while doing the job or trying to get elected. You would probably instead go work in tech, or finance, or nearly any other private industrial career or maybe academia. I wonder if dramatically boosting the pay of politicians would attract and retain top talent, plus provide a disincentive for corruption because you get paid enough that you wouldn't want to lose your straight-forward compensation. That, and what you wrote about around more civil service permanence.
I still remember Matt on a Weeds episode in the last few years pointing out that abysmal pay of state legislators is basically why ALEC writes most of our laws (in GOP-led states at least).
Raising the pay of civil servants would be a great place to start. I was a fed for 11 years and I can tell you that, sadly, I would never recommend government service these days to a bright young person. Why? From my observations, the creation of Inspectors General with their anonymous hotlines for reporting so-called abuse have made the work life of civil servants extremely stressful and unrewarding. I saw many good colleagues have their careers ruined by anonymous denunciations after taking difficult personnel decisions. IGs were completely unnecessary given the GAO and congressional oversight committees. They are a non-value added layer if ever there was one.
One reason this is hard to fix is that staffing with the same people between administrations means that there will be policy continuity between administrations. But we currently have a politics where the desired policy swings so wildly that if you wanted to actually enact it, you'd probably need different people at more levels than in Canada.
Of course, that's partly just that Republicans don't want to run the country well, more broadly than just not wanting to regulate. But there's not really a fix for the lack of consensus about what we should do as a country.
I think that's true in some of the higher prestige places for sure. But in many areas it's not as big a difference. I can speak from experience with the Education Department, where in practice the difference between Obama's final Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education and Trump's first was surprisingly negligible and the transition mostly served to cause confusion for state agencies.
Was that because there just wasn't much difference between what the adminstrations plausibly would do in that area, or because the Trump adminstration didn't know what they wanted that would be different or how to find someone to make it happen?
A little of both, but given that the role's primary function was reviewing state plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was intentionally passed by Congress to give little discretion to ED, I think it was more the former than the latter.
That does indeed seem like a place where political appointments are purely a negative, but also seems to make my point -- permanent civil service posts work best when there's a clear agreed-upon goal, rather than a mandate to do something new.
That our society doesn't have agreed-upon goals for what government should do in most cases is the problem, though.
While Canadian Deputy Ministers are typically career civil servants in the majority of cases, this is a bit of an odd situation as Paul Rochon announced that he is resigning mid-month. His replacement, Michael Sabia, is a bit more non-traditional in that he didn't rise straight through the ranks of the civil service. He's a former federal civil servant but also had sojurns as CEO of a major Quebec Bank, CFO of CN, and CEO of Bell as well as Chair of the Board of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which while non-political, is a creation of the current government. No one seems to think he's unqualified or anything but a bit of a different path.
Matt, I had trouble understanding this sentence fragment: "Freeland and Fortier by Sean Fraser as parliamentary secretary for the department, that’s a kind of junior political role that up-and-comers get." If you would like some editing help before you publish, I'd be glad to contribute pro bono.
For a number of years I worked at the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, VA. FEI is the executive skills training and leadership development facility for the top levels of the career civil service. Founded by Lyndon Johnson, it was supposed to be the civilian equivalent of the Army and Navy War Colleges. It was a very frustrating experience for me. It was all we could do to persuade agencies to give our federal executives the time off to attend our one-month residential flagship program. Executive skills training was just never a high priority on any recent Administration's agenda be it Republican or Democrat. During my time at FEI, I was invited to spend some time at South Korea's equivalent institution, the Central Officials Training Institue in Seoul. I was very sad to see that, in comparison to the U.S., every career civil servant in South Korea is entitled to 2 full years of tax payer funded senior management training. Vociferous conservatives who accuse the U.S. federal government of hopeless incompetence ought to wise up and understand that, as with so much else in life, you get the government you pay for. If I had just one job I could do in the Biden Administration, I would want to run the Office of Personnel Management. From there, I would begin the unglamorous and thankless process of reforming and building a world class civil service for the U.S. It's way past time we realized Lyndon Johnson's human capital strategy for federal executives.
Great idea
That's frustrating - I think management isn't valued as a skill in many orgs. A lot of times people get promoted for other abilities and just end up being a manager. But it's a really important skill
One thing I found interesting about the South Korean system was the sheer amount of transfer between different types of positions (e.g. fisheries to defense acquisition). I think there are some analogs to the U.S. military but was always curious whether that was a good idea. Maybe it had positive interactions with this sort of training or the like.
you see this in some other fields... i'm in libraries and it's not unusual for someone who's made it to the director level to transfer to a library serving a different field (this happens a lot in medical and sciences/engineering libraries). Once you have basic management skills the people who report to you can help fill whatever gaps you have in terms of subject matter expertise. (Of course it never hurts to have experience in that domain and in some positions it's essential.)
That what the Senior Executive Service was intended to be.
There is some of that in the Presidential Management Fellowships too I think.
I bet that helps prevent agencies from becoming too insular and set in their ways.
Britain's Civil Service works the same way
This is another area where it would be nice to see blue states lead, but I don’t know of any cases where this has happened. Civil servants are better paid, but you still have the transition and prestige issues (and they aren’t *that* much better paid).
Yes, back in the Progressive Era states like Wisconsin led by developing clearly superior public sector institutions which I don’t think you’d say is the case for present day New York or California.
It varies widely by state, but in healthcare, for example, there's actually a lot of expertise and creativity in state agencies. That's one good argument for expanding Medicaid into more than a means tested program. A lot of policy innovations that are now in vogue at CMS started in state Medicaid agencies.
ahh the good ole days of Robert Moses!
Even blue states are starved for revenue. Illinois, for example, is dealing with one of the largest budget deficits in the country right now. The state has earned a reputation for being on the verge of bankruptcy. Because a progressive tax ballot initiative failed, it is going to have to make deep across the board cuts to public services.
That deficit? $6 billion dollars. Illinois is the 5th largest state by GDP. That's nothing to the federal government. I wonder if there's a political coalition that could support increased unconditional cash grants from the federal government to state governments.
In law, state AG and SG offices hire a bunch of high-end lawyers who might otherwise be working at DOJ. The Alabama, California, and Texas ones are all filled with SCOTUS clerks for example. It can work.
I think part of the issue is the social status of bureaucrats. The very word has taken on an unfortunately pejorative tone.
A beneficial aspect of Trump's election-loss tantrums has been the opportunity for state election bureaucrats to shine. See Tim Wu's excellent column in the NYT today.
The same was true of State Department bureaucrats during impeachment hearings.
I'd like to see a Foundation create a prize for bureaucrats who are courageous and impactful in pursuing their lawful duties.
Right. I live in France these days and here being a senior civil servant carries more prestige than being a private sector CEO. Same in Germany and South Korea from my experience. Not just a different set of skills. Also, the French seem to think that while a CEO only maximizes benefits for the company's stockholders, civil servants work to benefit the entire society. That deserves greater respect in their view.
They tried with the Samuel J. Heyman awards (the "Sammies"), but it hasn't really caught on.
Matt, this is the kind of serious Slow Boring work we're here for! Administrative competence may be our biggest ongoing crisis. It doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves, or any at all.
Disappointingly, I have many family members that supported Donald Trump. This was my biggest point of discussion with them. Changing their viewpoints on issues >> not easy. I would spend the vast majority of my holiday (usually civil) political discussions explaining that Trump and Republican members of congress were entirely unable to competently execute any parts of the agenda they claimed to support (judges and tax cuts, notwithstanding).
I'm reminded for the quote attributed to Fiorello LaGuardia: "There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets." I want some clean streets, and it would be nice if it was an issue we just took off the table as something to worry about.
New York and California are not leading the way on a good model for blue governance. Rhode Island may be a bright spot, but I fear that may be related to one particularly competent governor, and not entirely systemic.
Another unappreciated aspect of the US system is that it discourages ambitious people from becoming civil servants. If you're an ambitious young person and you know you can't rise to the level of assistant secretary without playing politics, why join the civil service? The pay is already not comparable to the private sector, so if you take away the potential for prestige, what's left?
It's extremely hard for the government to compete with the private sector for the "best and the brightest." Remember that over a third of Harvard graduates go into finance and related industries. These companies flood the job fairs at elite institutions and can offer graduates starting positions with six-figure salaries. Not much the government can do about that.
You don't have to compete with the salaries if you offer a career path to the upper levels of government prestige. You won't compete for all graduates, but there are some that would definitely forgo high starting salaries for this sort of career path.
That has certainly been the case in the State Department for many years whereby many young people sought to pass the daunting Foreign Service Exam. However, when I ask my students who wants to serve in government (outside of diplomacy), I typically hear crickets. (I teach in a political science department that includes public administration and public policy as two of its areas of study.) At best, some of my pre-law students talk about becoming prosecutors or judges. I should note that we have seen an increase in students who want to manage or work for nonprofits (we offer a concentration in nonprofit management). Nonprofits don't offer the highest salaries, but many students find their advocacy efforts to be attractive.
In fact the accepted wisdom at one time was that a career that alternated between private sector and the government, with progressive promotions on each side along the way, was a great way to go. It was said that you could really leverage your government promotions because there were many fewer levels between entry and the top in government. So you could return to the private sector at a much higher level than you would have reached had you stayed in the private sector full time.
This happens in law. The career for many people is associate at a firm-->DOJ-->partner at a firm-->higher-ranking job in DOJ.
And it has been observed by Harvard Business School faculty that the world would get along just fine without an investment banking industry. I would also add that Harvard's Kennedy School of Government was originally set up to train civil servants. The vast majority of its graduates now go into the private sector upon graduation.
Just a fact check here... Only 37% of HKS graduates went into the private sector in 2019. That's consistent with prior years.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/OCA/files/20%20DPSA%20OCA%20Employment%20Snapshot_web.pdf
Do you know how many actually went into government service?
p. 2 of that pdf says 37% private sector, 34% government, 25% non-profit/NGO, 4% unspecified (political campaigns, "new venture", or "undisclosed").
Thanks, Kenny. Funny, the source I am looking at shows 25% government (22% federal, 3% state and local). My real point was that government service as a career choice for graduates has declined greatly over the years. Graham Allison, the founding Dean, once told me the original idea of the KSG was to create a school like the École National d'Administration in France to train top civil servants. Doesn't seem to have worked out that way. Pity.
There's really cool work you can do, for one. For two, job stability. And for three, if you do want more money, your experiences can translate into that at other employers. There are many constraints when it comes to who we hire; there's a lot we could do without touching pay or how far you can rise.
Agree, Emily. As someone who did do the alternating route between government and the private sector, I have to say, looking back, that the jobs in the federal government were much more interesting than the private sector ones. It’s just that they didn’t pay. I should add that my colleagues in the private sector simply couldn’t fathom why I had ever done any government service. They thought of it as a prodigious waste of time. I used to describe myself to them as a «recovering federal executive.». They didn’t get the joke. Sad, really. The idea of « giving back » something to the country that had given them so many opportunities was just incoherent to them.
Competence is indeed an important part of job performance. Lurking within your characteristically thoughtful essay is a deep unhappiness with the "revolving door," a model of dysfunction suggesting Evil Corporate Types exploiting their temporary government job for future profit. The threat is legitimate, but IMHO the left exaggerates it. For example, though I know nothing about railroads and their administration, it seems likely that a railroad corporate executive would know a great deal about the topic, unlike (say) a career politician, an academic economist, or an employee of an NGO.
On the contrary, I’m trying to push people on the left *off* their antipathy to the revolving door which I think is an inevitable consequence of the American system. Oftentimes it’s the best way to get knowledgeable people in office given the constraints of the system. But it’s not a very good system.
The line about the Taco Truck makes it clear why the revolving door is inevitable.
Thanks for your clarification. In my less-than-fastidious reading of your original essay, I confounded your own opinions with your view of the Progressive mainstream perspective. I nonetheless think you're excessively cautious in accepting the notion that the private sector's expertise could be useful. Perhaps the Progressive task should be to seek to reduce the potential for harmful consequences of the inherent conflict of interest, rather than to reduce involvement of the private sector in policy? In any case, I agree that strengthening the morale of career government employees is a Good Thing.
As a footnote, it is perhaps unfair to compare the organizational structure of US agencies with that of comparable Canadian agencies, given that Canada is economically much smaller, with more regional autonomy.
That may be so about Canada specifically, but it reflects general practice in other rich democracies, especially ones with parliamentary systems. Britain has a highly centralized system (what regional autonomy there is exists wholly at Westminster's sufferance) and a large economy (much smaller than the US of course but still one of the 10 largest economies in the world). It too has the pattern where there’s a very thin layer of political appointees—all MPs—over agencies composed of career civil servants. (If you’ve seen Yes, Minister, you know the setup.) Indeed the Canadians almost certainly got it from the Brits. That said, you see the same pattern even in countries without a Westminster tradition (e.g. Germany) and even in (semi-)presidential countries like France. The US really is an outlier among its peers in this regard. (As an aside, one of the reasons Armando Iannucci made the characters in Veep pathetic rather than assholes—as he had in The Thick of It—was that he was struck by the youth and, yes, amateurism of seemingly everyone in DC.)
Is there a model for the US that would give more regional autonomy?
Originally, each state had vast autonomy. The civil war was a turning point, followed by the 14th amendment. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the 14th amendment only gradually gained its current status in subordinating state law to the central authority. And now we have the vast financial and administrative power of the center.
I'm old. When I was a kid, segregation was widespread in the South, and the rhetoric of "states' rights" was weaponized to maintain Jim Crow. This political maneuver may have been crucial in discrediting the merit of regional autonomy.
The point here seems to be though that the competence would be better gotten, thicker, and beneficial to a functioning society if it developed internally to agencies. So, yeah, “the left” might complain about the revolving door, but the point here isn’t just “revolving door bad” but also “valuing civil service good”
I agree with your reading of the essay, but my point remains: Hiring outsiders with expertise acquired in the private sector is not without merit.
I read the post as saying something like this:
Best: Career civil servants with long experience with the agency/issue they are overseeing.
Second best: Revolving door political appointees who have some experience inside the agency and some experience in relevant private/non-profit sector during administrations of the other party.
Third best: Career party operatives who have bounced from issue to issue and congressional staffs, as administrations have changed.
Worst: Personal loyalists with no political or issue experience.
Some of the focus on revolving door appointees will have the effect of pushing Democrats from the second best to the third best, rather than from the second best to the first best.
The perfect person would:
1) Have the knowledge to know what they're doing
2) Not have a conflict of interest
3) Still be politically accountable
Seems like it's just impossible to have all three.
Agree. The problem then becomes how can you balance these three aims to lead to the best available outcome.
Sounds like an accurate summary. I'm not however convinced that professional civil servants are necessarily the best in all cases. Political accountability seems like a legitimate concern to me, and while the US is an outlier, in many respects America's private sector outperforms other countries public sector.
There's a lot of variability. Some outsiders come into agencies with a lot of expertise. Some don't. Some realize that while at the agency, their client is the public at large. Some don't.
OTOH having a freight railroad exec as the beneficiary of the revolving door might not be super beneficial to passenger rail. Alon Levy has written a lot about how our shitty passenger rail is in large part due to FRA. It's been several years since i read him on the topic, though, so maybe that's changed
This would be because shipping freight by rail actually makes money. And passenger rail in North America traditionally loses piles even with subsidies. Making the people who make money lose money by taking a back seat to passenger rail helps exactly no one. It just produces delays and drives up rail costs for both.
I admit my lack of expertise on this topic, but IMHO passenger rail in the US is an idea whose time should have ended 50 years ago, outside of the Northeast corridor. I find the case for passenger rail (outside that corridor) really poor.
Hi Peter, I actually wasn't referring to subsidies. Levy has described how FRA's regulations make passenger rail unnecessarily expensive in the US compared to in other countries. This is one of the more recent posts on the topic: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/20/fra-reform-is-here/ Hope this helps clarify the point i was making.
It does. That is definitely another problem outside of the main problem. One of the problems with fast longer range commuter trains of the high speed variety is that they really do require dedicated track suitable for ghigh speeds. Which the freight people do not require and they therefore have no particular reason to upgrade their trackage unless somebody else pays for it.
This problem has long historical roots. I'm studying environmental policymaking in the 1950s and 1960s, and most early air pollution control agencies were staffed by engineers who had served in industry. Not surprisingly, they emphasized cooperation with industry as the best means to reduce air pollution.
The U.S. has historically lacked prestigious educational programs that train future bureaucrats, unlike France with its École Nationale d'Administration. Of course, today, many universities offer degrees in public administration, and programs like SIPA at Johns Hopkins train future diplomats. However, many MPA students already work as civil servants and are just using the MPA for career advancement.
In any case, outside of diplomacy, the U.S. has failed to embrace the ideal of the civil servant, who has neutral competence and a loyalty to their program's mission, regardless of administration. Not surprisingly, Republicans have been able to frame civil servants as part of some sinister Deep State. I don't know how that will change.
A few non-partisan =) things to highlight on the Canadian system related to your article:
As someone else mentioned, Canadian governments are much easier to bring down through votes of confidence. Alternatively, Canadian governments (even minority governments) have it much easier to actually do something. This creates an incentive that narrows the political windows of both ministers and public servants. Libertarian burn-it-downers and full-blown socialists tend to either hide or lose their firebrand opinions very quickly once they enter the blob.
This tends to have downstream impacts in the sense that the two main parties don't have many ideological MPs and indeed, anyone too ideological ends up being an embarrassment for the leadership. The one exception is the leadership convention (our leadership primaries) where potential leaders tend to make cases for a party vision. But its worth thinking about how many Canadian MPs are as ideologically extreme as, say Rand Paul or AOC. This is not to say that there is huge partisan polarization or highly charged political issues.
I was at a presentation by a former Conservative Party of Canada minister and he made this little jab at the previous libertarian speaker on a particular topic, noting that he too read Atlas Shrugged in high school and got into politics to bring it all down. But once this former minister ended up in charge of a department that not only is indefinitely more complex than he thought but had to decide on tons of funding and policy, you tend to focus on running the ship and defer to the crew who know the in's and out's. This is also compounded by the fact that the hugest stakeholder for most departments is the provinces and territories, so any grand vision of shaking things up tend to run into transactional federalism.
Even Freeland, who was a famous econ journalist and probably has no shortage of interesting innovative, will and probably run into this when she tries to turn her favourite Yglesias blog post on Georgism into reality. What ministers often do is set the agenda space and keep highlighting to bureaucracies what burning issues keep them or the Prime Minister up at night.
Now if you are someone who is highly ideological and care strongly about changing the system, this system is bad! A lot of Canadians are extremely ideological and hold extreme opinions on these grand issues of capitalism, immigration, ethnic change, regulatory states, or corporate power, just like other electorates.
****Now if you are someone who is highly ideological and care strongly about changing the system, this system is bad!****
That's always been the big knock on the large, permanent civil services associated with the parliamentary model (viz. "Yes, Minister"). But it looks like an awfully attractive model from where I'm sitting.
Yeah, some worry about the stasis and the entrenchment of bureaucracies and bureaucrats since they don't face the market incentives of firms. A common point is that the political turnover in the US shakes up the administrative state and reduces its power to keep the status quo.
However, to use the market analogy, its not true that constant turnover or churn is all that conducive to innovation. If Thiel and Schumpeterian economists are correct, you do need quite a bit of slack to innovate and take risks. Always facing oversight or accountability doesn't make you risky, it makes you risk-averse both in the public or private sector.
And yet the job security guarantees enjoyed by civil servants theoretically should take a lot of the risk out of being innovative. But it doesn’t work that way in practice. I’ve never understood that.
Another issue that probably helps with this (forgot to add and can't edit), is that Canadian electorates are very cross-pressured for now (and hopefully stay that way) - including a large economically and ethnically diverse immigrant electorate, but also large regional and Anglo/French divisions. Parties that want to win and then do govern run into this a bricolage of supporters and stakeholders, which means you also just want to focus on wins and not be the vanguard to the right or left wing revolution.
The best show for watching this play out is Yes Minister.
Here is something to consider. I am sure the reason why a lot of these agencies were designed with so many Senate-confirmable appointees was Congress saw this as a way to keep oversight over the large executive branch. Whether or not this actually works in practice is a different story.
In Canada and other parliamentary governments its much easier to bring down the government if the prime minister isn't behaving. So maybe that's why they don't feel the need to stack these agencies with political appointees.
There may have been a time when committee chairs in Congress were powerful and ambitious enough to try to control the agencies they oversee.
But that doesn't seem to be true anymore, even on something as basic as insisting that positions that require Senate confirmation must be filled by with people who actually have been Senate-confirmed.
Yes this. Congress is such a partisan institution these days that “oversight” doesn’t really work.
A Moderate party could help with over site as they wouldn’t be seen as reflexively for or against any particular nominee or appointee.
Presumably if this moderate party ever wins the Presidency, then they *would* be seen as reflexively for or against particular nominees or appointees. It might be an interesting idea though for there to be a moderate party that runs candidates for congressional office but never for governorships or the presidency.
If you're a smart, competent politician, why would you choose to affiliate yourself with a party that guaranteed you'd never be able to run for governor or president?
There are plenty of people whose ambition is to be a significant legislator, and doesn't want the pressure of actually running an executive office.
Right, but with 2 other parties also in the mix, the “against” would have a different flavor. More like you’re doing it wrong and my way is better, not just completely opposed. Now if the other side loses, you win, with 3 viable parties, that is no longer the case. And with both House and Senate so close, it would only take a few moderates from both parties to start a Moderate party now.
I work in a senior career staff role at an executive branch agency and interact with low-level political appointees every day. I can't endorse this post strongly enough. This administration has been especially bad, but even during previous administrations our political leadership has always had an incredibly thin understanding of the agency and what we do. Additionally, we take most of our marching orders from the White House, but we still have to brief our in-house leadership and make them feel important even though they don't have authority to make decisions about anything. All they do is get in the way and slow things down.
I also want to say that it's been my experience that the civil service workforce is very bimodal. Some people are incredibly smart, competent, and hard-working. Some people are here because its impossible to get fired. There is nothing in between. I think Trump's EO creating a new schedule F designation was clearly done for nefarious reasons, but in the hands of a more responsible administration it could be a good thing.
The career parts hits home.
Considering the rising home prices in DC and the surrounding suburbs. Accumulating "time in government" to later "cash in" should be no surprise.
Especially when entry level jobs - exp. the Hill, start at 30k. Amazon HQ2, consultancies, and defense offer a great substitute. Taking talent away from government with government money.
I think a related issue is part-time governance. It is wild to me that in my home state of WA, the legislature adjourned on schedule in early March and has not reconvened during the pandemic.
The spend 60 or 120 days in session (depending on whether it's a budget year or not), and that's it. The result is a lot of really rushed decision making.
Here in Texas, I wish we had something like that! Instead we have a legislature that meets for six months in odd-numbered years, and gets paid $7200 plus a small per diem to house them in Austin during those six months. Not only has our legislature not met during the pandemic, but it hadn't met for six months before the first known cases in China!
WA might have a part-time legislature, but that legislature has a full-time professional staff, and obviously the state executive branch is full of normal full-time employees. I'm not sure that's really the problem. The governor has the power to underspend the budget, so unless you need budget adds or new laws the legislature reconvening in a special session isn't critical. Also, CA has a full-time legislature and they're not doing obviously better than WA.
if it makes you feel better about the WA situation, my home state of MI has a full-time legislature and they are also not that great at their jobs
However WA has had an excellent state response to Covid-19. I was rather tepid about Inslee pre-2020 but his covid management has been one of the best in the US. We were the first state to get cases yet have had far fewer fatalities than many other states. Whatever you think of his politics Inslee has listened to the medical advisers and acted. WA has an excellent state govt IMO.
I've thought about this for years and am glad you wrote about it. I think about it as paying for talent. I also think about how our political talent pool is shallow, which explains how we hand-wring our way through presidential primaries and often get truly unqualified people elected. Because if you're talented, why on earth would you choose that as a career? The US economy competes for top talent with high compensation, and being a civil servant or elected politician is a low pay proposition. On top of that, it's a low prestige walk of life and you have to put up with a huge amount of s--t while doing the job or trying to get elected. You would probably instead go work in tech, or finance, or nearly any other private industrial career or maybe academia. I wonder if dramatically boosting the pay of politicians would attract and retain top talent, plus provide a disincentive for corruption because you get paid enough that you wouldn't want to lose your straight-forward compensation. That, and what you wrote about around more civil service permanence.
I still remember Matt on a Weeds episode in the last few years pointing out that abysmal pay of state legislators is basically why ALEC writes most of our laws (in GOP-led states at least).
Raising the pay of civil servants would be a great place to start. I was a fed for 11 years and I can tell you that, sadly, I would never recommend government service these days to a bright young person. Why? From my observations, the creation of Inspectors General with their anonymous hotlines for reporting so-called abuse have made the work life of civil servants extremely stressful and unrewarding. I saw many good colleagues have their careers ruined by anonymous denunciations after taking difficult personnel decisions. IGs were completely unnecessary given the GAO and congressional oversight committees. They are a non-value added layer if ever there was one.
One reason this is hard to fix is that staffing with the same people between administrations means that there will be policy continuity between administrations. But we currently have a politics where the desired policy swings so wildly that if you wanted to actually enact it, you'd probably need different people at more levels than in Canada.
Of course, that's partly just that Republicans don't want to run the country well, more broadly than just not wanting to regulate. But there's not really a fix for the lack of consensus about what we should do as a country.
I think that's true in some of the higher prestige places for sure. But in many areas it's not as big a difference. I can speak from experience with the Education Department, where in practice the difference between Obama's final Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education and Trump's first was surprisingly negligible and the transition mostly served to cause confusion for state agencies.
Was that because there just wasn't much difference between what the adminstrations plausibly would do in that area, or because the Trump adminstration didn't know what they wanted that would be different or how to find someone to make it happen?
A little of both, but given that the role's primary function was reviewing state plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was intentionally passed by Congress to give little discretion to ED, I think it was more the former than the latter.
That does indeed seem like a place where political appointments are purely a negative, but also seems to make my point -- permanent civil service posts work best when there's a clear agreed-upon goal, rather than a mandate to do something new.
That our society doesn't have agreed-upon goals for what government should do in most cases is the problem, though.
While Canadian Deputy Ministers are typically career civil servants in the majority of cases, this is a bit of an odd situation as Paul Rochon announced that he is resigning mid-month. His replacement, Michael Sabia, is a bit more non-traditional in that he didn't rise straight through the ranks of the civil service. He's a former federal civil servant but also had sojurns as CEO of a major Quebec Bank, CFO of CN, and CEO of Bell as well as Chair of the Board of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which while non-political, is a creation of the current government. No one seems to think he's unqualified or anything but a bit of a different path.
Matt, I had trouble understanding this sentence fragment: "Freeland and Fortier by Sean Fraser as parliamentary secretary for the department, that’s a kind of junior political role that up-and-comers get." If you would like some editing help before you publish, I'd be glad to contribute pro bono.