What about a plan to completely upend the system: General elections for all Cabinet level positions, or heads of the major agencies. Let the people vote for Secretaries of State, HHS, DHS, EPA etc, even DOJ, every 4 years along with the President. Now I know this would take a Constitutional Amendment and all the political wrangling that would entail (and I won't get into the specific mechanisms to make this work, just wanted to broach the idea) But at least as a thought exercise I've never even heard this brought up. I think this idea would make the work of these agencies more salient in the minds of the American people and bring more accountability. Tie this with Matt's ideas to make Civil Service Great Again for the people that make up these agencies and we'd be on a much better path for good governance. Not to mention be able to end the whole garbage unitary executive arguments. Because the power of a single human as President responsible as Executive to everything under that branch is just too vast.
Now that you´re on this beat, but we get a mild temperature take on civil service exams? They used to be a big thing in the 1900s, but seem to have gone away and agency hiring is kind of obscure...
Notably, Justice doesn't really have this problem because the job market for lawyers is large and liquid so it's easier for appointees to have attractive non-DC-DOJ job options: (a) state government, (b) high prestige, de facto-independent U.S. Attorney's Offices, (c) relatively well-funded and high-prestige nonprofits like the ACLU, and (d) law firms, which generally hire their white-collar criminal defense partners from DOJ, but which aren't really a "revolving door" serving "industry" in the way that switching between running Union Pacific and DOT is because law firms are not DOJ-regulated entities.
This idea won't increase bipartisan confirmations, but... couldn't the parties do an appointee version of the "If I were President" game?
In the "If I were President" game, a Presidential candidate pretends to be acting President (not in a deceptive way, but a practicing way). A big event happens: the candidate writes and issues his hypothetical statement to the nation. The first hundred days: the candidates puts out fully written executive orders that he would be giving if this was his hundred days. Et cetera. (This happens naturally during a campaign, like when B gives a covid speech to contrast T's, but I'm talking like day-by-day total "if I were President today, I'd to exactly XYZ" with full text orders and everything.) This obviously would take a ton of work, massive staff, and most of it would go under the radar, so comprehensiveness offers little marginal benefit for campaign purposes... which leads to...
But if a party funded this massive effort to test out and offer real simulation practice to potential political appointees all the way through the stack, working through all issues with sufficiently public information to meaningfully do precise hypothetical work on... then the party would be able to just offer up everyone in the structure for confirmation immediately upon winning the election.
This would be more focused and training-oriented than the idea generation from think tank or political journalism. Corporate executives who wanted to contribute to the gov would be filtered by their willingness to engage in this exercise.
Problems include: (1) this team would reflect "the party's" goals more than the individual President-elect's, (2) this team would be clearly partisan, so the other party would fight the confirmations more, (3) I'm imagining you simply won't have enough public information to make meaningfully precise output, since lots is probably privy to the sitting Administration, and (4) it would be a ton of work.
(My first post here, and in any online comment section in years. Thanks, Matthew, for some cool writing on a wider range of topics than I would otherwise see.)
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.
There is an issue with a government apparatus that has very few political appointees in which the political appointees can't actually drive much change within the agency. This is ameliorated in parliamentary systems by the ability to drive change through legislation, but that avenue is effectively shut for American leaders, given our conservative "saucer cooling" system of legislation. Taking away the ability of presidential administrations to move the ball forward via agency work would likely lead to a very status quo apparatus of government. I'd sure as hell take that over Trump lackeys running around, but don't know that we'd get a chance to see Cass Sunstein or Samantha Power or Susan Rice make waves if only 25 ministerial minder jobs are permitted below cabinet level. That said - there's certainly plenty of underachieving congressional staffers that get important political jobs from the Plum Book that really would be better served going to someone who knows anything at all.
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.
Alas for the days of yore, like the days of FDR, when scions of wealth undertook public service out of a sense of noblesse oblige. I suspect those days are gone forever.
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.
I realize Matthew is addressing the upper levels of management when it comes to considering the revolving door. But this piece, on consideration, ignores a very important door where some seriously shady stuff happens. And this mostly applies to lower levels of government. That would be the exit door for retiring civil servants. In transportation, in particular, it is often very surprising how often successful contract bidders just coincidentally happen to employ the largest number of retired government employees who used to be in Transportation Depts.
This is going to be one of those relaxing days where I agree with every word you wrote and can't even think of a question offhand.
But an observation or two may be in order. I have had an adversarial relationships at both Provincial and Federal levels with Canadian government departments. At the lower levels one finds both resistance to requests for clarification of regulations or worse, resistance to correcting deficiencies in regulation. And sometimes even getting them to abide by their own published regulations. At lower levels the instinct is to play it safe and say no to any proposal. But they are professional and if you are persistent and drive issues up the chain of command then you have a good shot at success. Let us say that the better people do rise through the ranks. I am satisfied that on balance this works well. It may take years to get an Order in Council but eventually you get the check or the policy change.
You correctly note that achieving such a system in the US would be difficult. But do not underestimate the ease with which such a system can be eroded. I know people. And under the Harper government disturbing things began to happen. Policy researchers for both the House and the Senate were being pressured to produce results consistent with desired policies rather than the other way around. Canada has some very fine institutions not the least of which, historically, was the very rigorous and professionally respected Statscan. And when you start messing with how or what can be measured and who shall have access or input into this, nothing good results.
And indeed, the Canadian rejoinder to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is “peace, order and good government.”
Having worked for years at both the provincial and federal levels, I can say this system works well and there is a professionalism which ensures that the Minister’s wishes are carried out regardless of party, even if there is private grumbling. That is enforced by the fact that although the two top layers of the public (aka civil) service (deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers) are normally career bureaucrats, unlike the rest of the public service they may be summarily dismissed with no rationale, protections or recourse. They serve “at the pleasure” of the cabinet.
It is extraordinarily hard to fire anyone else in government, but the fact that junior folks’ careers depend on the DMs’ and ADMs’ views means overall that the public service stays in reasonable lockstep with the government of the day.
There are a few issues, but overall it works well. The US system has always seemed cumbersome and a bit patron-clienty to me.
Here's one thing I really do disagree with Matt on, his focus on "good government" reforms like this often put the cart before the horse. That is I think these sorts of complaints kind of miss the point of political appointees: that is they show a healthy sense of skepticism towards the dangers of Weber's concerns about the "Iron Cage" of bureaucracy totally taking over and being totally unaccountable to anyone, what Ardent liked to call a sort of "rule by no one." If you want to see a "better" system in action just look at the EU bureaucracies who don't have to answer to, well anyone really, or have any political people running around mucking things up. But it's not like that scenario is much better than ours, indeed it strikes me as being a lot worse based on the EU's economic record.
What about a plan to completely upend the system: General elections for all Cabinet level positions, or heads of the major agencies. Let the people vote for Secretaries of State, HHS, DHS, EPA etc, even DOJ, every 4 years along with the President. Now I know this would take a Constitutional Amendment and all the political wrangling that would entail (and I won't get into the specific mechanisms to make this work, just wanted to broach the idea) But at least as a thought exercise I've never even heard this brought up. I think this idea would make the work of these agencies more salient in the minds of the American people and bring more accountability. Tie this with Matt's ideas to make Civil Service Great Again for the people that make up these agencies and we'd be on a much better path for good governance. Not to mention be able to end the whole garbage unitary executive arguments. Because the power of a single human as President responsible as Executive to everything under that branch is just too vast.
Now that you´re on this beat, but we get a mild temperature take on civil service exams? They used to be a big thing in the 1900s, but seem to have gone away and agency hiring is kind of obscure...
"You’re not going to serve as an Assistant Treasury Secretary and then go operate a taco truck for four to eight years"
DC's best worst taco truck idea ever.
Notably, Justice doesn't really have this problem because the job market for lawyers is large and liquid so it's easier for appointees to have attractive non-DC-DOJ job options: (a) state government, (b) high prestige, de facto-independent U.S. Attorney's Offices, (c) relatively well-funded and high-prestige nonprofits like the ACLU, and (d) law firms, which generally hire their white-collar criminal defense partners from DOJ, but which aren't really a "revolving door" serving "industry" in the way that switching between running Union Pacific and DOT is because law firms are not DOJ-regulated entities.
This idea won't increase bipartisan confirmations, but... couldn't the parties do an appointee version of the "If I were President" game?
In the "If I were President" game, a Presidential candidate pretends to be acting President (not in a deceptive way, but a practicing way). A big event happens: the candidate writes and issues his hypothetical statement to the nation. The first hundred days: the candidates puts out fully written executive orders that he would be giving if this was his hundred days. Et cetera. (This happens naturally during a campaign, like when B gives a covid speech to contrast T's, but I'm talking like day-by-day total "if I were President today, I'd to exactly XYZ" with full text orders and everything.) This obviously would take a ton of work, massive staff, and most of it would go under the radar, so comprehensiveness offers little marginal benefit for campaign purposes... which leads to...
But if a party funded this massive effort to test out and offer real simulation practice to potential political appointees all the way through the stack, working through all issues with sufficiently public information to meaningfully do precise hypothetical work on... then the party would be able to just offer up everyone in the structure for confirmation immediately upon winning the election.
This would be more focused and training-oriented than the idea generation from think tank or political journalism. Corporate executives who wanted to contribute to the gov would be filtered by their willingness to engage in this exercise.
Problems include: (1) this team would reflect "the party's" goals more than the individual President-elect's, (2) this team would be clearly partisan, so the other party would fight the confirmations more, (3) I'm imagining you simply won't have enough public information to make meaningfully precise output, since lots is probably privy to the sitting Administration, and (4) it would be a ton of work.
(My first post here, and in any online comment section in years. Thanks, Matthew, for some cool writing on a wider range of topics than I would otherwise see.)
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.
There is an issue with a government apparatus that has very few political appointees in which the political appointees can't actually drive much change within the agency. This is ameliorated in parliamentary systems by the ability to drive change through legislation, but that avenue is effectively shut for American leaders, given our conservative "saucer cooling" system of legislation. Taking away the ability of presidential administrations to move the ball forward via agency work would likely lead to a very status quo apparatus of government. I'd sure as hell take that over Trump lackeys running around, but don't know that we'd get a chance to see Cass Sunstein or Samantha Power or Susan Rice make waves if only 25 ministerial minder jobs are permitted below cabinet level. That said - there's certainly plenty of underachieving congressional staffers that get important political jobs from the Plum Book that really would be better served going to someone who knows anything at all.
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.
Alas for the days of yore, like the days of FDR, when scions of wealth undertook public service out of a sense of noblesse oblige. I suspect those days are gone forever.
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.
My comment is
I realize Matthew is addressing the upper levels of management when it comes to considering the revolving door. But this piece, on consideration, ignores a very important door where some seriously shady stuff happens. And this mostly applies to lower levels of government. That would be the exit door for retiring civil servants. In transportation, in particular, it is often very surprising how often successful contract bidders just coincidentally happen to employ the largest number of retired government employees who used to be in Transportation Depts.
This is going to be one of those relaxing days where I agree with every word you wrote and can't even think of a question offhand.
But an observation or two may be in order. I have had an adversarial relationships at both Provincial and Federal levels with Canadian government departments. At the lower levels one finds both resistance to requests for clarification of regulations or worse, resistance to correcting deficiencies in regulation. And sometimes even getting them to abide by their own published regulations. At lower levels the instinct is to play it safe and say no to any proposal. But they are professional and if you are persistent and drive issues up the chain of command then you have a good shot at success. Let us say that the better people do rise through the ranks. I am satisfied that on balance this works well. It may take years to get an Order in Council but eventually you get the check or the policy change.
You correctly note that achieving such a system in the US would be difficult. But do not underestimate the ease with which such a system can be eroded. I know people. And under the Harper government disturbing things began to happen. Policy researchers for both the House and the Senate were being pressured to produce results consistent with desired policies rather than the other way around. Canada has some very fine institutions not the least of which, historically, was the very rigorous and professionally respected Statscan. And when you start messing with how or what can be measured and who shall have access or input into this, nothing good results.
And indeed, the Canadian rejoinder to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is “peace, order and good government.”
Having worked for years at both the provincial and federal levels, I can say this system works well and there is a professionalism which ensures that the Minister’s wishes are carried out regardless of party, even if there is private grumbling. That is enforced by the fact that although the two top layers of the public (aka civil) service (deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers) are normally career bureaucrats, unlike the rest of the public service they may be summarily dismissed with no rationale, protections or recourse. They serve “at the pleasure” of the cabinet.
It is extraordinarily hard to fire anyone else in government, but the fact that junior folks’ careers depend on the DMs’ and ADMs’ views means overall that the public service stays in reasonable lockstep with the government of the day.
There are a few issues, but overall it works well. The US system has always seemed cumbersome and a bit patron-clienty to me.
Any chance the discounts could apply to gift subscriptions when they're for a student/educator?
Here's one thing I really do disagree with Matt on, his focus on "good government" reforms like this often put the cart before the horse. That is I think these sorts of complaints kind of miss the point of political appointees: that is they show a healthy sense of skepticism towards the dangers of Weber's concerns about the "Iron Cage" of bureaucracy totally taking over and being totally unaccountable to anyone, what Ardent liked to call a sort of "rule by no one." If you want to see a "better" system in action just look at the EU bureaucracies who don't have to answer to, well anyone really, or have any political people running around mucking things up. But it's not like that scenario is much better than ours, indeed it strikes me as being a lot worse based on the EU's economic record.