CHAPTER TWENTY

Meaningful Government Reorganization

DURING HIS 1976 CAMPAIGN Jimmy Carter repeatedly promised to streamline the federal government, to amalgamate its agencies and to create such new “super agencies” as a Federal Department of Energy. In this, he simply followed the precedents set by every one of his predecessors since Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1936 campaign.

There is indeed need to overhaul the bureaucratic sprawl in Washington. But Mr. Carter’s proposals were unlikely to have any more impact on governmental performance than the proposals of his predecessors. Reshuffling the organization chart will not make a single agency more effective or perform better. Even zero-budgeting and zero-revenue planning, the new and far more radical measures proposed to control government spending and taxes, will have only limited impact, desirable and necessary though both approaches are.

If the new President really intends to make government more effective, however, we know what to do. At least we know the first three steps.

1. Require clear and specific goals for every government agency and for each program and project within each agency. What are needed are not just statements of broad policies—these are simply good intentions—but targets with specific timetables and clear assignments of accountability. The budget, of course, tells how much money an agency intends to spend and where. But it rarely tells what results are expected. In other words, budgets are spending plans which make vague promises, but they omit mention of social and economic changes that result from government action.

So the first step toward better governmental performance is to establish clear targets, targets which specify the expected results and the time necessary to achieve them. Then what is needed is a systematic study and report each year of how well these targets have been achieved.

2. Each agency needs to establish priorities within its targeted objectives, so that it can concentrate its effort. Practically without exception, government agencies lack priorities and steadfastly refuse to set them.

Every police department in the United States knows that crime on the street is a first priority, which requires concentrating uniformed officers on patrol duty. But few police departments dare say “no” to the old lady who phones in to complain that a cat is caught in a tree in her front yard. Instead, it sends a patrol car. Yet police departments probably have the clearest objectives and the keenest sense of priorities of all our public agencies.

By contrast, the enormous bureaucracies in such cabinet departments as Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) or in Housing and Urban Development are so badly subdivided among so many aimless programs that, despite their hordes of employees, few programs are staffed adequately to achieve results.

Setting priorities is difficult in politics because every program has its own constituencies. So setting priorities requires a great deal of courage, but this after all is what a chief executive—in the federal government or in a private business—is paid for.

3. Finally, the toughest, most novel, but also the most important prerequisite of organizational effectiveness is organized abandonment.

Political philosophy maintains that the tasks of government are perennial and can never be abandoned. This may have made sense when government confined itself to such basic functions as defense, administration of justice, and domestic order. Those days are long past, of course, yet this is still the way we run government. The underlying assumption should be that everything government does is as likely as every other human activity to become unproductive or obsolete within a short time. To keep such activities going requires infinitely more effort than to run the productive and successful ones.

Political philosophy has also always maintained, although not quite as firmly, that results and performance are not a proper yardstick by which to measure governmental programs. Those measurements belong to economics, which assumes that efforts are being made for the sake of results. But when governmental efforts produce disappointing performance and results it is always agreed that this only indicates that greater effort and more money are needed since “the forces of evil are so powerful.”

Antitrusters, for instance, clearly believe that the fewer results their efforts bring, the more effort is deserved; to them, the absence of results does not prove the inappropriateness of the antitrust approach but the overpowering presence of conspiracy and evil. The experience of countries that, with practically no antitrust efforts, have industrial structures not very different from our own does not impress the dedicated antitruster any more than sex statistics from other parts of the world would impress the Puritan thundering from the pulpit against fornication.

But even the most convinced moralist would likely admit that the bulk of governmental efforts today belong in the category of economics, in which results are the proper measurement of an activity and the proper concern of management.

Governmental agencies should therefore be required to abandon one program or one activity before a new one can be started. Lack of any such policy is probably why new efforts over the last twenty years have produced fewer and fewer results. The new programs may well have been necessary and even well-planned, but their execution had to be entrusted to whoever was available rather than to the experienced people stuck in unproductive and obsolete jobs.

A good deal of what goes on in HEW or in the Food and Drug Administration clearly needs to be abolished after the programs have accomplished their objectives. Our present “welfare mess” is, to a very large extent, the result of our having kept alive the successful welfare programs of the Great Depression. When a new welfare problem arose in the 1960s, we slapped on old programs designed for totally different purposes.

Most of the farm programs of the New Deal should be abandoned. Social Security, as it was designed in 1935, belongs here too, I suspect. It has been overtaken by profound changes in American demographies—by the surge of life expectancies and by the rise of employer-financed pension plans. The food-stamp program rapidly became the wrong kind of welfare program, regimenting expenditures of the poor rather than giving them additional purchasing power. Most of our housing subsidies probably belong in the same category.

These are initial steps toward improving government performance. They are by no means enough, but even for them the political obstacles erected by the bureaucracies and vested interests will be tremendous. Still, there is now both popular and legislative support for “sunset laws” which provide for the automatic lapse of governmental agencies and programs. And, as Mr. Carter rightly pointed out during his campaign, the foremost need of modern government is to make government more effective. It may even be a condition necessary for the survival of modern government.

(1977)