Whiplash - of the Philosophical Kind

In its response to crises, the Obama Administration generally focuses at the top of the tree.  The President identifies someone of like mind whom he trusts and asks that individual to establish the overarching framework for the reformulation of a particular industry.  The individual then becomes known as his (the President's) Czar for this, that or the other thing.  He’s done this now with the auto industry, identifying an Auto Czar Ed Montgomery; he’s done it with Afghanistan & Pakistan, TARP and cyber security to name a few.  There are other positions that he inherited - Czars for AIDS, Foreign Aid, Poverty, Energy, Drugs.  The list is fairly comprehensive.  What is troubling to me though is that while great attention is being paid to the top of the tree, far less seems to be being focused on the root system which sustains these trees.

We often sneer at the use of the words ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘bureaucrat’ but the fact of the matter is that it is bureaucracy that is the indispensable executing arm of this or any Administration.  To focus too closely on the leader of a particular system (tree top) and not focus at all on the sustaining system is, I think, a recipe for disaster.  Administrations establish philosophy and direction, but it is bureaucrats (aka federal government employees) who execute the established policies.  When they do so poorly, or not at all, chaos ensues.  

Take for instance, the horrible mess that is the Minerals Management Service – MMS. The approach to regulation and oversight during the Bush years was born of the Bush Administration’s attitude to same: less is good, none is better.  The agency inherited by the Obama Administration therefore, was functioning according to an approach to regulation that was on the opposite end of the spectrum from what the incoming Administration wanted.  That being the case, an immediate ‘intervention’ and culture change operation ought to have been mounted. That should have been the first order of business.  In hindsight of course, anyone with an ounce of organizational savvy can see this, but for some reason the effect of culture on execution of policy seems to have been overlooked in the heady days between the election and the current crisis.  Why is that?  That’s a question that’s not getting a lot of airtime, but probably should (for many reasons not the least of which is that I don’t think that MMS is the only Agency likely to be having this kind of philosophical whiplash).  

The mistake here wasn’t that housecleaning wasn’t done (witch hunting in the workplace is still illegal, ask former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez), but rather that no one seems to have taken the time to establish what the new rules of engagement were or to make clear that non-adherence to same would bring severe consequences.  If new rules were in fact outlined but were not followed, the failure of internal review mechanisms needs to be investigated as well, not with a view to firing anyone but with a view to identifying where the breakdowns in the system occurred and ensuring that they don’t occur again.   

Firing folk after the fact is a Pyrrhic victory.  We all may feel a little better once they’ve gone, but it solves nothing in the long run.  Moreover, a firing, much like a public execution, is really only a pretense that something has been done.  It’s the private organizational work that matters, not the public humiliation of a single person…even if the person really did need to go.