Our Amateur Hour Government

...Thequality of President Bush's leadership during the Gulf crisis allows us to see vividly the difference that experience can make in directing the country's affairs...

...Some commentators have put these two facts together and inferred that Bush's extensive government background was crucial in helping him to meet his Administration's biggest challenge thus far...

...Yet the general prejudice that it is useless for the government to "throw money at problems" was not dislodged...

...The intellectual case for the "nothing works" doctrine turns on the differences between public organizations and private businesses...

...On the other hand, the same reasoning should apply to the business sector, yet in opting for internal recruitment large firms have apparently decided that the benefits of experience outweigh the costs...

...Of the current members of the U.S...

...Approximately one-third had no Federal administrative experience at all before their selection by the President...

...Moreover, effective field commanders or pilots are not likely to get extra money because of their brave deeds...

...There is, however, a still more important lesson that can be gleaned from the Gulf victory...

...air attacks would severely limit the Iraqis' ability to fight a ground war...

...Only a single prime minister in this century was named to the job without having held a Cabinet portfolio...

...This helps, for example, to increase the accountability of the agencies to popular opinion...

...To hand any task to the public sector, it is widely held, is to assure at best incompetent performance and at worst utter fiasco...

...The same study revealed that the average CEO had been serving 11 years in his current job...

...To be sure, there are arguments in favor of the American tradition of turning government agencies over to the leadership of political appointees from outside government who serve at the President's pleasure...

...Most important, it should teach us some lessons about how to make our government work better...

...In most other democratic nations, candidates for elective office are chosen by party leaders, a practice that favors those who have methodically risen through the ranks...

...Second, our handling of the conflict provides some lessons about when government action is most likely to succeed and how to improve the likelihood that a public organization will work well...

...A stronger argument for the American tradition is that new blood encourages new thinking...

...There are several reasons why American political and administrative leaders have so much less experience than their counterparts abroad...

...It is almost a platitude by now to note that George Bush did a superb job of orchestrating a diplomatic and military response to the Iraqi takeover of Kuwait...

...The American troops who deftly moved an entire military machine into the Persian Gulf had no real Iraqi competition...

...Contrast this record with that of American business...

...One study of corporate chief executive officers in the United States showed that about 90 per cent had been appointed from within the company and had an average of 19 years experience working with the firm prior to being made CEO...

...As for the point that businesses typically have competitors whereas government organizations do not, it could be argued that the coalition forces in the Gulf did in fact face competition—from the Iraqi military...

...But our success in the Gulf suggests that economic incentives are not a necessary condition for good performance...

...political parties...

...air supremacy was achieved...

...Admittedly, some of those with littleorno Federal administrative background have been experts in the policy area of their agency, but they lacked practice in functioning in a governmental context...

...In most of the other Western European countries and Japan, the equivalent of assistant secretaries are typically appointed from among civil servants who have spent their entire careers in government—usually in the branch they come to lead...

...One is that government service in the United States has a lower status than in many other countries...

...Focusing on goals and establishing performance measures can help in carrying out government tasks far more mundane than the liberation of Kuwait —ranging from weather forecasting to giving assistance to taxpayers over the telephone...

...The implication here seems to be that proposals for increasing competition in the delivery of public goods are worth serious consideration...

...It is much the same with foreign governments...

...Generals Colin L. Powell and H. Norman Schwarzkopf each earn $108,000 a year, a fraction of what a top manager in a large U.S...

...Framing a clear goal can work wonders, especially when it is attractive or noble (an advantage public organizations often have over private firms...

...Nor did the American pilots flying over Iraq after U.S...

...A mixture of fatalism and cynicism has engendered a "nothing works" view of government in this country...

...Because government organizations are for the most part monopolies and have no "bottom line," it is maintained, they can hardly be expected to perform well...

...Yet it might be rejoined that the behavior of government agencies should reflect loyalty to the statutes chartering them more than to the current White House occupant...

...Indeed, significant statistical evidence of improvement on both scores emerged during the 1980s...

...Among assistant secretaries—the appointed officials who act as line managers for the agencies making up the Federal government—the tenure in office has averaged a mere two years during the last several decades...

...Similarly, a dispassionate onlooker would have recognized that the large outlays over the last decade devoted to attracting more educated recruits and developing their skills had produced higher-quality and better-trained troops...

...And the price of defeat in terms of death and injury was certainly more dramatic than the price of failure in the marketplace...

...Finally, although the Gulf War obviously was not conducted with an eye to profit and loss, if one defines "bottom line" as a clear goal set before members of an organization, then U.S...

...At the same time, this factor does not explain everything...

...But the episode should dispel the contrary prejudice that government can do nothing...

...First, the notion that government initiatives are inherently failure-prone greatly distorted the prewar debate about how the United States should respond to Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait...

...It is odd that the national debate prior to the UN deadline for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was so deeply influenced by the "nothing works" doctrine...

...Long-term products of a political or administrative system are less likely than outsiders to come up with creative ideas or to challenge accepted procedures...

...British prime ministers since World War II have on average had 28 years of Parliamentary experience when they were selected as head of government...

...A second study determined that when the U.S.-Japan Structural Impediments Negotiations began in 1989, the three Japanese negotiators had anaverageof32yearsof experience at their agencies, while two of the three members of the American team had started working in their agencies just months before the talks began...

...Perspectives OUR AMATEUR HOUR GOVERNMENT BY STEVEN KELMAN After the United States' successful manned lunar mission in 1969, it became common to hear, "If the government can send a man to the moon, why can't it solve the problem of poverty in the ghetto...

...soldiers and officers in the Gulf most definitely had one: the liberation of Kuwait and the defeat of Saddam Hussein...

...Of the eight American Presidents between the end of World War II and the Bush Administration, only three (Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford) had lengthy and broad government experience prior to assuming the Presidency, and only one of those three had extensive grounding in foreign policy...

...company makes...

...Another has to do with the relative weakness of U.S...

...For example, in appointing an agency head, a President might make more of an effort to choose a politically compatible senior civil servant from within the organization...

...Everyone also knows that he came to the White House with a long and varied career in public service behind him: He has to date worked in government for 24 years (versus the 19 previously spent in business), serving as a Congressman, UN ambassador, ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and Vice President before being elected President...

...Or at a very minimum he could select someone with previous service in other high government positions...

...Any reasonably fair-minded observer looking at the enormous American advances in military technology over the past few decades could not have helped concluding that Iraq would almost surely be defenseless in the air, and that unhindered U.S...

...The American system, with its direct primaries and media-based campaigns, makes it a lot easier for political ingenues to get into office...

...Steven Kelman, a longtime contributor to The New Leader, is a professor of public poticy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government...

...We should not, of course, conclude from the Gulf war that government can do anything...

...Instead, many chose to regard the much-publicized troubles plaguing a few advanced weapons systems as the tip of an iceberg of incompetence rather than what they were—the entire iceberg, and not a very large one...

...Today anyone asking such a question would be considered rather naïve...

...of the two-thirds who did have such experience, the median previous service was six years...

...Even within the bounds of existing governmental arrangements, it is possible to give experience greater weight...

...Senate, 14 held no elective office prior to arriving on Capitol Hill...

...The Amateur Hour in American government exacts a price that we have largelyignoredinpublicdiscourse...

...as a result, fewer people choose to make it their life career...

...The Persian Gulf experience affords us an opportunity to take a new look at the nature of such differences...

...America's military victory in the Gulf gives us cause to re-examine this conventional wisdom, for two reasons...

...Many government organizations do not function effectively because public managers, and the elected officials who oversee them, fail to grasp the importance of this...

...Yet almost no one has taken this approach one step further and pointed out its relevance to the way we run our government—which, compared with the management of private business or of government in most other industrial democracies, looks like Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour...

...It is true, for instance, that government has nowhere near the same ability to reward outstanding performance economically as the private sector...

...One comparative study found that the U. S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration had three chief executives in the first six years of its existence, while its Swedish counterpart had the same number of chiefs in its first 27 years...