Strangers in a Strange Land

...Perhaps the most important decision that Jimmy Carter made during the transition was to take a laissez-faire attitude toward staffing the government...

...The two Brookings books, Red Tape by Herbert Kaufman and A Government of Strangers, by Hugh Heclo, pake a convincing case against allowing political scientists to write about a topic as important as government...

...There seems to be at least one daily crisis...

...But Fiorina is useful in highlighting the degree to which Congress benefits from big government...

...He adds, “The book differs from academic studies of Congress in one other major respect: its tone is openly critical...

...Signing Off Nor are specificity and clarity the bureaucracy’s strong suit...

...These memos were taken seriously, for, at times, the President would announce a major decision by scrawling marginal comments on the memos and sending them back to the Cabinet officers...

...Jack Anderson spoke for all good government zealots when he recently declared that if Nixon “had been able to pull it off, it would have amounted to almost a coup against our existing form of government...

...Carter reputedly interviewed only two assistant secretaries before he sent their names to the Senate...

...Another 20 are total mediocrities who have been elevated to positions far beyond their competence in the hurried decisionmaking of a presidential transition...

...Again$ my betMichael Herwitz wrote “Money Doesn’t Talk in Washington” in the December issue of The Washington Monthly...

...Little has happened in the last year to cement the loyalty of these assistant secretaries to the President they technically serve...

...Typically, fewer than half a dozen of the political appointees in our mythical department were active in the campaign or were early Carter supporters...

...On Everyone’s List In practice, this is rather exaggerated...

...Put simply, Kaufman’s thesis is that learning to live with red tape is the only thing we can do...

...He goes on to contend that the increasing importance of congressional casework has inextricably bound legislators to big, inefficient government programs...

...Glossing Over Problems The handful of Carter loyalists who remain are the only people who feel compelled to do daily battle with a recalcitrant bureaucracy...

...President Carter began his term requiring four-page memos from his Cabinet secretaries each week detailing departmental activities...

...Like Heclo, Kaufman is so balanced and so responsible that he never develops a point of view...

...Originality and Verve After wading through two dreary Brooking studies, it was a relief to come across Morris P. Fiorina’s Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment...

...Had we more trust in one another and in our public officers...

...Now, Fiorina contends, they use their large staff resources to advertise what good ombudsmen they were for the citizens of their district...

...The conquistadors found themselves the rulers of a people who spoke an incomprehensible language and practiced unfathomable customs...

...This is a very careful system, but it also produces letters that are generally poorly written, several months late, and totally unresponsive...

...They had in mind only one type of activism: centralized federal programs whose primary effect would be to enrich the electoral coalitions that regularly return them to office...

...But Heclo’s attitude is that political appointees soon grow out of that, recognizing the futility of trying to change the bureaucracy and instead lowering their expectations and trying to live with it...

...Only in passing does Heclo touch on the real problem facing reformers of the government: that an incumbent President has only a handful of loyalists in each Cabinet department...

...The pattern remained relatively unchanged in the I974 and 1976 House elections...

...In 1972 only one congressman in ten won so marginally...

...The civil servant correctly assumes that mediocrity will never get him into trouble...

...In 1948, one quarter of all congressional candidates won with less than 55 per cent of the vote...

...ter instincts, I examined three of these books...

...My fellow congressional scholars have written exhaustively about the positive aspects of our national legislatures...

...To the mix should be added the special interest groups that gravitate around each federal program...

...Although the discussion of marginal congressional districts takes up the bulk of Fiorina’s little book, it is only the first part of his novel argument...

...For those with a Common Cause world-view, this is a laudable development...

...In the past, congressmen campaigned for reelection by publicizing their votes on key issues...

...Joel Solomon, the man Jimmy Carter picked to run the troubled $5-billion General Services Administration, has expressed the reasonable view that he should be entitled to bring in managers who have “some loyalty and some connection with the person who is going to run 35,000 people...

...As a result, the few books on bureaucracy that did appear in 1977 were the product either of political scientists writing for academic presses or Dolitical scientists writing for the Brookings Institution...

...After reading through a mound of the responses, I was struck by the uniformity of the answers across political and ideological lines...

...Probably about 50 of those are actually career civil servants who, for the moment, are holding political posts...

...Clearly, thousands of votes are swayed by assiduous casework effort...

...The weekly memos continue, but they have become steadily truncated...

...The cycle closes when the congressman lends a sympathetic ear, piously denounces the evils of bureaucracy, intervenes in the latter’s decisions, and rides a grateful electorate to ever more impressive electoral showings...

...While such an approach may represent Heclo’s “middle way,” it is not the way that Jimmy Carter can deliver on his pledge to make the federal bureaucracy more responsive...

...I don’t find it revolting, infuriating, or funny...

...We have all heard friends or relatives say about their congressman, “I don’t really like how he votes on most issues, but his office certainly was helpful when I had that problem with Social Security...

...At the outset he says “I have tried throughout the book to maintain clinical detachment from the subject...

...The Carter loyalists are too short-handed to do much about these problems...

...If something takes more than three hours of concentrated work, it doesn’t get done...

...It is a book of less than 100 pages, but it is written with insight, originality, and verve...

...A Carter loyalist entering a Cabinet department at the beginning of the administration is like one of the handful of Spanish conquistadors who accompanied Pizzaro on his conquest of the Incas...

...So one should not underestimate political appointees’ legitimate frustrations with the civil service mentality...

...In answering a letter addressed to a Cabinet secretary, for example, the bureaucracy generally produces a draft with twelve different sets of initials approving it (“signing off on it,” as the bureaucrats call it...

...At the end of the year, the federally run department store could announce total victory over shoplifting-and a loss of millions of dollars due to a sharp, unexplained drop in sales volume...

...There are just 84 jobs in the entire Treasury Department that are exempt from civil service requirements...

...The larger the federal budget, the larger the number of interest groups that get a share of the pie...

...Today interest groups aren’t just the hard-lobbying businesses of the past...

...some are highly competent...

...The decline in the number of marginal districts has a direct bearing on the political accountability of congressional incumbents...

...In a rational universe, 1977 would have produced several important books on how the federal bureaucracy does-or does not-work...

...The legislation is drafted in very general terms, so some agency...

...Fiorina argues: “Congressmen...

...It is typical of the Brookings style that Heclo’s innocuous conclusions are grouped under the heading, “A Middle Way...

...They are an important source of campaign money and, perhaps more important, campaign volunteers...

...Even Kaufman is inspired to sound the clarion call: “Perhaps we have opted for excessive caution...

...Fiorina is one person who took Jimmy Carter’s rhetoric about an unresponsive federal bureaucracy seriously...

...Lc 7 ago, however, New York publishers 3opted a basic credo: except when war, corruption, and glob4 conspiracy theories are involved, writing about gove rnm en t is fundamentally dull...

...It took two generations and a lot of priests for the Spaniards to decimate the native Indian culture...

...Cabinet secretaries, rather than the White House personnel office, chose most of the assistant secretaries and filled the Schedule C positions...

...Fiorina demonstrates that a shift of between just three and five per cent of the vote in each congressional district is enough to explain the increased job security of incumbents-which means enough voters are willing to reward a congressman for performing casework chores to explain the decline in marginal congressional districts...

...True, there were mounds of resumes sent over from the White House, but there were few follow-up phone calls insisting that a certain person be placed in a certain slot...

...Much of their time is absorbed by new programs and policies...

...Gunpower and European diseases like the measles were enough to make Pizzaro the ruler of a onceproud Indian people...

...the task proved far more difficult than he anticipated...

...Through an elegant series of arguments, too complicated to reproduce here, Fiorina demolishes these traditional explanations for the decline in marginal districts...

...Strangers in a Strange Land by Michael Herwitz Nineteen seventy-seven was the first year that Jimmy Carter had a chance to deliver on his pledge to provide a government as good as the American people...

...earn electoral credits by establishing various federal programs...

...In his introduction Fiorina notes, almost hesitantly, “I have not written a topical work before, and it is with some uncertainty that I do so now: topical writing arouses suspicion in serious academic circles...

...Decisions are made on the run...

...Everything seems to have to be redone at the last minute...

...By all accounts, most Housing and Urban Development programs are grotesquely ineffective...

...A year after Carter’s inaugural, one can choose among three explanations for why the government’s state of bureaucratic torpor has continued unabated: Carter lied...

...A ratio like that is bad enough, and it’s made even worse than it looks because things usually work out so that there are barely a dozen Carter loyalists among the assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, staff aides, and other political appointees...

...we would not feel impelled to limit discretion by means of lengthy, minutely detailed directives...

...Most of the others come from Capitol Hill or from one of the institutions that analyzes and feeds off the department’s programs...

...Your typical assistant secretary finds out about presidential policies in three ways: reading The Washington Post, hearing a Cabinet secretary briefly summarize a meeting with the President, and dealing with the person on Stu Eizenstat’s White House domestic staff responsible for their programs...

...For a moment I began picturing the federal government running a large department store...

...Heclo quotes a top government administrator: “In this agency we have six political slots...

...One, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment, by Morris P. Fiorina (Yale), turned out to be a highly stimulating little essay...

...must translate a vague policy mandate into a functioning program, a process that necessitates the promulgation of numerous rules and regulations and, incidentally, the trampling of numerous toes...

...A Mythical DeDartment Let’s examine for a moment the realities facing a political appointee in a mythical domestic Cabinet department with, say, a $30-billion budget and 150 patronage jobs...

...Taken as a group, these programs represent only a small fraction of the federal budget, yet they account for the overwhelming majority of congressional casework...

...There are incredible sentences like, “What appears to be bureaucratic torpor is in many instances the function of a different, albeit lengthy, time scale within government...

...but almost all have developed a keen sense of loyalty to the way the department has been doing things for time immemorial...

...An extreme example was Joseph Califano’s selection of Hale Champion, a prominent Morris Udal1 supporter in 1976, to be undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare...

...Instead, he argues convincingly that the growing importance of congressional casework explains the increased security of House and Senate incumbents...

...soon they have the same powers of concentration as a wheeler-dealer literary agent with four telephones on his desk...

...In fact, with the average tenure of assistant secretaries running about 22 months, he does not even have a.full four-year term...

...Even the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, with its 140,000 employees and a $165-billion budget, has only about 150 political appointees...

...Far more than most people who are now assistant secretaries in the Carter administration, Fiorina saw the potential of this unorthodox candidate to change the status quo...

...The real Carter loyalists often feel like strangers in a strange land...

...He contends that one man’s red tape is another man’s procedural safeguard...

...At the next stage, aggrieved and/or hopeful constituents petition their congressmen to intervene in the complex...

...Heclo quotes one veteran government official observing “the normal thing in all political appointees is to begin by being down on the bureaucrats...

...decision processes of the bureaucracy...

...For example, so-called public interest groups (“PIGS,” for short) like the League of Cities and the Governors’ Conference have become leading supporters of the social welfare spending that keeps them in business...

...But Heclo lacks any sense of passion or urgency...

...Clinical detachment may be fine in a psychiatrist, but a little passion could only help in a book about bureaucratic red tape...

...Our 150 political appointees have been already reduced to 90...

...Distrust is one thing in common in all administrations and among appointees in the same administration...

...There’s a widespread belief that another Kennedy assassination book, no matter how cockeyed its conspiracy theory, will automatically outsell even a brilliantly conceived look at the inner workings of the Department of Housing and Urban Development...

...They are the ones who worry that the careerists are hiding information and glossing over problems...

...At times Heclo sounds like little more than an academic apologist for the civil service unions...

...After all, Kaufman has written several excellent books, most recently, Are Government Organizations Immortal?, a well-documented study of the ability of bureaucracies to outlive their usefulness and their founders...

...Also, many of the safeguards that produce red tape are the result of efforts by Congress and the press to prevent dishonesty...

...The reasons for this will take a moment to explain...

...Unfortunately, a political appointee does not have two generations to deal with the native bureaucratic population...

...Prior to Carter’s move into the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” Fiorina writes, “he was in fact the only genuine hope for radical policy change...

...Perhaps some day the spate of Watergate and Vietnam books will end and our leading writers will take a little time off to see how government really operates...

...Any effort to eliminate wasteful government programs will as directly affect the turf of subcommittee chairmen as it will threaten the jobs of entrenched bureaucrats...

...These subcommittee chairmanships are an important badge of prestige in the House...

...I had high hopes for Herbert Kaufman’s little volume, Red Tape...

...they can’t worry about the administration of programs they inherited...

...Given how unfashionable the subject of bureaucracy is with New York publishers, I suspect we will be left to fight other, more spirited political wars over it in coming elections without a well-written map of the terrain...

...That may have been typical in prior administrations, but it isn’t true in this new era of Cabinet government...

...A conquistador could walk among the Incas and be treated with total deference, but he had little idea how the society worked, what glue held it together...

...But I believe that they have been less thorough in analyzing the negative side of Congress...

...Small wonder that Jimmy Carter took pains to assure the American people that the Cabinet secretaries could choose their subordinates...

...or the American people are pretty mediocre...

...A congressman really sways votes when he tries to find lost veterans’ checks, arrange small business loans, corral an increasing share of educational money for his district, or perform similar chores...

...Stores generally absorb shoplifting losses of about three per cent because if they adopted more elaborate security measures it would seriously hurt sales...

...On these grounds alone, the book deserves some special award...

...A federally run department store would be so worried about shoplifting that it would allow only one customer in at a time and then have a phalanx of security guards follow him everywhere as he shopped...

...But I wouldn’t bet on it...

...From Someone Else ~ The most insightful thing in Kaufman’s book is a quote from someone else, Kermit Gordon: “The public servant soon learns that successes rarely rate a headline, but governmental blunders are front page news...

...We have reached a point where trying to bring political accountability to the bureaucracy is widely regarded as a threat to the very fiber of the American way of life...

...Assistant secretaries have wide autonomy when it comes to administering programs or issuing regulations...

...Remember, these are the people who, day to day, run the government Carter is supposed to be reforming...

...They inspire relatively little casework, however, because they are generally administered through grants to state and local governments...

...Fiorina contrasts Carter to the congressional leaders whom he defeated in the Democratic primaries: “The congressional contenders were the true conservatives despite their talk of federal activism...

...Fiorina has managed the extraordinary feat of writing a book of political science theory so short, and so comparatively well written, that it is actually possible to lie down on a sofa and read the thing through in one sitting...

...Agencies like Social Security, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the VA, and programs such as black lung payments, and workers’ compensation for federal employees showed up on everyone’s list...

...many are apolitical...

...No one will ever be blamed for a vaguely worded, evasive letter, especially if that letter was approved by eleven other bureaucrats-but clarity always carries with it the danger of headlines...

...He notes that reform of the House has created over 120 separate subcommittees, each with its own chairman...

...he even uses words like “interfacing...

...Last fall Richard Pettigrew, a reorganization advisor to President Carter, conducted a survey of congressmen to find out which programs caused their constituents the most problems...

...Solomon has 21 political appointees for his entire agency, and his plight is far from unique...

...Early this year the President announced at the Cabinet meeting that the memos should now be one-page efforts modeled after the “Kiplinger Letter...

...If congressional seats only change parties because of retirements or sex scandals, the public’s control over Congress is seriously endangered...

...They are the ones who constantly send back memos to be rewritten...

...An extended metaphor may help put this problem into perspective...

...As the ordinary citizen’s involvement with politics declines, the interest groups play an increasingly visible role in congressional campaigns...

...Even school children now know that one of the sins of the Nixon administration was its determined effort to politicize the bureaucracy...

...One would assume that the remaining 40 political appointees are fierce loyalists who worked in the campaign and have a deep belief in the promise of Jimmy Carter...

...We have so many checks against federal corruption that the whole federal system may some day collapse under their weight...

...This is also a standard lament of Carter appointees...

...Only the President’s keen interest in recruiting women and minorities provided a consistent exception to this general rule...

...They are the ones who 58 chafe over the rigidities of civil service hiring practices...

...This goo d-government gesture meant that the 180 key jobs that comprise the subcabinet, as well as all the other political jobs, went to people whose primary loyalty was to the Cabinet secretary who appointed them, not to the President...

...Some of these careerists are holdovers from the previous administration who are kept around because it is necessary for someone to know where the keys to the men’s room are kept...

...An avid reader of Time and Newsweek knows as much about the inner workings of the White House as an assistant secretary running a $5-billion program...

...No such luck...

...if you tripled that you’d still have less than two dozen of your guys in an organization of 62,000, and how long will it take for those 18 to figure out what’s going on...

...For a while, life for the Incas went on pretty much as it had for centuries...

...Heclo’s could have been a highly topical book, because it focuses on the relationship between the President’s 2,500 political appointees and the over two million career bureaucrats...

...Fiorina’s argument is too narrow to explain fully the popularity of these programs, and the hundreds like them...

...Political scientists have advanced a number of possible causes for the increased job security of congressional incumbents: redistricting, the decline of the partyline voting, and the sharp increase in congressional staff and public relations efforts...

...The correspondence file of any congressman can produce examples of bureaucratic prose at its murkiest...

...He blames it all on the diversity of the country and our basic mistrust of government officials: “Were we a less differentiated society, the blizzard of official paper might be less severe and the labyrinths of official processes less torturous...

...Political scientists have noted that in the past 30 years there has been a steady decrease in the number of close congressional elections...

...Heclo’s style of writing is as dry as a bureaucratic memo...

...About 40 of these political appointees will have positions that are so technical or so minor that they can be of little help in carrying out the President’s policies...

...Their attention span suffers...

...Heclo estimates that 20 to 40 per cent of all political jobs go to career bureaucrats in any administration...

...The decline of “marginal” congressional districts is the starting point for Fiorina’s novel argument...