Strangers in a Strange Land

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Their attention span suffers...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...No such luck...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...many are apolitical...

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...some are highly competent...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...But I wouldn’t bet on it...

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

...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...

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

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

...Fiorina argues: “Congressmen...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...decision processes of the bureaucracy...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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