TILTING AT WINDMILLS
TILTING AT WINDMILLS George Bush is right! Jobs are available now! That's the message of a recent advertisement in the Baltimore Sun by Villa Julie College bragging about how it had placed...
...Another aspect of the bureaucratic problem is illustrated by the case of Daniel S. Goldin, who was hired last spring to head NASA with a White House mandate to make the space agency "better, faster, cheaper...
...As I write this in mid-October after several weeks of reading front page stories about Clinton's draft status, I want to applaud The New York Times as the only publication that seemed to realize that Dan Quayle deserved equal scrutiny...
...Economics," page 19, for the latest installment), even we were shocked by the latest disclosure from Stanford, which once again is breaking new ground in academic malfeasance...
...Not only does it cost less in Canada, it's also cheaper in those countries that are our major competitors...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS George Bush is right...
...American business has begun to learn that lesson, but on the whole, American government has not...
...But the College of Physicians has taken a noble step...
...Savaging bureaucracy is a must...
...The lieutenant said the brain drain was "apparently prevalent throughout the Army" leaving too many "mediocre officers for whom a career in the military represented a much higher standard of living than they would expect outside the service...
...His letter may reflect only an isolated episode, but I'm troubled by it and would very much like to hear from other readers in the military as to whether their own experiences confirm the lieutenant's observations...
...Raines had served in the National Guard during the Vietnam era, so he had a nose for where the scandals were...
...Not just Bush administration VIPs like Dick Cheney, but the 56 count 'em, 56—Republican congressmen who were of draft age during the Vietnam War but who somehow managed to avoid military service...
...four of them, when faced with a choice of promotion to captain or leaving the service, resigned...
...The halfway houses run by the U.S...
...My one concern about Clinton's self-consciousness about his lack of military experience is that it will lead him to be deferential to the hawks...
...And it is not some splinter group composed of a few isolated idealists...
...How many other American companies, hardpressed by the high costs of health insurance here, will make a similar calculation and move north...
...Gerth and Sack were guided in this reporting by Howell Raines the Times' Washington bureau chief...
...Last month we told you that 11,000 people in the government were making $100,000 or more per year...
...GM was motivated by the fact that health care costs for its employees will be cheaper there...
...Still, my best guess is that, even with hiring all new employees that we would need, we would still end up with a net reduction of half a million bureaucrats...
...If you believe in cheap chic, whether as a matter of principle or necessity, there's one simple step you can take that could save you a bundle: Cut your own hair...
...Facing heated opposition from most of his fellow surgeons, Crile crusaded against unnecessary surgery...
...In other words, the real work done by the bureaucracy has decreased in about the same proportion as the perks have increased...
...In the beginning, we thought the problem was confined to government, but when we started the Memo of the Month in the fall of our first year, we quickly realized that the bureaucratic problem was much more widespread...
...as late as 1945, blacks couldn't get in to "whites only" officers' clubs...
...But for him that's practically chicken feed...
...But we also need to hire new employees., who are both energetic and capable to staff the new agencies that will be needed for such crucial tasks as effectively controlling health costs...
...Although we have dealt extensively with the scandals in university administrations (see "B.S...
...Last year, Biaggi's lawyer persuaded authorities to release Biaggi from prison on grounds that he had serious heart trouble and "terrible neurological problems...
...If you're a New Yorker, get your own shears immediately...
...When Bill Clinton talks about eliminating 100,000 bureaucrats, he should be talking about 1 million...
...Mario Biaggi, a former congressman, was sentenced in 1989 to eight years in prison for his part in the Wedtech scandal...
...That's the message of a recent advertisement in the Baltimore Sun by Villa Julie College bragging about how it had placed one of its graduates within a week...
...Ten dollars is the rock-bottom barber shop price in the Big Apple, and according to a recent report in the Times' Consumer's World section, the minimum price for a real Vidal Sassoon cut is $55...
...I started being my own Vidal Sassoon 20 years ago...
...An effort is now underway to set aside the conviction...
...of 1970...
...We saw the bureaucratic fat that was beginning to slow American industry in the competitiveness race of the seventies and eighties, which is why we were the first magazine to recognize the importance of In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman...
...Paul Marks, head of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, made more than $1 million in total compensation in both 1990 and 1991...
...One of my heroes, Dr...
...It was accepted, however, mostly by the lower-level employees who do the real work and of whom there may now be too few...
...Yu may wonder how I can advocate firing a million government employees at the same time I recommended that we establish new government agencies...
...One has to wonder why the largest halfway house in the entire country was located just a half-block off Times Square in New York City and headed by a convicted sex murderer...
...Only a handful of journalists have served in the military or any other part of the government...
...In 1988, his total compensation amounted to $2.2 million, including a "signing bonus" for his promise to stay at the hospital through 1994...
...They have earned my gratitude by coming out for a national health care plan that, even though it falls short of the Canadian system this magazine supports, imposes dollar limits on charges by doctors and hospitals...
...The Peace Corps then had three times as many volunteers serving abroad as it does now...
...Hospital executive salaries have escaped the scalpel of cost controls in the health care industry...
...Both were new when they were effective...
...It was not marketed because, as he told the Greensboro, North Carolina, News & Record, "They'd be admitting all the cigarettes they had been producing were not safe...
...Compare the average $2,566 paid per person for health care here with $1,171 in Japan and $1,487 in Germany—both of which provide universal care, while we do not...
...The Peace Corps spent more than $31,703 in the 1992 fiscal year to rent parking spaces for 15 of its top officials, according to Mike Causey's "Federal Diary...
...The top administrator made $217,366 in 1991, having received a 20 percent pay increase that year...
...Of course, I should append this note of caution: You may hear giggles from people walking behind you which just might be related to their evaluation of your efforts to cut the hair on the back of your head...
...This year, Biaggi was healthy enough to run for Congress again...
...Readers flooded us with memos, not just from expected sources like the Pentagon and the State Department, but from labor unions, universities, foundations, and—second only to the government itself—corporations...
...If you want to be shorn by the most fashionable stylist of all, Frederick Fekkai, the bill will be $250 for the first haircut, but only $200 thereafter...
...Now 70, Terry had to list the offense on job applications throughout his working life...
...These people should be dismissed as rapidly as possible without causing serious social dislocation...
...With the aid of their allies among contractors, lobbyists, and congressional sponsors, NASA staffers quickly persuaded Goldin that "it is no longer practical to redesign the space station in a fundamental way even though 'I'd love to do it.' . One of the original purposes of this magazine was to try to understand such bureaucratic behavior and offer suggestions on what could be done about it...
...In fact, both proposals are important, and they are not inconsistent...
...This time the center of the scandal is the Stanford Bookstore—yes the bookstore—which has, in the words of The Stanford Observer, some "unusual perquisites" for its employees: a vacation home in the Sierra foothills and eight luxury or high-performance vehicles purchased or leased for its top managers...
...A lot of Republicans get very nervous when their party attacks Bill Clinton's draft record...
...In the past two years, this magazine has run two articles about government agencies that worked—the Office of Price Administration in the forties, and the Office of Technology Assessment in the eighties...
...Yes, that's right, Barcelona...
...If you want a hard-nosed economic competitiveness reason for adopting the Canadian health care system, consider the recent flight of a GM plant from Van Nuys, California, to Canada...
...The letter described a group of 12 fellow lieutenants...
...it is the largest specialty group in the United States, composed of 77,000 internists...
...If your Christmas cards don't arrive until after the New Year, you can blame it on the misguided early retirement offer the Postal Service made to its employees...
...Just one more point about health care...
...Many universities do not even require a comprehensive exam...
...Instead of sending 500,000 men to the Gulf, why didn't we first give the blockade a thorough try and then bomb if it didn't work...
...Why not consider destroying half the Serb air force, which could be done at little cost to us, and then telling the Serbs that if they don't behave, we'll destroy the other half...
...The catch is that school officials don't have access to the registry...
...Incredibly enough, one, Roger C. Terry, was actually convicted...
...The funny thing is that, while NBC producers realized that the sex murderer was not a good choice, they didn't seem to have the slightest notion that exposing criminals to Times Square is like sending a recovering alcoholic to live next door to a distillery...
...Even the most innocent and wellintentioned of agencies tends to be corrupted over time...
...Veteran readers will recognize the point I'm making, which is how reporters would benefit from either having had experience in the trenches of government or having editors with such experience...
...2. Three tobacco companies own insurance companies and, according to Andrew Tobias, all three charge smokers nearly double for term insurance because "at any age, a smoker is about twice as likely to die as a nonsmoker...
...In my home town of Charleston, West Virginia, the largest hospital is cutting at least $500,000 in nurse and technician take home pay, but, according to The Charleston Gazette, "administrators' pay will not change...
...Alarms went off," according to The Washington Post's Kathy Sawyer...
...As a result, the District recently was forced to rehire three officers who had been fired...
...Consider for another example the District of Columbia police force, which somehow got a rule adopted providing that an officer cannot be fired for an offense unless proceedings are brought against him within 45 days...
...When I last worked for the Peace Corps in 1968, we had only four "executive" parking spaces...
...A cautionary note: A new name does not mean a new agency...
...Bear in mind that the statute of limitations for the rest of us for just about every offense is at least a year...
...Another reason to be suspicious of American education is that of the nearly 1.5 million master's degrees awarded since 1987, only 25 percent of the recipients were required to write theses...
...There is a terrible amount of fat—far too many people who are not talented or dedicated enough, or who are not doing work that is really necessary--in our government...
...His greatest triumph was persuading other doctors to perform lumpectomies on breast cancer patients, which are less complex and disfiguring than radical mastectomies, which used to be standard treatment...
...The reason is that the haircut that cost 50 cents when I was a boy in the thirties and forties in Charleston, West Virginia, cost $5 in the Washington, D.C...
...It's hard to top that one, but Colorado is trying...
...This is the story of Washington...
...Or think of the job she or her disciples could do on what's wrong with lawyers and the legal system, or doctors and the health care system...
...Charles Peters...
...Last month I received a troubling letter from a first lieutenant in the Army who was writing in response to my recent observations in this column that in contrast to the civil service, "the military services manage to retain a good many of their stars for full careers...
...We weren't fanatics about the perils, in particular, of bloated headquarters...
...The other is the tendency of the city's best writers (See "The New Writers' Bloc," page 36) to devote their talents to delineating personality and character, to capturing mood and ambience, and to handicapping the political horse race, while they studiously avoid delving into questions of policy and program, of how government works or doesn't work and why...
...The state social services department has, according to The Denver Post, 155 school teachers who are confirmed sex abusers listed on its child protection registry...
...A bunch of them managed to arrange free trips there for themselves last summer...
...Nationally, according to Felicity Barringer of The New York Times, "the rise in nonprofit hospital executive compensation in the eighties was one of the fastest-growing components of the overall rise in medical costs, with the earnings of a few executives at the most prestigious institutions approaching or exceeding $1 million...
...I'm not kidding—the facts were all laid out by "Dateline NBC," a news magazine show, on September 22...
...It has been hard not to despair about the prospects for genuine health care reform in this country, because the doctors have been both greedy and politically powerful enough to get away with blocking reform...
...The last great master of the game, FDR, understood this and wherever possible, entrusted his most important initiatives to new agencies...
...Bureaucrats do take care of themselves...
...George Crile Jr...
...I would love, for example, to see Maureen Dowd apply her skills to defining the problems of our public schools, to identifying the reforms that are needed, and to casting a spotlight on the enemies of those reforms from which they would not be able to hide...
...In July, for the first time in recent decades, banks have more government securities than business loans among their assets...
...So I'm delighted to find something good to say about one group of doctors: the American College of Physicians...
...Goldin decided that meant reconsidering the design of NASA's biggest project, the space station...
...The chiefs, of course, didn't want to give up their lives of long lunches, leisurely conferences, and junkets to Barcelona...
...In Yugoslavia the choice was for too long framed as being between doing nothing or sending the large force that would be necessary to guarantee the safety of the convoys...
...Jeff Gerth and Kevin Sack discovered that the National Guard unit Quayle joined was an administrative section that could not be sent to Vietnam and that had a policy of maintaining open slots for the influential instead of accepting applicants on a firstcomefirst-served basis, which was supposed to be the official policy...
...The four who resigned were all "top blockers," meaning that they ranked in the top 10 to 20 percent in efficiency reports, but six of the eight who stayed were middle blockers...
...In fact, three black officers were court marshalled for trying to enter one such club which was located, not in the South, but at a base in Indiana ironically called Freeman Field...
...This month we offer the following details of this prosperous group: 43 are on the White House payroll, 535 are congressmen, and 376 are congressional staff...
...Another rich vein of bureaucratic scandal can be found in hospital administration...
...It's not that I don't think we have to be tough sometimes, it's that I'm sure we have to be very selective about when and how...
...The agency's bureaucrats saw that reconsideration would slow down or—horror of horrors—actually reduce spending...
...She's now a "legal assistant in the Creditor's Rights/Bankruptcy Division" of a law firm...
...Although it was designed to eliminate an excess of middlelevel management fat, the offer was made to all employees...
...The Atomic Energy Commission didn't improve when it became the Nuclear Regulatory Commission...
...Bureau of Prisons are designed to help former prison inmates bridge the gap between the world of criminality and a lawabiding life...
...Instead of making business loans that could fuel economic recovery, the banks are lending money to the government to finance the deficit...
...This column is perhaps too accustomed to bashing professionals, especially lawyers and doctors...
...The good news is he lost in the primary...
...This doesn't mean that government can't work, but rather that it's a hell of a lot more likely to work when it's new and hasn't let its original intentions become submerged in careerism, selfprotection, and preoccupation with the perquisites of office...
...Peters (see Political Booknotes, page 54) recently reflected on the lessons he has learned since In Search of Excellence was published in 1982...
...We didn't fathom that 'close to the customer' for example, was so much blather unless you destroy 90 percent of the headquarters staff...
...A black man, Colin Powell, is now chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, but...
...of Cleveland, Ohio, died recently...
...The latest cigarette scandals: 1. James Mold, a former director of research for Liggett & Myers, says the company's researchers had, by the late seventies, developed a cigarette that would not cause cancer...
...He now feels it should have been tougher on the bureaucrats...
...The lack of such experience among reporters and editors is one of the two problems that trouble me the most about Washington journalism...
Vol. 24 • November 1992 • No. 11
