Government Can Work

...and in the last couple of years IBM has pulled itself together and become the leader in notebook computers...

...Because liberals should present a united front...

...By now, though, the idea that government by its nature never works hovers behind the discussion of almost every domestic issue...

...But when the employees are more powerful in society than the clients, it sets the stage for inefficiency...

...it was of overcoming the sense of "that may be true, but you just can't say it" that pervaded liberalism at the time...

...Even the biggest news organizations typically ignore the entire federal bureaucracy except in times of scandal or other crisis, while, by contrast, wildly overcovering national politics...

...The moral reason is that communities and private business don't necessarily protect the interests of everybody in society—especially those who lack money, influence, education, and the life-stability that active citizenship requires...

...There is a cognitive dissonance in discussions of all these issues...

...NASA worked magnificently well in the sixties, terribly in the eighties, and now seems to be getting its act together again...

...One of the main taboo subjects—probably the main one, in terms of the energy the magazine expended on it—was the inefficiency of government bureaucracies...

...to change their minds about things...

...Government will work, some of the time, for some people: the people government can't afford to cross...

...In the 1970s, Pandora's Box arguments were often thrown at The Washington Monthly...

...Much of the early history of this magazine can be understood as a struggle to get liberals to stop blindly clinging to the weak ideas in liberalism...

...After the war, the interstate highway program may have been unpopular with liberal planners, but it worked...

...Today, probably the category of agency with the highest reputation inside government is the small monitoring or evaluating organization: Examples, not well known to the general public, are the Office of Technology Assessment, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Congressional Budget Office, and the General Accounting Office...

...Neither do I. Imagine what a difference it would make if people like that, and the person who runs the Chapter One programs for poor elementary school kids, or the regulators who were supposed to monitor the savings and loans in the eighties, received one-tenth the intense scrutiny from the press that the likes of Ed Rollins and James Carville get...

...Agencies whose output is highly public and easy to evaluate (the air traffic control system or the Secret Service, for example) work better than agencies that operate in a fog...

...But what's interesting is the intermittent leadership of IBM...

...The distrust of government also helps explain why by far the most expensive new social initiative Clinton has passed to date so far is a tax incentive (the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit—a good idea, by the way), not a service-providing program...

...an example that may have more power to change minds comes from personal computers...

...It's surprisingly difficult to reconstruct the standard contents of a young liberal's mind back then...

...On the other hand, for government employees in charge of processing millionaires' tax returns, or making sure private jets land safely, not much inefficiency will be tolerated...

...on the cover, in giant-sized letters, was the headline CRIMINALS BELONG IN JAIL...

...Government is actually full of examples of organizations that worked once or that work now...

...Sometimes they're only temporary, and sometimes (as in the case of inner-city schools) they hardly ever exist...

...Today there isn't the sense that an enormous struggle must be waged to induce liberals to confront the real issues facing the country: The level of agreement about what our problems are is vastly higher than it was in the seventies...

...and the Safari Lounge, where Charles Peters, the editor-in-chief, lunched every day amid mounted heads of big game (unless someone else was paying, in which case he went to Jean-Pierre...

...Then it notably didn't invent the personal computer...

...It put you on the wrong side...

...Going back to the personal computer case, little Apple made it on the basis of technology appropriated from big Xerox...

...Every agency has a constituency of clients—the people it theoretically exists to serve—and a constituency of employees and contractors...

...it was more that we believed you just couldn't say things like that...

...so do agencies with super-capable directors...

...Quite the opposite: It's supposed to lead to an obsession with them that will produce a clear sense of the difference between, and the causes of, good and bad performance...

...It wasn't, again, that everyone didn't know bureaucracies tended toward inefficiency, it was that the idea seemed to be disreputable and not to lead anywhere useful...

...The old pervasive liberal fear of discussing issues like crime and bureaucracy has almost completely disappeared—partly under the press of political expediency, since it became clear that liberals would almost always lose unless they gave up the luxury of refusing to confront tough questions, and partly thanks to the good work done by liberal rethinkers...

...On the other hand, influential people in American society—who themselves don't depend much on government services because they use private schools, private pensions, private police protection, private mail delivery (that is, messengers, faxes, and Federal Express)—have come to use as a starting point for consideration of new problems the idea that government never works, and business almost always works...

...The area where just about the right attitude toward government prevails is military affairs: Everybody who has spent time around the military knows that bureaucratic inefficiency is a constantly looming danger, but nobody (except truly purist libertarians and disarmers) argues that there's any choice but to use a government agency to defend the country...

...The result is that today the mission of The Washington Monthly is quite different from what it was in the seventies...

...Because you felt that most of the people who believed that criminals belong in jail believed it for the wrong reasons, and you didn't want to be in league with them...

...The great and surprising political success of Ronald Reagan, first of all, demonstrated that running against the very idea of government could be a big winner, and in politics the intellectual climate often follows electoral trends rather than leading them...

...In the sixties, the military medical system in Vietnam did such a good job that it inspired a revolution in the practice of civilian emergency medicine...

...Examples like the automobile companies and the steel companies have become too familiar to have much impact...

...The practical reason is that in modern industrial society, not everything can be accomplished by small local organizations...

...The same goes for inner-city public school systems, which employ vast armies of teachers and custodians while serving the powerless...

...Of course these conditions are not obtainable in every case...

...To say what's wrong with these attitudes is to state the obvious, but it has to be done...

...Our system for ensuring the safety of prescription drugs, though often questioned on ideological grounds, is efficient...

...I moved progressively through the office, Sholl's, and the Safari Lounge without incurring any major damage, and I was beginning to allow myself to luxuriate in a feeling of new membership...

...With exceptions, they clearly "work" in the sense that people from all over the world are clamoring to be admitted to them, even though they are run by big state bureaucracies with heavy federal involvement...

...But what about the state universities...

...the old Sholl's Colonial Cafeteria, with its constant low hum of people talking to themselves, where the staff hung out...

...But when I returned to the office with Charlie after lunch, I saw something that sent an icy stab of anxiety through me...

...Microsoft made it by getting a crucial contract from IBM...

...As the urgency fades and directors begin to fossilize, watch out—think of the FBI, or Robert Moses's Tri-borough Bridge Authority in New York...

...Only one thing will make government perform in those places: attention...

...It's probably made most often in the area of anti-poverty programs—the $2 billion a year War on Poverty has been used to drag down the whole concept of active government...

...As believers in the virtues of the spoils system, we don't think government, to work, must focus wholly on the former groups and ignore the latter...

...It's partly responsible, surely, for the decision of President Clinton (who seems to believe deep in his heart that government can work) to steer clear of a single-payer health care system, and even the conservative-sounding option he did choose is regularly attacked in terms like this one, from a New York Times headline: HEART OF CLINTON HEALTH PLAN: A SURLY BUREAUCRAT OR A PUBLIC SERVANT...

...Neither do I. Imagine what a difference it would make if people like that, or the regulators who monitored the S&Ls in the 1980s, received one-tenth the scrutiny from the press that the likes of Ed Rollins and James Carville get...

...It wasn't exactly that I, and the people at the Monthly who had argued heatedly against using that headline on the cover, believed that criminals belonged out of jail...

...Free Agencies The skepticism about government bureaucracies—indeed, all bureaucracies—that The Washington Monthly has been trying to engender for a quarter century is not supposed to lead to a turning away from government and large organizations...

...On the one hand, the idea of actually eliminating most of the existing big government bureaucracies is unthinkable, either because, as in the case of the military, everyone assumes they're a necessary evil, or, in the case of agencies like the Post Office and the Social Security Administration, because they matter so much to ordinary people that they're politically inviolable...

...While we were out, the latest issue of the magazine had arrived from the printer...

...Do you know who runs the Medicaid program...

...Our military history is full of examples that could be used to support the proposition that government programs don't work—think of Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs, Desert One, and the Beirut barracks bombing...

...It's already clear that the big problem with the next major item on the domestic agenda after health care, welfare reform, is people's unwillingness to believe that government social services can help get people off the dole—hence there is a lot of support for new welfare time limits but not much for new work programs that would get the people kicked off the rolls ready for steady employment...

...The main difficulty now is that discussions of the mechanism for solving these problems have taken on a facile, unreal quality...

...Clinton's "reinventing government" plan, which in public relations terms is meant to appeal to people who are skeptical about government, was attacked in The Washington Times by Thomas DiLorenzo for "its failure to acknowledge the fundamental fact that government is by nature wasteful, bureaucratic, and inefficient...

...history, the reaction to your comment would be like that of Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie (jaw dropping in disbelief, eyes widening in horror), wouldn't it...

...Business is sufficiently capable of bureaucratic inefficiency that it can't simply be assumed that it will always deliver and government never will...

...Garage inventors beat it to the PC...

...The lesson is that all bureaucracies, public and private, sometimes work and sometimes don't, depending on how they're organized and who leads them...

...The military quickly developed such effective equipment as the P-51 fighter plane and the amphibious troop-transport boat...

...The reason this is such a pressing need is simple and obvious, though to state it in the current climate is to risk becoming the kind of person friends nervously edge away from: Government is the best means of accomplishing a good many basic tasks in American society, so if government can't be invoked in political discourse, we can't discuss a great deal of what we need to do...

...Even among Republicans, ominous rhetoric about "big government" was considered faintly embarrassing—the kind of thing that one doled out for Nebraskans at fundraisers but didn't really mean—until about 1978...

...Imagine yourself, dear reader, to be at a dinner table and to make a remark like, "The federal government could really improve inner-city public schools," or, "Government can build decent, safe housing for the poor...

...Over the last generation, the American leadership class has shifted its base away from big organizations and now tends to be employed in various elite advising, commenting, and deal-making roles...

...If you open up certain subjects for discussion, unimaginable disaster will result...

...IBM, the traditional giant of the industry, for decades "worked" so well that it would be held up as the exemplar of the modem corporation...

...Also, a strain of thinking on the left that glorifies grassroots community activity and mistrusts large centralized efforts has been growing steadily stronger since the late 1950s, and it makes the anti-government attitude look bipartisan rather than merely right wing...

...then the head of the division died in a plane crash and IBM became a laughingstock...

...this has made hostility to big organizations a respectable prejudice...

...The feeling wasn't so much of convincing people Nicholas Lemann, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1976 to 1978, is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly...

...Agencies with a fresh, urgent sense of mission tend to work...

...The Post Office is generally acknowledged to work better now than it did in the 1970s...

...In those days most of the life of the magazine took place in three locations, none of which exists anymore: the La Salle Building, a combination cheap residential hotel and office building, where the actual office was...

...Government bureaucracies exist in the first place for two reasons, one practical and one moral...

...During the Depression, the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Tennessee Valley Authority all worked, at least in the early going...

...Conversely, small organizations simply can't deliver everything an advanced society needs...

...Countervailing the anti-romance of big government is, currently, a romance of the private sector and of small local organizations...

...then, in the early eighties, IBM's out-side-the-bureaucracy Entry Systems Division became the leader in the industry...

...The role of the press here is especially important, and currently especially shameful...

...Everything went extremely well...

...Do you know who runs the Medicaid program...

...Even conservatives don't claim that the problems of higher education, such as tenure abuse and overpricing, are characteristic of the public system but not the private...

...No change in the general climate of political thought over the last 10 or 15 years has been as dramatic as the one in the attitude toward government: We've gone from intellectual dishonesty about the genuine issue of inefficiency all the way over to a prevailing conviction of government's complete inefficiency...

...This subject was considered the province of diehard anti-New Dealers and Taftites, people who either hadn't been able to come to terms with the realities of a modern industrial society or who were using a stated concern about government inefficiency as a polite cover for opposition to the basic health, education, and welfare provisions of the modern welfare state...

...And, of course, there have been plenty of spectacular government failures to feed the attitude...

...Agencies that attract bright non-lifers who know their performance will be closely watched—for competence, not complaisance—by the institutions where their economic future rests have a built-in advantage: The Securities and Exchange Commission and the White House staff are examples...

...Public education is now one of the most often held up examples of a failed government program, even though, as one of the most localized government functions, it should according to the prevailing theory escape the iron law of bureaucratic failure...

...and so on...

...Because the information might fall into the wrong hands...

...During World War II, the Office of Price Administration did the theoretically impossible by keeping prices steady at a time of shortages and rapidly rising incomes...

...Where it won't work is where it doesn't work now (and where the private sector doesn't, either), in the inner cities and other venues where bureaucratic failure is tolerated...

...Imagine yourself at a dinner table remarking, "The federal government could really improve inner-city public schools...

...That wasn't what happened in this case, though...

...Instead, in our better moments at least, we respond to such disasters by devising ways to make the military bureaucracy perform better, such as the unified field command that kept interservice rivalry from dominating Desert Storm...

...Desert Storming Now we have to break this attitude down, and develop a body of real thinking, instead of an unthinking pose, about what makes government work and not work...

...So it's absolutely essential that the society pay closer attention to institutional performance...

...Frustration with bureaucracy had been almost an overriding theme of American life during World War II, for example, but nobody would have suggested that we not fight because of it...

...Why not...

...in other words, there are cases when institutions simply can't be made to work on autopilot...

...But in domestic affairs, the leap from particular failures to a general dismissal of government is made all the time...

...Smaller agencies work better than bigger agencies...

...At this moment in history, the reaction to your comment would be like that of Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie (jaw dropping in disbelief, eyes widening in horror), wouldn't it...

...At this moment in history, the reaction would be like that of Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie (jaw dropping in disbelief, eyes widening in horror...

...Agencies whose foul-ups lead directly to complaints being made to members of Congress (the Social Security Administration) have a built-in spur toward efficiency, too...

...Because to want criminals in jail was somehow also to want to abandon all attempts to alleviate poverty...

...Reporters and editors ought to be ashamed of themselves for knowing so little about the consequences of the campaigns whose consequentiality they're always reminding us of...

...One can now confidently assert, without fear of being challenged, that central government can never successfully address any problem, and that everything can be solved from the bottom up and without the participation of public agencies...

...For example, local police forces have a large employee constituency of lower-middle-class people, and a client constituency of poor people (the class from which most crime victims and criminals come)—so they tend toward corruption and inefficiency...

...At the moment, because this obsession doesn't yet exist, it's possible only to suggest what the ground rules are that determine bureaucratic quality (which might replace the current ground rule, "Nothing government does can ever work...