How Carter Can Find Out What the Government Is Doing
Peters, Charles
How Carter Can Find Out What The Government Is Doing by Charles Peters As soon as Jimmy Carter was elected, he announced that the members of his new Cabinet would be powerful men once...
...Even in the most perfectly reorganized Department of Commerce or State, even with the most dedicated and scrupulous Secretaries, the basic rules of organizational life will mean that the departments and their Secretaries will almost never want to give the President what he almost always needs...
...They will learn to spare him the bad news when he wants to be spared...
...Simply delegating authority to the Cabinet, while hoping that performance will take care of itself, will only aggravate the problems of ineffectiveness and waste that so many voters are counting on Carter to correct...
...He may be surprised when a big housing scandal is reported in the newspapers...
...But there will come times when the President, like any human being, will get tired...
...To some extent such tact is a godsend...
...that is what his reorganization teams are working on right now...
...Some day Carter's people may have the duplica tion and overlap eliminated...
...He will, theoretically, be willing to rearrange and change and hire and fire, as experience and judgment show best...
...The President can let himself be misled, unless he takes steps beforehand to see that he keeps getting all the news, even when he doesn't want it—just as he must schedule regular bouts of physical exercise...
...Carter deplores that abuse, but three years from now he may have a little more sympathy for the frustration that drove Nixon to such lengths...
...It may sit ill with many in the White House, too, for some of their grand ideas will turn to dross when enacted...
...Through the miracle of modern science he may even change the administrative structure within the departments, so that Secretaries can exercise genuine control over the people who sit below them on the organization charts...
...There will be no rest for the weary at this point, however, for a second obstacle will remain...
...When Carter faced all those Udalls and Jacksons in the Democratic primaries, it was not stark differences of ideology that enabled him to prevail...
...He has a CIA to tell him what's happening in Poland but no one to tell him what's up at HEW...
...And when it is over, they should not inter their findings in jargon, but write them up in a form the President and his assistants will want to read...
...At just that moment, Carter will not be dying to hear about the latest flop in crime control...
...As governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter used to visit the offices of the state government and ask advice from people he would otherwise never have seen...
...This was an article of faith with Nixon, whose generation of Republicans were brought up to denounce the swollen White House staffs of the FDR days—the janissariae—and who matured in the staff system of the Eisenhower years, with Treasury Secretary George Humphrey effectively running the country and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles running the 'free world.' " But it didn't work...
...He had Haldeman cram each department with spies who functioned as extensions of the White House...
...Carter does not want a White House janissariat...
...How Carter Can Find Out What The Government Is Doing by Charles Peters As soon as Jimmy Carter was elected, he announced that the members of his new Cabinet would be powerful men once again...
...Certainly there is virtue in delegating authority...
...But there is a serious danger too, namely that in its enthusiastic embrace of this new mistress, the Carter AdministraCharles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly...
...Other leaders in other ages have made symbolic steps in this direction...
...But there can be such a thing as too much consideration...
...Most people have similar ones in their own jobs...
...All that is fine...
...And when it does, the departments will prevail unless the President has taken unusual steps to see that his programs are run the way he wants them run...
...A civil servant may be honestly concerned about the government's power and performance, but concern only goes so far...
...Program officers tell bureau heads, bureau heads tell Secretaries, Secretaries tell the President...
...The departments' interests will never be the same as that...
...The answer is to create an independent system that will report the facts to him...
...They should not even want to stay for the whole course of the Administration, for if their career interests lie elsewhere than the White House they will be better able to cope with the subtler predicaments of life there...
...Hiring such a temporary staff is more troublesome than appointing Secretaries and special assistants who will stay for the duration, but there are ways to do it...
...The danger is that they combine to push in an unhealthy direction...
...It might mean putting a few more people on the payroll, but it would also mean he could transfer real authority to the departments without having to scramble to recover it later on...
...It will be harder to put off the PE instructor if he has a 7:30 appointment each moring, and it will be' harder to ignore the bad news if he hires people to bring it...
...He can just delegate authority, wait two years, and then pull out Bob Haldeman's blueprints from some dusty closet at the White House and figure out how to grab hold of the departments once again...
...But it cannot take the place of systematic, impartial reporting from people who work not for any department but for the President and his staff...
...He may be frustrated when his orders for a more efficient welfare system seem to vanish in the haze...
...If his assistants hope to be eight-year men in the White House, they will learn when to lay off...
...Depending on his literary taste at the moment, he may recall Bunyan's Slough of Despond or Vonnegues "so it goes...
...It will be tricky to set up and it will sit ill with the Secretaries...
...But such happy changes will be at least a year or two in coming, and until then Carter must continue to hold the reins, direct from the White House...
...There is one other way out for Carter, one way to delegate authority without hiring a Haldeman of his own...
...As President, Carter needs an independent reporting group on his White House staff...
...it said, in essence, that the President should confine himself to deciding the big questions of public policy and—with the exception of foreign crises—leave the details of performance and execution to the people who run his departments...
...The President needs people who can go out and inspect government programs at the delivery end...
...The predicament comes down to this: no President can rely on his appointees to transmit accurate information about how well the government is doing...
...Locked deep in the nucleus of each department and civil servant, determining behavior as reliably as DNA, is the double-helix of Survival...
...The same `Locked deep in the nucleus of each department and civil servant, determining behavior as reliably as DNA, is the double-helix of Survival.' people–and the PE teacher too–will keep coming, despite the President's moods and favor, if their careers and hopes are not wholly bound up in his pleasure...
...This is not such a modest proposal...
...The main requirement is that they be something other than career civil servants...
...Two obstacles stand in his way, and unless he removes them, decentralization will do nothing to improve the government's performance...
...He will tell his assistants so...
...he can avoid it if he has a reporting staff...
...The President's desire for high performance will often conflict with the departments' desire to survive...
...Alone among the candidates, Carter gave a sign of understanding how it felt to be on the receiving end of government— to stand at that place at the end of the funnel where the brilliance of overarching conceptions is difficult to perceive, so thick is the fog of incompetence, foolishness, and waste...
...A transmission system of sorts now exists, of course...
...The White House staff would be serving in a staff capacity—not in an administrative capacity...
...and fourth, for the handful of political appointees at the The President has a CIA to tell him what's happening in Poland, bu `Other Presidents have discovered the dangers of decentralization...
...Answers to the December puzzle...
...the reporters could also be lawyers, economists, academics, or anyone else with the skills and the cast of mind for the job...
...Other Presidents have walked this road and discovered the same thing before...
...At his press conference on November 3 he said, "I would choose Secretaries of Agriculture, the Treasury, of Defense, 'HEW, HUD, and others who are completely competent to run their own departments...
...In fact, Carter doesn't need to bother with it at all...
...At the Peace Corps–the one branch of the government that had a reporting staff during the 1960s–the main source of talent was journalists, hired on a free-lance basis...
...In the interest of improving performance, he needs to hear the good news and the bad news, to find out about the successes and the failures, the heroes and the goats, He may want to create this new agency and abolish that old one...
...Everyone will believe it—in theory...
...it takes just a brief stroll down the memory lane of the Nixon years to remember why...
...Congress will be rebellious, the Rhodesians will be restless, and Amy will be in trouble at school...
...In choosing the people to do this, he should bear two qualifications in mind...
...four years from now, he must be able to show that his government has done the job...
...third, survival of his department...
...In Before the' Fall, William Safire says that Richard Nixon, in his too brief impersonation of Disraeli, was intent on giving his Cabinet real authority to run an efficient govern ment: "Nixon was determined to give his Cabinet members...
...He knows that is what he must hear...
...Or he may recall that Nixon found one very effective way to cope with this frustration...
...Sometimes they do, but the odds are all against it...
...By the time he faced down Gerald Ford...
...Who can sneer at these interests...
...Carter made another gesture in the same direction a few weeks later, when he said that he enjoyed a new book by Stephen Hess, a former assistant in the Nixon White House who now works at the Brookings Institution...
...John Kennedy used to phone up lowly members of the bureaucracy to find out what they thought...
...He was sincere in this...
...That is,part of Carter's promise—to have a government that works again...
...I would not try to run those departments from the White House...
...The one place where this conflict of aims is most likely to occur, and where it is most dangerous, is the transmission of reports about how well the government is performing...
...This President's interest lies in performance...
...The real hierarchy of values—the impulses that cannot be ignored—are likely to go like this: most important is his own survival in his job...
...Those whose career and identity are bound up with a program or department are unenthusiastic about passing on information that makes them look bad...
...Now and then he'll hear dour reports, but those who bring them will most often be angling to take over an agency by impugning its current management...
...rather, it was his emphasis on the way the government performed...
...Richard Nixon, in his too brief impersonation of Disraeli, was intent on giving his Cabinet real authority— but it didn't work.' top of each department, survival of the Administration in the next election...
...And so the President limps along without reliable information...
...The first problem is that the departments, as presently organized, are hardly the ideal vehicles for smooth, efficient administration...
...The pressure runs right to the very top: each Secretary is the Secretary of a certain department, and anything that diminishes the honor and respect of his organization inevitably diminishes him as well...
...When inspecting a program, they must be immune from the desire to take the program over...
...The pressure runs, in fact, even beyond the top: it runs to the President, for when he reports to the nation about the results of his stewardship, he, too, will emphasize the brighter side...
...So, when Carter reduces inter-agency warfare by eliminating overlap, he will take away even this incentive to the bearers of bad news...
...second, survival of the subdivision or program of which his job is part...
...First are the skills...
...tion may forget the plain-but-virtuous sweetheart who got Carter elected in the first place...
...The newspaperman is happy when he gets the facts straight, the scholar sometimes forgets to get the facts at all, while one of the President's reporters should be able to give him both—facts and interpretation, detail and analysis, forest and trees...
...But at each stage in this process—how can this be a surprise?—the laws of human nature come into play...
...In theory, any President wants to hear it all—the good news and the bad...
...Their inquiries should not be those of either a newspaperman or an academic, but rather a combination of the best of both...
...Journalists need have no monopoly on the field...
...R. Haldeman] studied the recommendations of management consultants and agreed that staff-power decentralization should be the theme...
...Carter had to fight with more of the traditional Democratic weapons, but if he had not shown that he could do more than Spend, Spend, Spend, he would certainly have lost...
...It is to be sure that he is getting information from someone other than the Secretaries...
...They should not hope to hold this job—or any other in the government—for very long...
...much more of a say in running the government...
...The book, called Organizing the Presidency, was a sort of emancipation proclamation for the oppressed masses of the Cabinet...
...Yet if he follows Hess' recommendations, he will never see it fulfilled...
...Franklin Roosevelt sent Eleanor into the hinterlands...
...it fit neatly into his basic idea of command structure, with decentralized authority...
...The second qualification concerns their attitudes: they must not be careerists...
...It won't work for Carter, either, however much his character may glisten compared to Nixon's...
Vol. 8 • January 1977 • No. 11
