Government Reform
A reasoned look from first principles
Along this journey through the essay medium, I’ve tried to keep a balance between creativity and clarity, with the scales sometime shifting in one of these directions based on the subject matter under address. This post will turn focus to questions of American governance, and thus points traditionally heavily mired in politics. In order to avoid a ‘third rail’ scenario, I’m going to try to keep this discussion anchored around policy and first principles. It as an unfortunate characteristic of mainstream political discussions that most commentators feel the need to “pick sides” and color their thoughts with at least hues of a partisan agenda. If this post has any agenda it is just to demonstrate clarity of communication around principles of policy rather than of politics. I may toss in a few creative elements for color, but the goal here is to inform and elaborate on some specific elements of governmental reform. The basis for discussions will be a review of a recently published White House report carrying an extensive series of proposals for restructuring of various government agencies: Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century [Link]. The report is structured as first an introduction to the circumstances necessitating reform, along with an overview with the executive orders that are facilitating this initiative in Section I. Section II covers some high level general principles of organizational reform initiatives, and then Section III offers an overview of priorities and high-level summary of specific agency proposals. Section IV is filler and then the meat of the specific agency proposals are fleshed out (to a small degree) throughout Section V. Finally the Appendix offers some further agency proposals that can be achieved within the existing agency frameworks.
Even though I am trying to maintain a degree of partisan neutrality in this work, it would be inaccurate to characterize my personal beliefs as simply neutral, so I’ll go ahead and paint a quick sketch of some high level principles that have guided some of my thinking and recent voting patterns, if there is any bias in this essay I expect it may fall along these axes. The government like any large bureaucracy is a kind of complex system, and I’ve found some useful mental models from writings on complexity theory applied to institutions, such as John Gall’s The Systems Bible. In general, I support localized institutions over centralized when possible, as the more concentrated a power and the more uniform application a policy the less room is available for experimentations / trial and error, and the more fragile the institution. I bet there’s probably a name for this principle that escapes me, but a bureaucracy when left to it’s own devices will trend to expansions in complexity and scope, especially in conditions of expanding resources (e.g. tax base), thus an imperative function of governance, in addition to expansion to address new challenges, is the trimming or transformation of those elements which no longer maintain relevance or effectiveness in a changing world. (One of the best actions taken by the current administration to date was the 2 for 1 regulation dismantling executive order 13771, a brilliant example of governing by heuristic.) I believe there are certainly tasks well-suited for government, and that missions such as national security, ensuring functioning institutions and infrastructure for healthcare and commerce, enabling educational opportunities for all classes, or providing a citizen safety net are imperative missions that at a minimum require the participation if not facilitation by public institutions. I believe that there are certain shortcomings or failings of capitalism that require address through government channels, such as protections for our environment or public safety. I believe there are some types of worthwhile investments for a society that are not adequately addressed by private capital, such as fundings for scientific research or transformative innovations with a long time horizon of potential implementation. While the granting of temporary monopolies in intellectual property to spur innovation have proven effective at driving change (albeit in a fashion admittedly a little beyond my expertise), I believe other backdoor means of regulatory granted competitive advantage to private entities (aka regulatory capture) are a sign of political failings, and that a certain weakness of our current system of democracy is a tendency for policy to be driven by special interests with undue influence via shortcomings in campaign finance law, a concept I’ve written about previously here. I believe our nation is at it’s most vulnerable in conditions of transfer of power, particularly in the executive branch, and that it is in our country’s best interest for leadership to be selective in what policies or diplomatic positions they choose to transform upon gaining power, that a degree of continuity is a hedge against instability. I believe our government over time has established certain norms in leadership values that have contributed to our country’s success, and that the degradation of these values, such as truthful communications and moral doctrines, are a modern crisis of the institution, one that is partly driven by elections in a changing media environment with coverage driven by viral appeal to baser instincts. I believe democracy is most effective when elections are run as a competition between policies or ideas rather than between identity or personality, and that party messaging that competes along the latter becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believe that the rapidly changing media landscape is both an opportunity and a crisis for democracy, and we as citizens are performing a public good by offering our attention and support towards those media resources that avoid sensationalized coverage or otherwise manipulative messaging.
Turning back to the current proposals for reform, a quick background on how we got here is that this White House report is really a deliverable from an early executive order 13781 issued by this administration in March 2017, which spurred the Office of Management and Budget (the largest office of the executive branch) to solicit reform proposals from various agencies in 2017, which have then been under further development over the last year. This report constitutes the office’s recommendations to Congress, for although some of the recommendations here can be achieved via executive administrative action alone, the more significant changes will require legislative action. What I suspect is a key contributor to the need for change sited by the report is the availability of modern information technology systems, after all government is fundamentally a service business, one that can benefit from practices in use by private industry — much of our government is still aligned to the stove-piped organizational constructs of the 20th Century which in many cases have grown inefficient and out-of-date.
The Section II of the report captures some basic principles of organizational redesign which are fairly generic, such as tailoring the organization to the mission. I am reminded of a concept I recently came across in literature around an announced Microsoft organizational restructuring, Conway’s Law, basically a principle that organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of the organization, which I’m sure applies here. Services offered by the government traditionally have customer experiences vastly trailing those that might be available from the private sector, these levels of service (such as speed, convenience, and cost-effectiveness) are good potential metrics for success. The report suggests an intent to make strong use of data driven methods going forward to ensure effective use of resources, a new kind of stewardship. The report notes that prior successful major reorganizations of the government have mostly been based on some common mission focus for each, and I believe the intent of this Section II is to spell out what will be the themes of this attempt at near comprehensive overhaul, that is focus on specific missions, levels of service, and stewardship. I expect a wonderful byproduct could be that implementation of these changes may coincide with a modernization of IT and cybersecurity resources.
A fun inclusion throughout this report is a series of demonstrations of some of the absurdities of existing federal regulation, which I expect are meant to fuel talking points for talking heads on talking news programs. Of course you have to consider that these are hand-picked for their obviousness in ineffectiveness, but they certainly do a good job at demonstrating how out of hand government can become when left unchecked. Consider that in food regulations, there are two different agencies that regulate pizza, one for cheese pizza and one for pepperoni (although to be fair this is less absurd if you consider this is merely a byproduct of having separate oversight for meat products). In a similar vein, in poultry one agency is responsible for whole eggs and chicken feed, while another is responsible for liquid eggs from a carton and inspecting chickens at slaughter. Consider that different agencies offer environmental oversight for a hydraulic dam’s actions of storing water or releasing water downstream. These are all demonstrations of intuitively unnecessary regulatory overlap in industries that are easily understood and familiar to the public, and with each of these cases comes a corresponding redundancy of bureaucracy. These are some obvious points of low hanging fruit, and are illustrative of the kinds of mission overlap that can be addressed by some of the proposed agency reorganizations.
At least to this author, the priorities and principles of this attempted reorganization as justified in this report are sound and at least worthy of consideration for bipartisan support. Of course what is presented in the report and the intended reality of implementation may not with certainty align. Consider the history of this administration’s approach to transitions in power. I found a somewhat alarming illustration of last year’s transfer of executive governance told by the author Michael Lewis in his Vanity Fair article about the Department of Energy 2017 transition [Link], a story of an attack on climate science and a bordering on chaotic disregard for the existing missions of the agency. It is one thing to reform an agency through careful consideration of mission / level of service / stewardship, to engineer a reorganization based on evaluation of stakeholder proposals, and to professionally execute. The story as presented by Lewis is quite removed from that ideal, and paints a picture of what could be interpreted as executive overreach or incompetence. It should be the mission of any bipartisan support to ensure safeguards against backdoor disbanding of legislative derived agency scope.
It is certainly of note that the proposed reorganizations including some cases of privatizing or disbanding what is currently government purview, with a list including a sale of electrical transmission assets. We in the wind power industry are certainly interested in any action that may help facilitate additional interstate transmission capacity between the wind resource rich midwest and the coastal population centers, although I am not an expert on transmission I speculate further privatization of transmission assets will not make this cause easier to address. (To reiterate, I am not an expert on this point.) In another case of proposed disbanding, the spinning off of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control system to a nonprofit certainly peaked my interest given the prior address in this blog. Last I heard air traffic control management remains surprisingly similar to practices of prior decades, with prior attempts to modernize becoming an expensive and well-known example of exceeding the capabilities of the practice of systems engineering. I expect it will be a major success of complexity science, advancement in machine learning, or some combination thereto if an automation of air traffic control becomes possible under new management (although for all I know this attempted spin off might be an attempt to protect the current governance from such advancement, am not an insider here). Although the proposed restructuring of the postal service will not immediately result in a privatization, the report implies that part of the goal of the restructuring is to prepare the organization for such potential change down the road (after all a privatized postal service would first require profitability, currently a stretch goal from my understanding). The report suggests that some potential changes here could include delivering mail fewer days per week or even potentially to a central location as opposed to door-to-door. Such eventual privatization would with certainty be followed by a renegotiation of postal employee compensation packages. Another important example of disbanding federal programs was a recommendation to “end the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, reducing their role in the housing market, and providing an explicit, limited Federal backstop that is on-budget and apart from the Federal support for low and moderate income homebuyers”. (I found no discussion included in the report on the federal student loan program other than a recommendation to modernize the servicing aspects.)
The preceding was just a brief selection of some examples of proposed disbanding or privatizations. Of much more prevalence in the report was recommendations for agency reorganizations and consolidations, I’ll only give a few examples here to give a flavor: examples include combining the departments of education and labor into a single cabinet agency, combining food inspection services into a single agency (no more double oversight of chickens), consolidating international humanitarian assistance programs, consolidating federal economic growth resources, consolidating all graduate student fellowship programs to a single agency, and renovating or selling off of federal real estate assets (should have seen this one coming). The report also includes some recommendations for new initiatives and capabilities, here again are just some highlights for a flavor: creating a government-wide customer experience resource, addressing the federal cybersecurity workforce shortage, establishing a public-private partnership for advanced research in government effectiveness (this was interesting, not sure what to make of this one), transferring the national background investigations to the defense department, and a kind of vague suggestion for a more formalized approach to evaluating each agency’s effectiveness going forward.
This essay was intended to inform fellow voters of a current major initiative under way by our country’s executive office. In today’s media environment of sensationalized political personalities and scandals (manufactured or otherwise), it is easy to get distracted from the more important issues of policy that if enacted will survive this election cycle, possibly shaping the America of our children and grandchildren to come. It is our responsibility as an electorate to demand sustainable government practices and institutions from our elected officials.
*For further readings please check out my Table of Contents, Book Recommendations, and Music Recommendations.
Books that were referenced here or otherwise inspired this post:
The Systems Bible— John Gall
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Albums that were referenced here or otherwise inspired this post:
Turning Point — Buckwheat Zydeco (CD)
(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
For further readings please check out my Table of Contents, Book Recommendations, and Music Recommendations.
