Bureaucracy Reading II: James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy

First, I wanted to thank everyone who sent me reading suggestions, or said they'd be reading along with me. I'm glad to know you all are out there. Just as a heads-up, though, my reading list is determined by a syllabus, so I don't have a lot of discretion to incorporate suggestions, since the list is extremely heavy (much more than I'm writing about here) and tied to assignments and class discussions. Otherwise I'd change directions in a heartbeat! I'll keep track of them, though, and perhaps extend the project further into the year if folks are interested.

But now to dive into this week's reading, James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy. Of everything I'm reading for this project, Bureaucracy is the thing I'm most embarrassed I didn't read on my own at some point, and that I regret not getting to. It's an extremely clear, cogent, lucid account of how government works that both tracks with most of my own experience as a reporter, and that I think would have been extremely useful to me when I was just beginning to get to know government agencies.

One of the things that I think Wilson does that would be useful for journalists, irrespective of beat, and for the general public, irrespective of occupation, to understand in better detail, is make clear the magnitude of what we ask of government. "We have less confidence in government precisely because it is trying to do many things that cannot be done, by anyone, very well," he writes in the preface to the new edition (which cites Tom Shoop, my editor and FedBlog Founder, if anyone's reading closely). That doesn't mean that the things government doing should not be done at all--when it comes to educating our children or housing our prisoners, these things have to be done. And it doesn't necessarily mean that the private sector would do them better. But the latter argument, that industry could handle these things better than government agencies do, stands as an ever-present, frequently unprovable counterfactual that casts doubt on government's capabilities and obscures the difficulties of what most agencies actually do. That even this basic idea hasn't made its way indelibly into political conversations about agency management is disturbing, and is an explanation for why Congressional oversight of agencies can be both powerful and misdirected (not that it always is, of course, or that it's even flawed most of the time).

Second, while all of us who work in or cover the government know, the federal government is hardly a monolith. But much of our public political discourse assumes that federal agencies, by virtue of being "bureaucratic" operate the same way, and are guided by the same motivations and the same resource constraints. It's an astonishingly unuseful assumption. The structure of agencies, the outputs they're supposed to produce, the extent to which they're able to develop a strong, coherent identity all play a critical role in determining whether they can do their jobs well, whether they can adapt to new tasks, and whether reforms that are supposed to improve agency performance are actually suited to an agency and will be able to take root there.

And, as Wilson points out, Congress and the President are actually equally interested in their own prerogatives as they are in efficient management. He writes:

Congress will not tolerate giving department heads or bureau chiefs independent authority to reorganize their agencies, select their own personnel, or acquire and dispose of assets. to do so would be to reduce, if not eliminate, Congress's ability to make these agencies responsive to its wishes....One-half of the business-school teaching has been implemented: the president has gained marginally in his quest for a greater capacity to set administrative policy but the department heads and bureau chief s have been neither made more directly accountable to the president nor equipped with the tools to manage their own domains.

Wilson contains a multitude of lessons for those of us who work in, write about, or study government. But perhaps the most useful for commentators who are never going to dig deep into public administration is this: government will never operate like a business. It won't because it has different tasks, different structures, and different motivations. But most of all, government agencies won't act like businesses because no matter how much they say otherwise, powerful forces don't actually want them to.