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A New
Administration in Washington D.C.:
What It Means to You and Me
by Jack Anderson
George
W. Bush is about to invade Washington with a fragmentary force of
no more than about 2500 men and women who will make decisions affecting
you and me. Yet most of them will need instructions to find the
restroom in their new domain.
As the new head
of the Federal animal, Bush will discover that he has inherited
a massive tail that will tend to hold rigid when he wants it to
waggle. His tiny invading army will take command of a worldwide
civilian force of more than 4 million civilians and military. This
faceless mass-anonymous men and women holding more than ten thousand
different types of federal jobs which vary from lawyers and economists
to interior decorators and fish hatchery operators-who truly manipulate
the wheels and levers of government.
We the people
who are told that the government belongs to us have learned by now
that the bureaucracy is the gorilla in the closet. Its political
managers have demonstrated an inability to manage the beast let
alone curb its growth or diminish its domain.
The new president's
huge unresponsive tail is not a single tail at all. The disobedient
tail is, in fact, thousands of tails that don't necessarily wag
in the same direction. The massive tail, Bush will discover, has
a life of its own. It functions more like the arms of an octopus
that will smother the incoming administrators in a loving embrace-the
undulating arms simultaneously carressing them and keeping them
occupied. With too many arms to outmaneuver, Bush and company are
likely to become the pampered captives of the octopus they are supposed
to control.
Elections are
held; opposite political parties take power; appointive heads come
and go. But the bureaucracy remains entrenched in the granite and
sandstone compounds of government. Like those invaders who conquered
China and then became absorbed by the Chinese, new administrations
are routinely consumed by the bureaucracy.
John F. Kennedy
was so frustrated by the bureaucratic obstruction in Washington
that he often ignored protocol and communicated directly with lower-ranked
bureaucrats over the heads of their bosses. I was present in the
oval office when he placed a call to a lowly bureaucrat and explained,
"This is the President." In those days Kennedy with his Massachusetts
accent was widely imitated. The bureaucrat at the other end of the
phone thought it was a prankster and hung up on the president of
the United States! Kennedy got back to him and gave him personal
instructions which I overheard. But bureaucrats have a way of tying
up even presidential directives that they don't like. I followed
up on this one a couple of years later and found that nothing had
been done to carry out the president's orders.
I called the
head of the agency and told him that he had a great story over there,
that I had heard the president issue orders that were never carried
out. I said I'm trying to identify who in the state department is
more powerful than the president. It's a good story. I just need
his name. Will you tell me who it was who overruled the president?
Was it you? "Oh no,". he said with great alarm. " It wasn't me.
It got stuck over in some committee," and then he identified the
committee.
Nonetheless,
there is reason to hope that Bush the Second will be able to somewhat
control his unruly tail. Word has leaked out from his intimate circle
that he is wise to the ways of bureaucracy. As governor of Texas,
he was detoothed and bound up by the rope and line Lilliputians
of the permanent bureaucracy, yet he managed to handle them in such
an impressive way that he wound up with yet a bigger bureaucracy
to manage. Most of his predecessors were swallowed up by the environment
they had sworn to master. It may be significant that only one recent
president was able routinely to override the bureaucracy. His name
was Ronald Reagan who also got his training in a large state with
its own cumbersome bureaucracy.
Number one
on Bush's agenda is to slash taxes. By their nature, the taxpayers
seek to ax taxes and the taxspenders want to max taxes. Justly do
the taxpayers groan under the complexity of our income tax code
with its myriad exceptions and alternatives. Each of these exceptions,
exemptions, and alternatives is designed to accommodate the special
situation of some group, worthy or unworthy, or to advance some
policy. The bureaucracy's ultimate achievement is the finesse, the
unobtrusiveness by which it picks our pockets. So gently, gradually
and invisibly does it tighten its bonds that we never appreciate
the extent to which we are in its grip.
Prior to the
bureaucratic age when a government had reached its feasible limits
of general taxation, it had to forcibly lay hands on estates or
loot other countries. Nowadays the departmental experts peaceably
and effortlessly perpetrate the same atrocities by manufacturing
paper money or devaluating the currency.
To the progressively
inclined, this is the cardinal element of hope. This clerical government
makes dreamable the millenarian utopia, creating enterprises of
vast scope which they claim are necessary to preserve us from corporations
and unions, protect us from dictatorships, and save us from our
wasteful polluting selves. The bureaucracy believes it has the capacity--at
least in its own vision-- to implement full employment schemes,
universal health care, old age care, day care, prenatal care or
if you are so disposed unlimited abortions. Senator Claghorn's bill
need but be passed and the machinery is in place to send every American
child to Harvard University.
Viewed in the
totality of its services and over the sweep of the centuries, the
bureaucracy looms as a majestic benefactor of humankind. Why then,
viewed up close in its particulars, is it so uninspiring, wasteful
and counterproductive? It is as though one were viewing from afar
the US fleet arrayed in battle line on the high seas, advancing
awesomely in perfect order, and then one poses to reflect that many
of the individual ships are old and unfit for service, that many
are manned by ill-trained crews , that some are commanded by Captain
Queeg's.
The bureaucracy
is manned by people of normal abilities and reasonable disposition
who react in various defensive ways to the limited routine-bound
roles decreed for them-some by falling asleep, some by becoming
the world's most methodical readers of newspapers, others by making
empires out of molehills, still others by finding their needed raison
d'etre in the regulation books, developing a mastery of them with
which they confound the real world.
The ever adaptive
bureaucracy operates at a flabbergasting cost which I, as chairman
of Citizens against Government Waste, have found to be beyond the
reach of our computers. Sometimes I just write it all off with the
sentiment in a sign I once saw tacked behind a lunch counter; "Here's
to my wife who has stood by me through all the troubles I would
never have had if I hadn't married her."
The American
people seem to be joined in unholy matrimony to the anonymous clerk
in his cubicle who in his pettifogging way makes decisions that
could disrupt our lives. Can George W. Bush possibly master this
benign beast? He at least knows its habits-- and the preliminary
reports indicate that he is holding the whip hand. He has made it
pleasantly clear that the next four years will be the Bush administration,
not some anonymous bureaucrat's.
Most presidents
during my 53 year watch on Washington, however, were subsumed by
their bureaucratic chores and by the presidential protocol and formalities.
A president is surrounded by bureaucrats who lay these out neatly
on his desk everyday, leaving the control of the government to them.
The rare exception to that rule was Reagan who ironically has been
denounced and deplored by critics who claimed he was not in charge
of the ship of state. I visited many times in the oval office and
discussed policies with him. I found him to be in total charge.
He felt that his place was on the bridge guiding the ship of state.
He was the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to turn the
ship of state in a different direction. He actually changed course
of the ship of state. to the right . Those who followed Reagan,
whether Democrat or Republican thereafter stuck closely to his course
Now another
former governor will take his place on the bridge. The preliminary
reports indicate he will guide the ship of state in the direction
he chooses, not that has been laid out by his predecessors.
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© 2001 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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