M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

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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