Among the serious problems with Republican administrations is that many of their political appointees in middle management are often put in charge of areas they know nothing about.
This makes them dependent on career staff, with all of the bad consequences I have previously described. I know a conservative career lawyer who works at the Justice Department. Unfortunately, the chief of staff for the Bush political appointee who ran his division knew next to nothing about the work done by this division. The chief of staff did not want to make any mistakes that would garner the attention of higher-ups within the department or at the White House. Thus, this staffer relied on the advice of long-time senior career employees, advice based on liberal, left-wing policies unchanged from the Clinton administration.
My friend obviously could not complain about this to his career managers, but he tried to bring this to the attention of the political appointee and his chief of staff. He was disciplined for going outside the chain of command — the chief of staff was not interested in rocking the boat in any way that would call attention to his ignorance, or upset liberal advocacy groups or the media and potentially screw up his chances for future advancement.
As Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity described in the Wall Street Journal, many Republican political appointees are intimidated by career employees. Clegg was initially disinvited from testifying about pervasive reverse discrimination by companies on the basis of “diversity” and the EEOC’s refusal to do anything about it. The head of the commission was afraid it would “lead to a ‘mutiny’ among the career people at the commission.” I saw this kind of political cowardice on many occasions, particularly as Clegg has said, because political appointees want to go on to their next job without having to deal with controversy generated by criticism from career employees.
While a president’s top appointees — like attorney general or secretary of state — get lots of attention, we never hear much about the hundreds of other appointees who inhabit the middle levels of management. Many are early in their careers, and although they may have been appointed to middle level posts in the Bush administration, all of them hope that they will advance to higher posts in the next Republican administration. Some of these appointees looked at the past nominees who had been filibustered, such as Miguel Estrada (or me), and realized that pursuing policies that upset liberals could result in their nominations getting torpedoed if they were selected for a higher post. They changed their behavior and avoided implementing conservative principles on important public policy issues out of fear that this would upset the Left.
This was not noticed because those decisions were often made at a level low enough that we would never hear about it. But it impaired implementation of conservative policies in many different areas, and it frustrated other political appointees who wanted to forcefully push conservative principles.
This brings up another area in which conservatives are very deficient in comparison with their liberal counterparts. Liberal advocacy organizations in Washington vastly outnumber the Right in terms of the number of organizations, funding, and an ability and willingness to make sustained and noisy demands on government agencies. They closely monitor the policies and regulations being formulated by federal agencies and howl in protest when they see things with which they disagree.
The situation may be out of control before many of these individuals ever get to Washington, DC. We must not forget that one usually has to be an intellectual whore to make it through the typical university graduate program. This is especially true regarding the process to obtain a Ph.D. It must be added that thankfully both the New York Times and the Washington Post may be out of business in the next few years. Alternative media outlets like Pajamas Media, Fox News, and countless conservative radio talk shows are making a huge difference. Lastly, center-right citizens now realize that their backs are to the wall. They will ultimately be hunted down and destroyed if they don’t fight back today.
It will never happen, Hans. The Behemoth is a Hydra with 30,000 dendrites from K Street sprouting heads which sprout more dendrites. If you could squeeze down on the balloon full of goo in the center, which you rightly state won’t happen, the goo will just ooze out into the network of NGOs and foundations until the next election comes and the center gets another shot of goo.
With this article you gave not only the effects, but you correctly pointed out the guilty: the pseudo conservatives, the annointed appointed scions of the Hamptons oligarchs, the cowards.
We approached the tipping point in the 30s, then passed it long ago, in the 60s. Nothing will stop the fall short of revolution or utter conquest from without.
The head of the commission was afraid it would “lead to a ‘mutiny’ among the career people at the commission.”
A mutiny sounds like a good idea to me.
if the will isn;t there to fix this now (and it isn;t) then it will become more difficult with time. which probably means you will be able to write this story again in 4, 8, 12 years etc.
a massive cull is probably the only way to do it as stated above. unfortunately at the end of Obama’s first term there will be a doubling of these same employees not a reduction.
as with most cronic problems the problem grows faster then the solution.
A revolution can solve the problem if the new government realizes that current civil service work regs need to be scrapped and rewritten. The advantage of a successful revolution is that you can then go to these leftist bureaucrats and tell them that they are fired effective immediately. I would tell them that their entire pensions will go into the general fund to help remedy the damage they have done. /daydream
Excellent three-part piece! Depressing, but illuminating, to the extent that light can be emitted by gloom. It reminds me of what happened to Frank Gaffney when he was working on a film that was supposed to be aired on PBS, but whose message ran afoul of the prevailing wisdom. His personal inclinations made him into an alien in the most fundamental sense of the term, one who is deprived of linkage from those who would otherwise be his social peers, or at the minimum, his natural collaborators!
All the devilish mechanisms described by Hans A. von Spakovsky may well be an inevitable consequence of prosperity. As it happens, the ancient Chinese character for “governement agent” clearly represents a fat man sitting under a roof, so the burden of officialdom has been chronicled before!
The drastic measures required to roll back this massive runaway corruption may simply be impossible to even initiate in prosperous times. But prosperity is not to be taken for granted, and burdensome administration is not helping the prospects of economic vigor.
Should things get dicey, the luxury of feeding the fat cats may well evaporate, and the notion of limited government may become appreciated again. I hope we don’t have to wait until the economy crumbles to attack the weight bearing down on it.
We can limit how long a civil service worker can be employed by the government. Pass a law to limit the employment contracts of all civil service employees to something like 10 years. Then give them a partial pension to supplement the retirement planning they do in their real careers. There isn’t one government job that should take more than five years to learn completely, so the efficiency of experience is not a factor here. Okay, none of the gutless wonders in Washington will ever pass such a law. Also, none of the idiots we send to Washington are competent to manage the replacement hiring. I just remembered, these nincompoops will try to fix an economy by printing money so they can spend it, so how do we expect them to do anything right? Oh well, let me know when the shooting starts.
TO: Maggie, et al.
RE: MUTINY, You Say, Mr. Christian!
Be prepared to shed ‘blood’, babe.
That is IF you have the ‘courage’ to ‘resist’.
But then again….
….unless you’re willing to give ‘everything’ for liberty….
….you don’t have what it ‘takes’ to establish and sustain it.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out.....]
I hate to burst everyone’s bubble but most non-appointed government employees are Indepedants, not Democrats.
Jeez, Hans, so you didn’t get confirmed. Get over it. Maybe if you hadn’t been up to your armpits in all those sleazy Deep-South voting laws designed to keep blacks from the polls, you’d have had an easier time with those eeeeeevil liberals.
No wonder that the term bureaucrats has for hundreds of years been synomynous with bad government.
Shef,
That was a typical presumptuous hack job by a typical useful idiot, who has heard his echo so many times that he suffers unknowingly from his unwarrented superiority complex.
To which of this myriad of voting laws do you object? I thought most of those were eliminated 50 years ago, but then, I was here. Get some help, smart guy. You need a real education.