Blinkered by Formalism?
Reviewing the Management Failures of the Bush Years
Donald Moynihan, La Follette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Alasdair Roberts, MaxwellSchool of Citizenship and Public Affairs, SyracuseUniversity
Paper presented at the Midwestern Political Science Association Meeting, April 3-6, 2008, Chicago.
Questions and comments welcome.
Abstract
To understand the interaction between politics and administration, scholars must distinguish between formal statements of administrative philosophy offered by elected officials, and actual practice. Scholarship on public administration scholarship has been blinkered by an excessive focus on formal reform efforts. Such efforts are presented in policy documents and couched in good government values. Scholars debate the meaning of formal reforms and whether they live up to expectations. But actual practice may depart significantly from espoused values. The problematic nature of formalism has become apparent under the Bush administration, which has demonstrated the negative effects of prioritizing political loyalty over expertise. This evidence is at odds with scholarly portrayals of the Bush administration’s management agenda as performance focused. The paper ultimately turns to anepistemological question – how scholars should research the role of politics in administration, especially when there is a disjuncture between espoused values and actual administrative behavior.
Introduction
This paper makes three related claims, and concludes by proposing a question. The first claim is that there is significant evidence that the Bush administration has managed many key policies poorly. This claim may seem unremarkable enough. After all, the latter years of the Bush administration has seen a continuous stream of critical media coverage on the management of key issues. This criticism has shaped public views of the White House. In a 2006 survey, the phrase that the public most associated with President Bush was “incompetent.” But our second claim is that is that the scholarly field of public administration has largely neglected evidence of poor management by the Bush administration. Instead, it has generally analyzed the White House management efforts in the context of positive administrative values. The third claim is that this failure is the result of a tendency toward formalism in scholarly treatments of presidential management practices. Public administration scholars largelyfocus on the formal management plans and reforms presented by a president, but fail to connect actual management practices to presidential politics.
The negative implications of formalism have become glaring during the Bush years, when formal management plans typified by the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) have been at odds with much management practice. The PMA pursues widely agreed upon administrative values, such as competence, expertise, performance, and rationality. But the values that characterize the management practicesof the Bush administration reflect a preference for ideological goals and loyalty over expertise, weakening the ability to manage key policy areas. The question that arises (and which is beyond the scope of this paper to fully answer) is an epistemological one: how should a scholarly field analyze the actual management practices of political administrations?
The Management Values of the Bush Administration
The formal management agenda of the Bush Administration has been described in detail elsewhere (Bruel 2007). The PMAwas prepared by the Office of Management and Budget, and released in 2001. It identified five cross-government management priorities: strategic management of human capital, competitive sourcing, improved financial performance, expanded electronic government, and budget and performance integration. The human capital aspect of the PMA spawned unsuccessful legislative initiatives to enhance managerial flexibility (the Managerial Flexibility Act of 2001 and Freedom to Manage Act of 2001), and to also implement pay for performance (the Working for America Act of 2005). But by tying managerial flexibility to the issue of homeland security, the Bush administration was able to partially achieve the goal of establishing new personnel frameworks for the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense (Moynihan 2005; Brook and King 2007).
The most studied product of the PMA has been the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), which arose from the budget and performance integration initiative. PART is an evaluation tool used by the OMB to assess whether programs are effective or not performing, and is presented as an attempt to infuse rationality and a focus on results in management and funding. PART has won a prestigious award for innovation in government from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and has been held as an example of a new approach to performance budgeting (Redburn, Shea and Buss 2008). Gilmour (2007) has looked at the challenges of implementing PART, Norcross and Adamson (2007) examined how agencies were rated, while Gilmour and Lewis (2006a, 2006b) and Olsen and Levy (2006) find that PART scores are associated with the President’s proposed spending initiatives. PART has been critiqued on a number of levels that recognize the interplay of politics and reform. Radin (2006) argues that it has displaced concerns about equity. Moynihan (2006) argues that the ambiguity of performance information makes PART a less than precise tool, while Gilmour and Lewis (2006a, 2006b) suggest that political considerations affect the assessment. PART has been examined as an institutional tool of presidential power (Dull 2006), and as altering intergovernmental relationships (Frederickson and Frederickson 2006).
If there has been a moderate amount of attention to the espoused Bush management agenda reflected in the PMA, there has been almost no attention by public administration scholars on the actual management practices that run contrary to the PMA. An early study of Bush as a manager focused on his personal style, and pointed to his background as an MBA. This was reflected in a tendency for disciplined political behavior, a preference for loyalty and decisiveness, the flip side of which was a potential for groupthink (Kettl 2003). In the early years of the Bush White House the positive aspects of the President’s management style were apparent. Leaks were uncommon, and the White House pursued the president’s policy goals aggressively and successfully.
More recently, Pfiffner (2006) provides the most direct critique of the first MBA president. Pfiffner argues that the characteristics that helped Bush policy adoption have also served to weaken responsible management. This paper joins with Pfiffner in offering a critique of the Bush management record that looks beyond the formal management agenda, but also asks why such critiques have been so rare in public administration. The next section lays out the criteria for such a critique, contrasting the espoused administrative values of the Bush administration with a political model of management.
Administrative and Political Models of Management
How do we define what represents a valid management philosophy in a democratic setting? There is a temptation to argue that management and politics should be separate domains, and to regard any breaching of the two as corruption. But this is unrealistic. Politics plays an appropriate role in any democratic administration. The desire of political appointees for change balances the long-term view of career officials to create accountable and credible public management(Krause, Lewis and Douglas 2006). But the Bush administration exemplifies an imbalance, where administrative values are often subsumed by political ones.
This imbalance stemsless from mismanagement than from a deliberate management philosophy. But this philosophy is implicit, not formally acknowledged by the actors pursuing it. Nowhere in the PMA is there an explicit statement that call for political loyalty or dismissing expertise. Even agenda items that could be used for such purpose – such as the management of human capital – are justified in terms of classic administrative values such as performance.[i] The espoused values of the PMA are the need for better performance, efficiency in the use of resources, providing service to citizens, and relying on competition to foster innovation (U.S. OMB 2001, 4). These values are consistent the philosophy of the previous Clinton administration, and contemporary reform initiatives. In the examples of management failures, the Bush administration continues to use language that reflects widely-agreed upon administrative values.
The most explicit alternative philosophy of management that appears consistent with the Bush White House is offered by public management commentators at the conservative Heritage Foundation and President Reagan’s former Office of Personnel Management director (Moffit 2001, see also Devine 1991). As the new Bush administration came into office, Moffit advised that it should ignore what he presents as a traditional public administration model that emphasizes expertise. Instead, it should pursue a political administration model best represented by the actions of President Reagan. The political administration model seeks responsiveness, making extensive use of political appointees. The selection of appointees should be “based on loyalty first and expertise second, and that the whole governmental apparatus must be managed from this perspective” (Moffit 2001). Such appointees should take responsibility for management decisions rather than delegate them to the bureaucracy, and need greater authority to control bureaucrats, who enjoy a “workplace culture of entitlement.” The ideal personnel design for the political model is to reduce much of the career bureaucracy, and employ a cadre of senior appointees, some temporary non-partisan officials, but have the bulk of government work undertaken by contractors.
While proponents of the political model are correct that public administration training places a high value on expertise, they offer a fairly simplistic understanding of the field that still revolves around Woodrow Wilson. A more recent statement of appropriate administrative values in a democratic context is offered by Bertelli and Lynn (2003, 262):“Judgment is the sine qua non of responsible administration. Its content consists of (1) accountability-an obligation to accept the authority of Madisonian institutions; (2) balance- acceptance of responsibility for identifying and reconciling the inevitable conflict among interests, mandates, and desires; and (3) rationality-habitual resort to reason to ensure transparent justifications for managerial action. Irresponsible public management, then, is management that disavows judgment or that acts without authority or in an arbitrary, self-serving, ill-informed, and nontransparent fashion.”
By the standards offered by Bertelli and Lynn (2003), the White House has failed to offer responsible public management. A preference for secrecy and belief in convictions has led the White House to fail to consult with constitutionally relevant actors. A reliance on evidence, expertise and reason implied by rationality has frequently been absent. As a result, poor assumptions were unchallenged, or such challenges were dismissed. The demand for political loyalty not only quieted internal dissent, it also restricted the recruitment of capable managers.
Even if we use the standards of political administration that justified the processes used by the Bush administration, the results have been so poor as to question the viability of this approach. The explicit goal of political administration is to pursue responsiveness in the name of achieving policy objectives. In two ways the Bush Administrationfailed to live up to this goal. First, partisan concerns trumped policy objectives. In a way reminiscent of the Nixon years (Mosher 1974), the White House centralized policy decisions at the expense of Cabinet officers. This gave rise to an environment where substantive policy discussions were rare, and routinely trumped by political considerations (Suskind 2003; Pfiffner 2006). Political appointees from across government were briefed by White House officials on election strategies and vulnerable Republican constituencies, in some cases in violation of the Hatch Act (Higham and O’ Harrow 2007). The Office of Special Counsel tasked with investigating the possible violations was itself headed by a political appointee under investigation for politicizing his agency (Lewis 2007). Second, efforts to foster responsiveness often ended up undermining performance by any reasonable standard, preventing programs or officials from fulfilling their statutory mission, and arriving at positions that defywidely agreed upon empirical evidence. In some cases, this may serve the political goals of the President (in regulatory agencies for example). But even in areas where there is little doubt that the White House wanted a policy to succeed, such as reconstructing Iraq, irresponsible management led to failure.
Pfiffner (2006) has already analyzed mismanagement in the war in Iraq, interrogation of detainees, the politicizing of intelligence. We do not go over the same material, but instead seek to illustrate additional patterns of management activity in the following section. We do not claim that such patterns are true across all policy areas at all times during the Bush years. But they have been apparent often enough, particularly in the signature policy areas of President Bush, that they do amount to a pattern. It is also true that our list is not exhaustive. It will likely to take years to gain a fuller picture of actual management practices in the Bush White House, although such efforts will be hampered by an executive order signed by President Bush that limits access to presidential papers.
The Management Failures of the Bush Administration
Substantive and symbolic rationality
Rational decisions imply the transparent use of reason and evidence to inform the selection of goals and the means to achieve those goals (Bertelli and Lynn 2003). In many instances, the Bush White House has dismissed experts and evidence in decision-making. In some cases, this was to achieve ideological goals. But rather than simply argue for the democratic right to choose policies even when they conflicted with evidence, the White House still appealed to the values of rationality. Rationality as a mode of decisionmaking was devalued, but the symbolic trappings of rationality were not.
For example, tensions between scientists and the White House arose not simply because scientific advice was ignored, but because the Bush White House was especially active and effective at managing the content of scientific information (Lambright 2008). This tendency has been most marked when scientific evidence is at odds with the interests of the private sector or social conservatives (Mooney 2005). A NASA expert on climate change was censored by an unqualified political appointee who warned of “dire consequences” if the scientist was interviewed by the media(U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 2007). Media requests to talk to federal scientists were often referred to the White House for approval, and the White House was selective in how these interviews were allocated. After Hurricane Katrina the White House sought to direct inquiries to government scientists who did not think climate change was connected to hurricanes.
White House involvement in Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) statements on climate change illustrates the effort to manage science. In one case the White House Council on Environmental Quality edited a chapter on climate change in an EPA report to such a degree that the EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman decided to eliminate it. The same office vetoed the section of another EPA report that dealt with climate change effects on air quality, and made at least 181 changes to the Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science Program, the administration’s guide for federal research(U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 2007).
The substance of these edits wasto downplay evidence on climate change and the role of human activity in contributing to climate change, and to suggest that there was not consensus on the science, in some cases referring to a discredited industry-funded paper. Rather than simply ignoring scientific evidence, the administration tried to obfuscate the significant consensus that exists. Such a strategy indicated that the White House continued to view the appearance of rationality in decisionmaking as important. For example, Philip Cooney, the head of the Council on Environment Quality, defended the edits by arguing that they were informed by a report from the National Academy of Sciences (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 2007, 21). In fact, some of the edits Cooneymade eliminated or weakened direct quotes from the same report.
In other cases, EPA decisions ignored the advice of its staff, cost-benefit analyses and empirical evidence in order to weaken clean air regulation (Specter 2006). EPA staff also reported having been pressured not to make findings that were protective of endangered species for non-scientific reasons (Mooney 2005). The Deputy Assistant of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, Julie MacDonald, altered and ordered the altering of findings made by staff scientists.
The White House has also proven willing to ignore expert advice if it conflicted with the goals of social conservatives. One such goalhas been to amend policies that are argued to condone sexual activity, especially among young people. The Administration opposed vaccinating young women against the human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, and the primary cause of cervical cancer (Specter 2006). The Food and Drug Administration(FDA) also denied permission to provide Plan B (the morning-after pill) as an over-the-counter medicine, arguing that there was not evidence on how this affectedthe behavior of young women. In doing so, FDA political appointeestook the unprecedented step of contradicting the FDA directors who normally make such decisions, andits scientific advisory committee.