Responsibility and Accountability Part 3: The Bureaucracy and Accountability

This is Part 3 of a series on accountability and responsibility. As the graphic shows, the two should work together, but can but can get jammed. But often the two are divorced, or at least separated, in this case, by laws and regulations and regulatory capture.

President Wilson lead the effort to reform the bureaucracy along the lines of scientific management when he was the president of Princeton. At the time, the bureaucracy was based on the so-called spoils system. In this case, the cure may have been worse than the disease (see Creating the Monster: The American Bureaucracy).

Over time, laws and regulations protected bureaucratic works and made it difficult to fire them and regulatory capture (see Regulatory Capture and other Bureaucratic Problems) enhanced their power. These two factors created a largely unaccountable fourth branch of government that even the executive branch has difficulty controlling. McCubbins et al. and others have written extensively on the bureaucracy and their drive to preserve their positions and extend their power.

So. what does that mean for the Republic?

The literature on street level bureaucracy shows how even low-level bureaucrats at the state and local levels can shape and effectively create policy and selectively enforce them.

Bureaucrats use this power to effectively create legislation as discussed in a Brooking Institute paper. Therefore, the bureaucracy can resemble a royal of county/baronial level court in old Europe that combined both legislative and executive powers. This was exactly what the founders of the Republic sought to avoid.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us,” as Pogo once said. But I am not sure even Pogo/Walk Kelly understood how dangerous this can be for a society. This is especially true when the bureaucracy is unelected, unaccountable, and cannot easily be removed. Who can remove them under today’s conditions? I find it interesting that Kelly drew the poster to celebrate Earth Day, and it is now the Green movement and climate change movement that push this combined executive and legislative approach. Not their motives are bad, but the powers of combined executive and legislative can, if we are not careful, become totalitarian in nature.

When Theodore Roosevelt created the first national bird sanctuary, he was very careful about combining powers and avoiding executive overreach, as discussed in The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. He is an effective model for us on multiple dimensions.

So what can we do?

We need to combine the best of Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt to re-reform the bureaucracy. In addition to his conservation efforts, Roosevelt was a trust buster. He understood both power and control. But both went a bit off the rails. Wilson overreached his power during WWI and effectively compromised the First Amendment and jailed people that disagreed with entry into WWI, as discussed by Thomas E. Woods; Gutzman, Kevin R. C.. in Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. Roosevelt worried over executive overreach, but tried to run for a third term, possibly denying Taft a re-election in 1912 and allowed Wilson to win the election.

Some elements of bureaucratic reform may include:

• Term limits on senior levels.
• Code key positions below the Senior Executive Service political appointees, subject to advice and consent from the Senate.
• Develop a code of ethics for bureaucrats that includes sanctions and penalties for violations.
• Oversight over the bureaucracy, proving accountability. Given the bureaucratic expansion into the legislative arena, this body will need to be composed of both executives and legislators and have the power to sanction and remove bureaucrats.

We need to ensure we are not the enemy.