[Cross-posted from my substack, davekasten.substack.com. {I never said that I was creative at naming things}]

Hi,

So here are some things I’ve been thinking about while traveling on policy consulting business over the past few months.

Bureaucracy, by James Q. Wilson

As we’ve discussed previously, a decent description of the goal of bureaucracy is that it’s the organizational form that society uses to turn nonstandard inputs into standardized outputs. Put another way, the original bureaucrats were the 19th Century’s version of software engineers, abstracting away complexity and turning it into legible forms through, well, forms.^[1]

And there’s a stereotype that just like software, bureaucracy wants to have feature-creep, wants to get bloated; growing its power through new regulations, new budgetary lines, new staffing.

This assumption has motivated, generally, the bipartisan assumptions of American politics since (at least) when Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” in 1996 and promised “smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington.”

The messaging syllogism roughly is:

Government is bad;
Government means bureaucracy;
Therefore the more government you have, the more bureaucracy you have;
So the only way to get rid of bad bureaucracy is to have less government.

(And all of this goes double for tech policy! After all, we don’t want to kill the libertarian geese that lay the stock market eggs.)

In Bureaucracy (Amazon affiliate link), James Q. Wilson basically takes 378 pages to, implicitly, call all that bullshit.

On the surface level, Wilson has one project: pushing back against the framework. He argues that bureaucracies are such a “complex and varied phenomenon” (p. 10) that not only do they radically differ even within the American constitutional context, but that therefore it’s not even feasible for a political scientist to come up with a theory to explain that variation. So…he’s just gonna do some descriptive stuff; his project is “to explain why government agencies — bureaucracies — behave as they do.” (p. ix.) Lots of great chapters follow describing how bureaucracies vary and differ

But…I don’t think that’s his real point. I think his real point is this: bureaucracies don’t actually want to accumulate power. Bureaucracies want to keep on doing what they are already doing, and usually, that’s not optimal accumulation of power.

It’s something else.

At this point, I probably should admit something to you: Bureaucracy is a frustrating and deeply weird book for me to read now, versus a decade ago.

As many of you know, I’ve spent much of my career as a consultant or strategist, mainly working with various government entities to try to get them to change; and the private-sector entities were usually so big or so regulated that they felt para-governmental. ^[2] This in particular was a focus of my time working in Management-consulting Knowledge Inculcation Navigating Sleepless Evening Years (or “McKINSEY”), whereby I learned some of the contours of what Wilson argues, by osmosis.

And frankly, that’s why I’d gotten into management consulting ^[3]: I had a theory that the reason the public sector was broken was a lack of lessons from the business world, and that learning those lessons would help me tackle government problems. (I still believe this can be true, but now believe that government unfortunately too often learns the wrong lessons.)

This work wasn’t easy; it took long hours, cost me time and energy and strain on relationships with those I love, and we didn’t always succeed. But we did comfortably beat the odds, and I’m proud of that work.

Yet part of why that work involved such long hours — inarguably longer hours even that my private sector work — was that so few actionable guides exist for how to think about government bureaucracies. The average person I worked with was deeply familiar with a lot of the academic literature — often holding a MA, JD, or PhD in public policy — and often had firsthand government experience as well; but there just weren’t nearly as many off-the-shelf playbooks as there were for the private-sector work we did. Everything was bespoke, and too-often required extensive tailoring of private-sector templates, or even creation from first principles.

And so my reaction to reading Bureaucracy is, roughly:

Why did no one tell me to read this sooner?

Those of you with a policy or legal background have probably already recalled that Wilson is probably most famous as a conservative thinker who promulgated the so-called “broken windows” theory of crime, which advocated relatively harsh punishments for even minor offenses to maintain social order, and for his advocacy of long prison sentences for criminals generally. He also served on a range of federal government task forces; mainly for Republican presidents, and when not, usually on crime issues. So, by partisan pattern recognition, you’d probably expect him to be deeply skeptical of government and obsessed with economic efficiency of the private sector.

Not so.

To our 21st-century eyes, Wilson’s writing is weirdly non-statistical, and non-economically-motivated for a work of either political science or public policy: the quantitative revolution hadn’t fully happened yet, and people were still writing Big Monographs. He writes a little bit about cost-benefit analysis, and gives some little mention of metrics-driven work like Compstat for the NYPD, but he isn’t trying to make an argument about efficiency — in fact, he does a surprising detour wherein he comprehensively debunks stories of government paying too much for hammers and toilet seats and argues that they shouldn’t be used as examples of waste at all.⁴

Bureaucracy is an opinionated book, and arguably a conservative one, but his concern isn’t about shrinking government to make it spend less or do less. Sure, Wilson mentions all the privatization and libertarianism stuff in a late chapter, but cost-benefit analysis or the study of financial incentives just plain isn’t his main concern in weighing alternatives to current bureaucracies. He in fact explicitly denounces the theory-of-the-firm economic approach of assuming that government agencies are consistently attempting to maximize some sort of shared, comparable utility function.

Instead, he sees government bureaucracies as being as muddled as humans, but with greater scale; organizations in which “tasks and goals are not connected in the straightforward way that is implied by the notion that tasks are ‘means’ logically related to ‘ends.’” (p. 26) This is perhaps inevitable — their goals are messy, contradictory, and just big — things like “Promote the long-range security and well-being of the United States” — and so the organization is faced with tradeoffs that aren’t legible in a profit-like metric, or even a bundle of metrics.

Wilson sees this crisis as being resolved by bureaucracies becoming sorts of meaning-making entities, organizations that have a “distinctive way of viewing and reacting to the bureaucratic world.” (Note that anyone who’s spent 30 seconds around life in DC recognizes how often government employees cite their mission and their culture as the reasons they stay in their jobs.) This culture is so powerful that, contrary to popular depictions of power-hungry bureaucrats, when an organization is offered a new job that conflicts with its current jobs, it might fight that offer of more bureaucratic power if that offer comes with a different mission.

For example, Wilson sees the Social Security Administration (SSA) as facing a crisis of meaning when it started having to administer disability benefits (SSDI). As Wilson describes it, prior to the advent of SSDI, the SSA was in the business of getting checks to grandmas; so much so that, contrary to the traditional vision of lazy civil servants, its employees cheered the expansion of their working hours to nights and weekends to better serve benefits recipients (who, presumably, often needed help of family members who worked 9-5 to get to SSA appointments). All of that changed when the SSA went from the happy, process-optimizing business of getting traditional Social Security checks out on time to anyone of age to the messy, challenging, adversarial business of determining whether or not someone truly qualified for disability. And the SSA hated it — resulting in blown program deadlines to implement the change, collapsing morale, and seemingly-endless conflict with Congress. (p.100) ^[4]

Wilson cites endless examples of this: uniformed services accepting lower budgets in exchange for less oversight by the Pentagon; the FBI not wanting funding to pursue narcotics investigations because they recognized there was no way to “solve” narcotics trafficking like they could a kidnapping; OSHA inspectors focusing on black-and-white but low-consequence safety rule violations that they can easily write up rather than more consequential but difficult-to-measure health hazards; or even the Agriculture Department attempting to give away its responsibility for food stamps (a full 2/3rds of its budget!).

In other words, Wilson wants you to see bureaucracies as cultures that push back, and that really don’t want to do some of the jobs they’re assigned.

The question is, of course, then what should you do about that problem?

Bureaucracy is, frankly, kinda useless for academics. Eminently cite-able examples, sure, but very little in the way of formal theory about why bureaucracies vary on so many dimensions that don’t matter to their mission alignment — in fact, Wilson declaims the possibility, saying, “I have come to have grave doubts that anything worth calling ‘organization theory’ will ever exist.”(p. xi) And though he makes few predictions, the closest Wilson comes is extensively praising a bunch of organizations (DoD, the FBI, the US Army Corps of Engineers) that came to, ah, have very different reputations for bureaucratic effectiveness in the decade following Bureaucracy’s publication.

By contrast, it is indispensible for the practical policy professional attempting to do open-heart surgery on a bureaucracy. As Wilson notes — as true then as it is now:

“Save for a few celebrated exceptions, books on government agencies hardly refer to organizational culture at all. There will be chapters on structure planning, decision making, and congressional oversight — all important matters, to be sure — but none on what the organization does or the problem of getting people to want to do it.” (p. 31)

So, what should you do, if you believe Wilson’s take?

Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a great answer on how to make an organization want to do something; many of his recommendations are about telling you how to most-cannily make changes, not about how to get an agency to accept that its mission shouldBut here’s what I took away.

For the foreseeable future, government will have new jobs to consider. Some of those will be easily compatible with existing government agencies and departments’ cultures; things like “build a new fighter jet” or “send people checks.” But others will be things like, “tell every American where they can get the most-anticipated health product in human history” or “prepare to deal with the possible future threats from superintelligent computer programs” or even just “get someone to prioritize the threats from terrorist groups.”

Historically, I’ve believed that when you have a new threat, you need to move fast. You need to use existing capabilities. But, if those existing capabilities will fight you tooth and nail, even if you’re giving them infinite budget and the most important job in the Federal Government…well, I’m no longer so sure about that. Maybe you should first try to stand up more new agencies that want those jobs, instead, run like the SOE or OSS in World War II, frantic and full of potential and novelty and energy and, yes, more than a few fuckups.

Of course, that means wanting to stand up new agencies. And if the everyday bureaucracies of each agency will fight you when given a new mission…well, the bureaucracy of Congress itself nowadays probably wants to fight creating a new agency even more. (Heck, as we learned this week, Congress might even fight the creation of a new agency at the state level.)

And that, dear reader, is where I’m stuck. Just as Wilson didn’t have a theory to explain why bureaucracies vary in so many of their features, I don’t have a theory for how we can get Congress to want nice things.

But thanks to Wilson, I have a better sense of what to ask Congress for, even if I’m not sure how to get it.

Disclosures:

Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or the Social Security Administration.

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The funniest possible fact is that the US Government Standard Form 1 is the form to print more forms.
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An earlier draft of this essay had the typo “para-grovermental”, which would be amusing to the discerning meme connoisseur…
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From government contracting. Yes, IT’S DIFFERENT. No, I WILL NOT EXPLAIN WHY.
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The hammer’s sticker shock cost was the true unit cost + fixed overhead being spread out on a per-order basis; the “toilet seat” was actually most of what constitutes a full airplane toilet for a military plane, and he argues that both are reasonably priced when you control for those factors.
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And, as my friend Leah Libresco Sargeant would point out, resulting in some of the most awful, punitive, pointless rules in all of the federal government. Rules that, no kidding, make it impossible for people to get married without losing the disability benefits literally keeping them alive.