Dan Wendlandt
PS 22Q: Feb 25, 2003
Swing and a Miss:
The Failure of Progressive Institutional Reform
At the close of the 19th Century, a period in American Politics dominated by the spoils systems and party machines, Progressive reformers pushed to replace America’s oft corrupt bureaucracy with a nonpolitical ‘scientific administration’. Progressives determined that professional staff and a hierarchal organizational structure would create a bureaucracy capable of carrying out policy impartially, expertly, and in the public interest. Essentially, they sought to separate administration and politics. Yet around the same time, as Congress sought to increase the size and scope of government, they were forced to delegate increasing amounts of decision-making authority to administrative agencies. Power over bureaucracy became critical to control the real impacts of legislation. As a result, the separation of administration and politics became impossible.
The battle to assert control over bureaucracy created a political environment hostile to professionalism and efficient hierarchal control, the two pillars of Progressive bureaucratic reform. Having taken a scientific and not political approach to reform, the Progressive’s changes met little success. In this paper, we examine how political factors undermine the principles of professionalism and hierarchal control in administrative agencies, leaving the Progressive’s goal of an impartial and expert bureaucracy focused on the public interest largely unrealized.
Professionalism
Inherent in the concept of professionalism is a sense of autonomy for the individual bureaucrat. This independence was of great value to the Progressives, who lamented the ties of patronage between bureaucrats and politicians. Civil Service reform sought to create a cadre of career public servants whose jobs were protected from the influence of elected officials, allowing them to act in the public interest. In Progressive theory, these professionals will act in a non-partial manner. Yet in reality, with more authority delegated to agencies, the chance that personal ideology, political dealing, or even corruption would influence an autonomous bureaucrat’s decisions increases greatly.
Thus, Congress needs a means of insuring that agencies comply with the mandates it has given via legislation. As James Wilson writes, effectively measuring whether a federal agency is following its mandate from Congress is in the best case non-trivial and in the worst case nearly impossible. Often the best Congress can do is define a limited role for the agency by requiring its experts to operate within an environment filled with constraints. These rules assure that the political interests of the overseers are not subverted by agency staff with their own ideas on how to best approach a given problem. Thus, the political response to administrative autonomy, according to Jack Knott and Gary Miller is that agency experts find themselves tightly bound by political constraints.
Yet many agencies today are comprised of skilled researchers in every field from economics to ecology and produce volumes of scientific regulations each year. Does this imply that the Progressive’s efforts to build a expert bureaucracy succeeded? Not likely. Rather this new makeup of many federal agency is the result of new goals of the federal government, such as environmental regulation or space exploration, that require workers highly educated in specific fields. Even so, today’s agencies are not necessarily those expert guided institutions envisioned by Progressive reformers. Technical expertise in agencies is still subject to the final discretion of agency heads, who are often more likely to be motivated by political necessity than by scientific merit.
Hierarchal Control
In the eyes of Progressives, a centralized organizational structure creates efficient and thus effective government administration. This structure allows for a clear mission and an accountable chain of command for each agency. Yet the basic principles of American government, namely separation of powers, stand in direct opposition to this Progressive ideal. As federal agencies were granted greater political discretion, all three branches of the federal government recognized the increased need to monitor and influence these organizations in order to promote their own policy interests. With hosts of different groups seeking to direct the agency in every conceivable direction, the agency head must juggle the demands of competing interests and is often unable to provide clear direction for the agency.
As stated in Wilson’s text, Congress has an “awesome arsenal” of weapons that allows it to exercise authority over agencies. These include the key roles of drafting legislation and appropriating budgets, as well as the power to conduct hearings and investigations. These powers can be wielded by parties at the floor level, or even by individuals in the committee and subcommittee realms. As the head of the executive branch, the President holds the discretion to choose heads of many federal agencies, allowing him to place like-minded individuals in positions of power. As described by John Burke, the presidential institution has also developed more elaborate systems of control for agencies, the most power of these being the Office of Management and Budget, a key player in the appropriation of each agency’s budget. As discretion in administrative agencies has increased, so has the frequency with which federal courts have stepped in to either demand or prohibit agency action on an given issue. Private interest groups also lobby agencies on pertinent issues both directly and via politicians.
What results from all of these conflicting interactions of interests is a tangled web of directives and constraints that gives agencies neither a clear course of action nor the latitude to achieve what they determines to be in the public interest. Terry Moe argues that this mess of oversight and constraints is not a surprising result at all, but rather the expected outcome of competing political interests, all of which have some stake in the success or failure of a given agency. This system is the antithesis of the ideal Progressive organizational structure described by Knott and Miller, in which “all lines of authority lead ultimately to a single administrative executive.” Even worse, James Wilson points out that top bureaucrats are not even free to make personnel or production minded decisions independent of constricting regulations and oversight. For many agencies, the constraints of the political system shift their focus from the development of good policy to the maintenance of turf and budgets. Furthermore, the incentive structure created by oversight and bureaucratic rules does nothing to reward agencies for serving the public good by either reducing costs or increasing productivity. In fact, conversely, an agency is liable to have its funding slashed if it does not spend all of its budget in a given fiscal year. Such a bureaucratic system, burdened with rules and void of correct incentives, will be highly adverse to risk and innovation, to the detriment of public interest.
In this conflict-ridden environment that rewards political influence over strong and efficient policy, the most primary need of any federal agency is to find and develop a strong constituency. According to both Francis Rourke and Wilson, in order to survive and grown agencies must build up networks of support so that the power of their political friends outweighs that of their political enemies. No member of Congress or President would dare attack an agency with widespread national support, yet agencies with diffuse or localized support are vulnerable. As we have seen with other political factors, this need to develop a base of support runs in direct opposition to the Progressive concept of an impartial and nonpolitical administrative institution.
The landscape of America’s bureaucracies prior to the Progressive period is a far cry from the sprawl of federal agencies we know today. Yet the changes in the nature of these institutions has had more to do with the new role of federal agencies than it does with the Progressive goals of professionalism and hierarchal organization in institutional reform. The great increase in bureaucratic discretion resulting from broad Congressional mandates made political control over bureaucracy crucial and doomed the Progressive’s hope of a nonpolitical body of professionals.
What lessons can be garnered from the failure of the Progressives and applied to bureaucratic reform today? First and foremost, bureaucracies must be viewed not solely in their traditional role as policy administrators but also in their new role as policy creators. Recognizing this fact, reform must consider how the rules and constraints on modern bureaucracies define their incentive structures. The reliance on an outdated model of nonpolitical and publicly minded civil servants has resulted in a system in which efficiency and the public good are only two of many considerations in running an agency. If reform is to succeed, it must examine the surrounding political environment and design a system in which the incentives for efficiency and public minded policy are powerful enough to overcome other influence of other political factors.