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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (18002)	7/11/2001 6:04:04 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

But you haven't yet talked about the, to me, more important issue of whether the people who go into government in the first place, particularly into policy making positions, start with a bias which can't help but color their work....In your experience, did the people in policy making positions in government tend to mirror the general population's view of the proper balance between government control and individual liberty? Chris, Washington is a company town. People here work for the government for the same reason people in Bartlesville work for Phillips Petroleum--because it's there. I'd guess that, on any given day, not one civil servant in a million gives a single thought to "the proper balance between government control and individual liberty." That's for philosophers, professors, and think tank denizens, not civil servants. People work in the HQ bureaucracies that you're talking about for the same reason they work anywhere else. Because they have an uncle who worked there who got them an internship and they stayed on. Because their spouse works in internet technology and they need a reliable paycheck. Because they need good health benefits for a chronically ill child. Because the office is near where they live. Because they're black or female and they know they can get a fair deal. Not too many are out to change the world although most are predisposed to do something that helps people or their country, all other things being equal. My sense is that most people either enter government with the notion that the government is at least part of the solution or, during their tenure, develop that notion. You can't do any job without thinking that what you're doing is, if not worthwhile, at least not destructive. Chris, these are just ordinary people doing ordinary jobs just like anyone else who is a cog in a big company. You'll find more gung ho types in places like EPA because it's so young, but most of the people working for one agency could just as soon be working for another agency. You do research, push paper, write reports, process cases, analyze comments, prepare briefings, yada, yada. If you do a study, it's often a program assessment, which means, did the program accomplish its objectives, not whether those were the right objectives. The objectives are spelled out in the law, for the most part, often in way too much detail about process. The people who do those things are good at it. They report what they find. Sometimes it's a study on how the agency can best accomplish X or Y. Those options may have various roles for the agency vs. the private sector. The study includes all the options. Objectively. Agnostically. They don't make them up. They study the literature, interview experts, interview sometimes biased program managers, and sift through public input. The decision is made by a political type for reasons that are often unfathomable to the staff. But you can count on the staff report almost all the time for a variety of reasons. You question their motivations. Well, their motivations are usually to be objective. For one reason, that report will be available to the next administration and the one after that. You don't want your name on something biased that will offend the next administration. You play it straight. Another reason is that you really are an agnostic. I know the political affiliations of very few people I ever worked with either because they had none, which is most common, or because they kept their opinions on the back burner. They're more interested in the respect of their colleagues than in saving the world for or from any political objective. Reputation is extremely important to a civil servant. They also know their place, which is to implement laws, not make them. As for your opinion vis a vis out to lunch, I don't think it's entirely unfounded. As I said before, you can't run a government program unless you think the government can be part of the solution. And you may be concerned about putting yourself out of a job, but that's not very likely. Civil servants almost never lose jobs over the dissolution of their programs although they get nervous about it from time to time. Other than that, I don't see any motivation for the report writers to favor big government. That's not enough to drown out the oath they took to serve. Almost all the people in the kind of positions we're talking about are career civil servants. Only the bureau heads and their immediate staffs are political hires. At the end of an administration, the bureau heads often find their staffs permanent jobs where they can "burrow in" and act as agents for their political backers. It happens. But there aren't all that many of them. And there are places in the bureaucracy where the inmates are running the asylum. But that's anomalous, too. Remember, in four years there's another boss, so you don't want to get too far out on a limb and get that limb chopped off. The safest place is fair and honest and keep your head down when placed in a position where fair and honest is hard to do. Karen