Winner of the 2016 Book of the Year Award from the American Society of Public Administration.

Why big government is not the problem

The Progressive government movement, founded on support from Republicans and Democrats alike, reined in corporate trusts and improved the lives of sweatshop workers. It created modern government, from the Federal Reserve to the nation’s budgetary and civil service policies, and most of the programs on which we depend.

Ask Americans today and they will tell you that our government has hit a wall of low performance and high distrust, with huge implications for governance in the country. Instead of a focus on government effectiveness, the movement that spawned the idea of government for the people has become known for creating a big government disconnected from citizens. Donald F. Kettl finds that both political parties have contributed to the decline of the Progressive ideal of a commitment to competence. They have both fed gridlock and created a government that does not work the way citizens expect and deserve.

Kettl argues for a rebirth of the original Progressive spirit, not in pursuit of bigger government but with a bipartisan dedication to better government, one that works on behalf of all citizens and that delivers services effectively. He outlines the problems in today’s government, including political pressures, proxy tools, and managerial failures. Escaping Jurassic Government details the strategies, evidence, and people that can strengthen governmental effectiveness and shut down gridlock.

      

 

 

Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on the Center for Public Impact blog. See more information about CPI twitter, @CPI_foundation.

Fans of service delivery are convinced that delivery is truly the core of governance in the 21st century—and that the delivery unit is an organizational mechanism that governments ought to adopt. But if it’s such a good idea, why don’t more people care—especially elected officials? And if people can be convinced to care, what will it take to make more things happen more effectively?

The puzzle at the core is the old one of balancing supply and demand. Reformers have produced a steady supply of new ideas, including a focus on delivery, and new structures to produce those ideas, including the delivery unit at the center of government. But on the demand side, elected officials often don’t care about these initiatives. They either don’t believe they matter or don’t believe they can help, especially in producing results during the time they have in office. They often don’t want to buy what the analysts are selling.

Boosting the business of government

There are three big reasons why the focus on delivery makes sense for elected officials. Firstly, elected officials too often discover the costs of failing to deliver only when mega-crises occur. And then it’s too late—they find themselves in political hot water over issues they never saw coming.

Elected officials, not surprisingly, focus on policy and politics and tend to push questions of delivery off to the bureaucracy. Voters, of course, expect value for their hard-earned tax dollars and, when big problems surface—from natural disasters to public health crises—they expect their elected officials to solve them. There is often little upside political gain for good management, since voters naturally expect that politicians shouldn’t get applause for doing their job. But there’s often a huge downside risk in failing to respond effectively to crises. Too often, elected officials discover that lesson too late, when failures in crisis management stick to them like flypaper. That was the catastrophic story of President George W. Bush, whose polling negatives exceeded his positives and never recovered after the debacle of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The second reason is language. Elected officials typically process reality and speak to citizens through anecdotes and stories. Delivery units naturally gravitate to sophisticated data analysis. It can often be difficult to translate the analytical language of delivery into the anecdote-based language of politics, so delivery analysts and elected officials often talk past each other.

We are beginning to find better ways to make the connection. Delivery analysts are learning to translate their analytics into anecdotes. These stories can be a powerful means of persuasion when they resonate with elected officials, and they can be analytically valid if they capture the core of the underlying measures, just as statistical measures are designed to do. Place-based mapping systems can also prove powerful, as some of the American stat-based systems are demonstrating. That’s an important finding of the new Johns Hopkins University Center for Government Excellence, which is tackling the challenge of creating a data infrastructure in 100 American cities.

The fundamental challenge is that people at the top want questions for which they want answers—and they don’t always want answers to questions they haven’t asked. Unless delivery experts make that connection, elected officials aren’t likely to pay attention to the data. That means, in turn, that one of the most important challenges facing delivery units and their analysts is getting the people who share responsibility for decisions and their delivery to speak a language both parties understand and want to hear.

The third reason is government’s ongoing capacity problem. Delivery units sometimes falter in the transition between administrations, not so much because of an unwillingness to continue good work but because new officials sometimes fail to see the connection between their decisions and the apparatus required to make them real. It’s hardly surprising that a candidate who campaigns against the incumbent often arrives in office distrusting the system that the previous administration shaped. But when they take over, newly-elected officials need the support of the permanent government, often far more than they know. Doing important, hard, complicated things requires a highly-skilled bureaucracy—and elected officials who build a trust in it. Building that trust often requires enhancing capacity as well.

Rising to the challenge

This frames one of the most important roles that a delivery unit can play, as a shock absorber between political officials at the top and the administrative machinery at the bottom. Even if a new administration decides it doesn’t want to follow the delivery unit model, it needs to wire the government to make the connections between decisions and delivery. No government can survive for long without that connection—and it’s a challenge that will punish any government that fails to meet it.

      

 

 

In the flush of enthusiasm to make government work better, reformers from both left and right have urged government to turn as many functions as possible over to the private sector and to allow market competition instill efficiency and choice. In fact, government has been doing just this for years: every major policy initiative launched since World War II has been managed by public-private partnerships. Yet such privatization has not solved government’s problems. While there have been some positive results, thee has been far less success than advocates of market competition have promised.

In a searching examination of why the “competition prescription” has not worked well, Donald F. Kettl finds that government has largely been a poor judge of private markets. Because government rarely operates in truly competitive markets contracting out has not so much solved the problems of inefficiency, but has aggravated them. Government has often not proved to be an intelligent consumer of the goods and services it has purchased. Kettl provides specific recommendations as to how government can become a “smart buyer,” knowing what it wants and judging better what it has bought.

Through detailed case studies, Kettl shows that as market imperfections increase, so do problems in governance and management. He examines the A-76 program for buying goods and services, the FTS-2000 telecommunications system, the Superfund program, the Department of Energy’s production of nuclear weapons, and contracting out by state and local governments. He argues that government must be more aggressive in managing contracts if it is to build successful partnerships with outside contractors.

Kettl maintains that the answer is not more government, but a smarter one, which requires strong political leadership to refocus the bureaucracy’s mission and to change the bureaucratic culture.

      

 

 

On March 22, the Brookings Institution hosted a half-day conference on improving government performance, efficiency and effectiveness. The second annual A. Alfred Taubman Forum convened leaders from government, academia, and administrative agencies to discuss concrete policy actions to improve federal government performance and to overcome obstacles that hinder good governance. Questions to be explored included: How can we reform our political institutions? How can we improve federal agency performance? Where will we get our future federal workforce and what is the role of technology in making agencies more transparent and efficient?

To discuss these challenges were Jeffrey Zients, chief performance officer and deputy director, White House Office of Management and Budget; Joseph Goldman, interim executive director, Campaign for Stronger Democracy; and Shelley Metzenbaum, associate director for performance and management, White House Office of Management and Budget.

Following each panel, the participants took questions from the audience.

      

 

 

The authors of this book contend that the civil service system, which was devised to create a uniform process for recruiting high-quality workers to government, is no longer uniform or a system. Nor does it help government find and retain the workers it needs to build a government that works.

The current civil service system was designed for a government in which federal agencies directly delivered most public services. But over the last generation, privatization and devolution have increased the number and importance of government’s partnerships with private companies, nonprofit organizations, and state and local governments. Government workers today spend much of their time managing these partnerships, not delivering services, and this trend will only accelerate in the future. The authors contend that the current system poorly develops government workers who can effectively manage these partnerships, resulting too often in a gap between promise and performance.

This short, lively, and bipartisan volume, authored by the nation’s leading experts on government management, describes what the government of the future will look like, what it will need to work well, and how in particular the nation can build the next generation of workers required to lead it.

      

 

 

As the Clinton administration marks the fifth anniversary of its “reinventing government” campaign, what has it produced? This report, one of Brookings’ continuing analyses of management reform, examines the content and accomplishments of reinventing government, as well as the missing pieces it has yet to tackle. Reinventing government has often been presented as a revolution in government management. In truth it is less a revolutionary than an evolutionary movement. To its great credit, reinventing government has evolved to the point that it has recognized the central dilemma: redefining accountability for performance in the many programs where government’s partners share responsibility for performance. However, reinventing government has yet to develop or implement strategies to solve this problem. For that matter, though, it is a problem bedeviling government reformers around the world. If the answers are as yet unclear, the question at least is the right one. It is the question ensuring that, whoever is elected president in 2000, reinventing government in some form must continue.

      

 

 

The era of strict top-down, stovepiped public management in America is over. The traditional dichotomy between public ownership and privatization is an outdated notion. Public executives have shifted their focus from managing workers and directly providing services to orchestrating networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations to deliver those services. Unlocking the Power of Networks employs original sector-specific analyses to reveal how networked governance achieves previously unthinkable policy goals.

Stephen Goldsmith and Donald F. Kettl head a stellar cast of policy practitioners and scholars exploring the potential, strategies, and best practices of high-performance networks while identifying next-generation issues in public-sector network management. They cover the gamut of public policy issues, including national security, and the book even includes a thought-provoking look at how jihadist terrorists use the principles of network management to pursue their goals.

Contributors: William G. Berberich (Virginia Tech), Tim Burke (Harvard University), G. Edward DeSeve (University of Pennsylvania),William D. Eggers (Manhattan Institute), Anne M. Khademian (Virginia Tech), H. Brinton Milward (University of Arizona), Mark H. Moore (Harvard University), Paul Posner (George Mason University), Jörg Raab (Tilburg University), and Barry G. Rabe (University of Michigan).

      

 

 

On December 17, Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston moderated a discussion with Kettl to examine the governance challenges facing the next administration and offer solutions to the policy problems plaguing our government. They were joined by Elaine Kamarck, lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Jonathan Breul, executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

This event is part of the Governing Ideas series intended to broaden the discussion of governance issues through forums on timely and relevant books on history, culture, legal norms and practices, values and religion.

      

 

 

Kamarck’s The End of Government…As We Know It: Making Public Policy Work (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007) also argues that this revolution in governing brings new challenges, more questions, and a renewed debate over how to make public policy work.

On Thursday, March 1, Brookings hosted a discussion featuring Kamarck, a public policy lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston, and Nonresident Senior Fellow Donald Kettl.