R.E.S.P.E.C.T. (Or, Why Civil Servants Deserve More Of It, and Appointees Should Get Less Ink and Fewer Chairs)

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have made a couple of points about my argument that there are too many political appointees in government right now, that I think raise an interesting question about how people perceive the federal government and what they see of it. I want to explore their points, because I think they hit on some issues that may seem obvious to those of us who work in and cover the workings of government, but may be invisible to those outside it. Ezra says, postulating a pro-appointee argument:

The counterargument here is that administrations enter office with radically different agendas -- agendas that often have to be imposed on bureaucracies that have spent the last few years doing the opposite thing, and may have liked doing that thing. That's a lot of inertia for one appointee to overcome. So you fan them throughout the bureaucracy to make sure the various departments align with the administration's agenda.

But that sort of strategic appointing is not always necessary. It's hard to imagine the Treasury Department hid a lot of functionaries bitterly opposed to crafting a bank rescue plan.

I think this argument somewhat overstates the extent to which White House-set policy impacts the day-to-day operations of government, and that Ezra's right to say there aren't huge pockets of agenda-driven federal employees. It's one thing to set policy regarding what scientists can say to the press and Congress, for example. A policy decision like that might be something that a new administration wants to reverse, but it doesn't actually stop the scientists from doing research, or change the grants process at the National Science Foundation, much less change how the person who runs telework programs at the National Science Foundation does their job. The Bush administration may have changed how Medicare interacts with prescription drug coverage, but that doesn't change the fact that there are people who need to need to process Medicare applications.

More importantly, I think that what's most important to federal employees is efficacy, rather than ideology. If they work at the National Institutes of Health, they're going to support policies that do the most to support excellent research. If they work for the Army, they want to find effective ways to support the armed forces. When I was researching and reporting a series about faith in the federal workplace more than a year ago, one thing I found was that the very devout employees I talked to, even ones with clearly articulated conservative politics, were directing that energy not towards advancing a political agenda, but towards, for example, challenging themselves and their co-workers to do record amounts of pro-bono work helping low-income people with their tax filings, or creating work environments that helped them deal with the stress brought on by working in public health. The goal was efficacy, not a specific policy spin.