You know what they say: be careful what you wish for. That goes double in government. And right now we’re seeing some simultaneous fallout from and aggravation of the public wishing for the ephemeral illusion of “accountability” in government. Now don’t get me wrong – anyone charged with doing a thing for pay, and especially those who are charged with serving the public for tax-pay, should be accountable for their work. Unfortunately “accountability” has become a red herring. Everyone must be endlessly accountable to everyone for everything all the time, and open to criticism from anywhere about what they do. (If I haven’t already posted something about how the judiciary should emphatically NOT be accountable to the public, I will soon.) OK. Fine. That’s Thing 1.
So let’s look at Thing 2. Thing 2 is the recession-and-GOP-driven neurosis about government payrolls. It’s a recession, I get it. See prior post about government not being a business. BUT – just because you see a big number somewhere doesn’t mean that number must be inherently inflated or illegitimate because it’s big. That’s what’s happening now with state and federal employees. GOP officials all over the country, and Tea Partiers in particular, armchair-politicianed and minority-party-grandstanded themselves into a corner by yelling from sea to shining sea about cutting budgets/deficits/spending/entitlements/etc. Then America called their bluff. Now they’re in office going “oh shit – I can’t actually do anything about this stuff, now what?” So – they look for a big number and an easy enemy, and come up with government workers.
As in every job, there are many, many dedicated individuals who pursue their tasks diligently and caringly. There are also jackasses. They are everywhere and they are part of the fabric of human existence. And BTW America – from what I’ve seen, a lot of you calling DMV and postal workers names had it coming! I’ve seen you acting like jackasses yourselves, so you don’t get to feel put-out when someone gives it back to you. But I digress. The point is, “government payroll” – when taken as a whole – tends to be a big number, and everyone in society has encountered a jackass at some agency or other, so officials have set about turning working people against each other. The better to rob you with, my dear.
So now we’ve got the litany of evils about government workers. See prior post about Wisconsin and the GOP hypocrisy of union-busting there. Next on the list, though, is how top-heavy government agencies are. There are X managers for every Y employees and that’s so clearly unreasonable that something must be wrong and we’re getting fleeced and DAMMIT they’re not gonna take it anymore!
Well, OK. What’s the remedy? ACCOUNTABILITY!! We’re spending thousands/ millions/ gazillions on this project or that agency or this other goal, and someone should be accountable for how that money gets spent! Well, yes. And odds are that someone is. Odds are that after multiple bites at this particular apple over the past dozen decades or so, that many people are. Because every time some administration has an accountability-gasm, they start putting new people into new places to do new things designed to “oversee” or “monitor” or “regulate” what everyone else is doing, including the ten people who were previously appointed to oversee, monitor, and regulate the same thing. So now every time an agency does something, every second of every employee’s time and every consideration of every step of every committee for every change of anything anywhere has to be accounted for multiple times.
Guess what that means. That means that every time one of these accountability pimps puts another measure in place, the agency has to restructure its work flow to “be accountable” to one more person for one more thing. So we get lots and lots of people watching a henhouse where the hens can do nothing but report and track and “be accountable,” and then we get the incessant hue and cry about how inefficient the government is – how they can’t seem to do anything without twelve forms filled out in triplicate, filed with four different offices, approved by nine managers, sent to committee, sent back, reassigned, expired, resubmitted, reassigned again, lost, found, and buried in peat moss. You got what you asked for.
There are lots of people in government whose jobs are to manage the accountability. They collect information about what other people think will be the timelines or costs or outcomes or risks for a project, and what’s actually happening. They assemble it, analyze it, move it around, prepare reports for the project managers, the enterprise managers, the division managers, the department managers, the committees, the boards, the legislators, and the public. That’s their job: being accountable. There are often more of these people than there are people being accounted for.
And once again the hue and cry has gone up about topheavy/ bloated/ unsustainable/ socialist government payrolls and how someone should have to be accountable and DAMMIT they’re not gonna take anymore! So here we sit. Waiting for the next rule change or revolutionary piece of legislation that tells us we need one more report to go to some new committee who will appoint some new overlord to look at reports and save the world. Meanwhile some of us try to fit in a little bit of actual productivity amongst all the accounting. Bawk bawk.
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