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- [00:00]
A
The history of the American Federal Civil service. What can we learn from its past glories and failures? And where should we all take this next to discuss? We have on today Kevin Havochorst of the foundation for American Innovation. Kevin, welcome to ChinaTalk.
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B
Really a pleasure to be here, Jordan.
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A
So where do we start the clock? Everyone always wants to do Pendleton, but I hear you have a contrarian take on this.
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B
Right? Well, people start the clock at Pendleton because that's the real birth of civil service law in the United States. But in my opinion, there's just a fundamental distinction between civil service law and the actual civil service. Right. The, the history of the US Civil service is the people who got hired and came in to do jobs for the government and did either a good job or a bad job, and people thought that they did well or poorly and they had some amount of training, all of those things. The civil service existed before the Pendleton Act. It existed long after the Pendleton Act. The real question in my mind is how good were the people? At different points in time, did Congress think that different agencies and different groups of employees were doing a good job, that they were trustworthy? So to me, I think you should start the clock at the major inflection points of the federal bureaucracy, where agencies became competent, where there were agencies that managed to set up recruitment pipelines of civil servants who, who could actually do the job they were hired for and command respect across the entire United States. Questions like the Pendleton act about merit exams and removal protections and that whole troika, they're important questions, but they're secondary to the actual question of who was working for the federal government and did they actually know a thing or two about what they were talking about?
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A
So, yeah, so how did we go from being like John Adams son, or just being a hack who got a job in the Postal Service to actually having real experts who knew what was up precisely.
- [02:25]
B
So well, that was the story in two acts. First, the United States under the Federalists and the Jeffersonians had a very gentlemanly conception of civil service, that basically any sort of, well brought up person of quality could do basically any job. Then the Jacksonians expanded that idea to the idea that anyone who volunteered for the campaign could do any sort of a job. And that was the low point of US civil service. So by the middle of the 1800s, the country was just completely awash in patronage. There would be just tens and tens of thousands of people fired after each presidential election. At the height of the patronage system, there were about 70,000 patronage positions in just the Post office alone. So you mentioned a hack at the post office. There were tens of thousands of hacks at the post office. So we are talking about an unpromising foundation here. All right. However, that was also kind of a opportunity because the starting point was so bad that only bureaucrats who were really, really good could overcome that and successfully set up agencies that commanded respect and recruited the right people. So in other countries there was just sort of a conception of the civil service as a gentlemanly kind of thing that recruited from people and it was never very controversial. The US was starting from such a point of patronage that only really outstandingly well run agencies could rise above that. So there was a certain pressure to create such things, although it was of course never the ordinary case. Now I think it's time to actually get to the answer of what you're talking about, which is, well, sounds great. How did they do that? So for the specific history there, there were a couple of early, early experiments that didn't really take, but they were very much the sort of playbook for later reformers. The first experience that's really worth looking at is called the Topographical corps in the U.S. army. So it was a bunch of professional engineers who were surveyors, who would go out and map out like roads and bridges and so forth. And it was a pretty elite group. It commanded a lot of respect from Congress, especially the western states where such surveys were done. And the basic playbook of it was it was a bunch of well qualified engineers who did something that Congress really wanted, which was to map some railroads and to map some bridges and things like that. Alright, but that didn't, that was sort of a early mid-1800s thing and it didn't last purely because of all of the politics leading up to the Civil War. Right. That was the base idea though, was recruit people from technical societies like engineering groups and put them at the disposal of Congress, turn them loose. Okay, so the real start of the upswing was where the civil service started to be clearly getting better rather than getting worse. I would peg it in about the 1870s or 1880s, so right around the time of Pendleton, but starting a little bit before it. So the first agency where I think the professionalization was a really big story was the U.S. public Health Service Service. So that agency was originally a kind of loose federation of doctors who provided care for people in, in and around the military. But it was really revamped in the 1870s where the director of the US Public Health Service decided to get serious. He revamped the service as almost Sort of like a paramilitary corps of surgeons where they had military esque uniforms, military ranks recruited from the medical schools around the country and paired with state hospitals to get their work done. All right, so if we're just starting by laying out the the heroes of this story, U.S. public Health Service in the early 1870s is one of them. Then a lot of the bureaus of the Department of Agriculture were extremely good, and they professionalized in the 1890s and the very first decade of the 1900s. So we're thinking about agencies like the Bureau of Entomology studied insects, the Forest Service, which was 1905. Ish. The Bureau of Soils. So USDA punched really above its weight in recruiting high quality people.
- [07:50]
A
So I'm curious, like, is this, you know, the other sort of professional thing we have from the start of the Republic are, you know, the profession of arms? Right. West Point goes back a pretty long time. And then, you know, you have sort of generals and admirals running around. I'm curious to what extent that was or wasn't a model for some of this much more domestic focus kind of expertise generating stuff.
- [08:17]
B
100% the model. You're completely right. So when I was talking about the civil service and its professionalization, the military actually furnishes several good examples that I was avoiding just because they weren't the civil service, they were the military service. But it's a great question because there are some really striking things you can find there. So in most of the United States, people would work their civil service jobs for, you know, a couple of years at the most and then get kicked out of after the next election. But in the military, there were a few heads of bureaus who were just almost all powerful. They served for literal decades, like from 10 years to 35 years or something like that. 10 years. That would be unimaginable even today. So in particular, the Quartermaster bureau under General Meigs I believe was outstandingly good because the difficulty of provisioning the entire far flung United States just was a very, very difficult job. They had to be very good at what they did. So when you talk about the military inspiration first, it's pretty clear that that was the inspiration. Like the idea of professionalizing by dressing in uniforms and having ranks and having standard training and so forth. But it's actually the more civilian y and logistical side of the military that was the bigger inspiration. The Quartermaster Bureau people don't talk about how outstandingly good it was, but it was world class. So that is an underrated one, I believe.
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A
All right, let's Continue the narrative, Kevin.
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B
Okay, I've set the stage for talking about the late 1800s. And I've said that these details about these cool agencies matter more than the Pendleton Act. Why do I think that? And the first question for that, I guess for some of your readers, your listeners, is what was the Pendleton Act? A long story short, the Pendleton act was passed after President Garfield was assassinated by a crazy dude who thought that Garfield had promised him a federal job. So by some astounding coincidence, reformers who wanted to get rid of patronage had basically the perfect story. And they muffled through Congress a bill that said you could only recruit people through merit tests. Alright? You had to test people and give the job to the most competent person. And it was meant to get rid of the patronage and graft. So the Pendleton act, people say, is like, this is when we decided to get rid of politics and recruit real experts. Here's the thing. First, it was just a law and it was not implemented very quickly. It applied to only a very small number of positions for decades. It took a very long time for it to explain that much about the competence of the civil service. That's the details of the law. But more than that, it was still just a law. The civil service is a bunch of dudes who work for the government and do stuff. And laws only matter if they make you recruit different dudes who do different stuff. So the fundamental question when did the government start recruiting better dudes who started doing better stuff? The Pendleton act helped change the trajectory. It's a major factor. It is not directly the answer to that question. You have to look at different agencies and say, when did they start recruiting much better people than they had recruited before and how did they manage to recruit those people and put them to use? So the history of civil service law is not the history of the civil service. So having made my anti Pendleton screed, we reach these bureaus that I love so much. The US Public Health Service, the different bureaus of usda, the Soil Service, the Bureau of Entomology, the Forest Service, all of those, those sorts of agencies. And we have the question like, why were they good? Why do I like them? I've said that they were cool people and that it was hard to recruit very experienced, competent people in that era. But like, how did they do it? My theory basically that struck me from reading all of this history is that agencies were just organized in a different way and they had a different relationship to Congress and civil society than we've got today. This was actually struck me when I was reading about the Department of Agriculture for the first time and I was thinking about the different agencies that were in usda, like the Bureau of Entomology, the Bureau of Plant Industry, the Bureau of Animal Industry, the Bureau of Soils. And I was thinking, these are such charmingly old fashioned names. And eventually I thought, you know, you don't have agencies named things like that anymore. I wonder why that is. So the, and the fact that these were very concrete and old fashioned sounding names reflected something quite real about what they did and the vision they embodied about what government is and does. So let's take my favorite example. The Bureau of Entomology studied, worked with insects at usda. What it did was it brought together all of the different facets about entomology. So the employees there would do research about entomology, usually working with state land grant colleges. They would do regulation condemning diseased crops, usually working with state regulators, and they would administer grant programs with farmers to help them insect proof their crops. Right. So my point here being that they combined the different functions of what government can do, all related to a single subject. And so they were then able to draw on technical vocations. If the government was making a pitch to entomologists, they would say, sure, Dupont or Monsanto or whatever the equivalent was back then. They can pay you more. But this is going to be literally the most interesting job in the world for an entomologist. You're going to be able to see every corner of it in your career from research to enforcement to just helping people on the ground. And that was just a very attractive proposition for technical people. Then when the agency was filled to the brim with these people with a slightly autistic fixation on their subjects, it was able to command real respect because it was clearly had expertise that was useful that most people just didn't have. Right. If you're a Bureau of Entomology filled with hard charging experts in insects who are going around putting a stop to outbreaks of weevils or whatever, that clearly is an impressive thing. Even during the patronage era, people would look at jobs in the post office and they'd say, I could do that. They'd look at jobs in the Treasury Department processing paperwork, they'd say, I could do that. But then you look at a Bureau of Entomology that is filled with uniformed entomologists with PhDs in an era when nobody had PhDs and it's going around ending outbreaks of infestations or whatever, People would not say I could do that. They would say, I'm glad that there are people who can do that. Which is basically the attitude that let some agencies rise above the morass of patronage in the late 1800s.
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A
And how far did we get with this trend? Like, give us, give us some of the highlights of the accomplishments that this setup ended up unlocking.
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B
Right. Well, I guess I'll go a little bit further into their day to day sort of process. As I said, they recruited people with the strength of their pitch. And then for the actual doing of the stuff, they paired pretty heavily with state regulators, state universities, things like that, to make themselves known throughout the entire country, to build up congressional support for what they were doing. So it wasn't just they could do the thing, it was they can do the thing. And everyone knows they can do the thing because they are doing the thing all throughout the U.S. so the progressive era playbook of these technical agencies, it was one, organized around a single subject that corresponds to some vocational community like engineers or like doctors or whatever. And then two, offer this technical resourcing to institutions throughout the country like state universities, state regulators, just ordinary people for grant aid to make it known that you have this expertise and are putting it at their disposal. So get in the right people and then get them out to show them to the world. That was the basic way that they were able to set up these agencies. Great.
- [18:48]
A
So, all right, we have all these really smart autists doing catastrophic. And in counting up insects and whatnot, what does that end up unlocking for the American people? Economic development, governance. That didn't exist when you were stuck with your tough uncle who roughed people up on the way to the polls, getting their postal service gig.
- [19:12]
B
Right? Well, just at the level of vibes, people don't appreciate just how good it was. So even just the quality of the people at USDA in like 1910, if you look at the top appointees, the people who ran the agencies formally, they were political appointees. Even though the president normally appointed career experts, 2/3 of them had graduate degrees in their subject, which would be both almost unimaginable today. And it was just astounding back then when basically nobody had a graduate degree, it was a vanishingly rare credential. So the agencies had very good leadership and the outcomes were much better than and is customarily remembered today. So there were European, European bureaucrats who went on trips to visit the USDA headquarters in like 1900, 1910s, because they said they considered it possibly the best run bureaucracy on the planet Earth. And it really did manage to do some pretty Big things. So the growth of productivity for American farmers was not really all that much of a. It was not quite the laissez faire, rugged individualism we remember it as. The USDA spent lavishly on research and there was tons and tons of outreach to bring this information to US farmers to boost productivity. So the Department of Agriculture first kept the agriculture sector humming along by just dispersing all of this knowledge and making it useful to farmers. And I, I can't recall the econometric studies offhand, but it was indeed a significant factor in helping the, the agrarian sector, which was the great majority of the United States up until fairly well into the 1900s. So it was helpful for, for the farmers then. A lot of the infrastructure connecting the United States was actually laid during that era. I mean, not like the physical infrastructure, but the basic setups. So the US Bureau of Public Roads was an agency that started the earliest programs about federal supervision of road building. And it was extremely elite. The head of it in the early 1900s had studied at the French University of Roads and Bridges, which is nearly the most, is one of the very most prestigious civil engineering schools in the world and probably was quite possibly the top in that era. So it set a lot of technical standards. And a lot of the planning about road layout eventually evolved into AID during the New Deal and ultimately the Interstate highway system. So people remember, of course, the actual building of the Interstate highway system. But the Bureau of Public Roads started raising standards for state and local roads and it started writing the plans and getting politicians aligned on plans that bore fruit much later. But their vision had a very great staying power. It was very path dependent in that sense. And then there was also a very fundamental boost to the US Economy in the postal Service. So as we've talked about, there was this, you know, many rough uncles, perhaps tens of thousands of them who, who got their job from doing campaign work in, whether in the sticks or in the slums of the city or wherever disreputable fellows who want to work for the post office come from. But towards the end of the 1800s, there was a backlash against the fact that the post office was incredibly expensive and worked poorly, which is a predictable enough backlash. And so the post office too tried to professionalize. There's an interesting story of how they did that, which we could go into if we wanted to. But one of the things they did as they were professionalizing is they said, we've become a lot more competent, we've got our costs under control, we're hiring professional people and kicking out the corrupt ones. We want to start doing more. And they said, we want to start setting up a delivery network for parcels and magazines and so forth throughout the entire United States. Because before that it had been letters, basically was what the post office did. So they convinced Congress to go along with it and they got it rolled out throughout the entire United States. And this was actually very. It was transformative, especially for the more backwards rural parts of the United States. I'm sure you've heard like stories perhaps by grandfather or perhaps just, you know, reading about them, but about people in rural communities reading their Sears and Roebucks catalog, deciding what they're going to buy. Right. It was once transformative that you even could do that, because where did the delivery service come from? Like how did Sears and Roebuck send you the stuff that you ordered? Right. How did they even send you the catalog in the first place? The post office was a driving force in setting up. I don't remember if it was highly subsidized or free, but it was at least highly subsidized. A delivery network for magazines and parcels and things like that, which enabled the reach of these big manufacturers such as were sold in Sears and Roebuck's catalog to sell throughout the entire United States. You got a mass market for goods on the one hand, you got the rural area being connected to the modern economy on the other hand. And the post office was at the center of also kind of broke up the corrupt or at least very personalistic power relations in certain rural communities where it used to be the person who owned the general store was sort of the. The king of the castle. He was the one who everyone had to buy goods from. But now you could buy from anyone who would deliver to you. You could just get their catalog and order it. So the post office's professionalization created a mass market for goods and it also brought modernity to a great deal of the rural United States. So the actual stakes of civil service were much higher than just, do we have people take tests? Do we have too many people getting fired? It was things like, are we starting to think about the infrastructure of the United States? Are we bringing modernity to the rural areas through delivery networks, through agricultural research, through things like that? So the accomplishments are really foundational and they're sort of forgotten because people over index on asking what were the laws like? And they don't ask what was the bureaucracy like, what were they doing and were they good at it?
- [27:33]
A
Well, let's take a little detour. Amongst our many detours to sort of talk about the literature around these questions. I think like a year or two ago, I must have tweeted out, you know, who's got good books on the history of federal bureaucracy for me? And you responded with like, a book from 1957, which was a good book, but was also like, kind of the only book. And I mean, and there's like one Italian, like, professor who has written a contemporary thing about, about the history of the post, primarily post World War II American Civil Service. But, Kevin, you've put together an annotated bibliography about this. Why don't you just give the audience a bit of a sense of what is the scholarship that's out there for you to be able to make those sorts of claims that you have over the past half hour?
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B
Well, first I'll give sort of a horror story for your listeners, which is a book from 1957 is one of the more comparatively recent books on my, my bibliography. Many of them are from, from the 20s and 30s. But for the question of why is that the case, I think it's kind of useful to step back and ask the broader question, like, how did I get interested in this and how did I find the. The sorts of books that I read in the first place? So I got interested in this in grad school when I was studying economics, and I wanted to know more about the politics and implementation of programs. In particular, I had this. Was the government more competent in the past? And lots of people have asked that, right. But I got frustrated at the level of generality that this debate often stayed at, where to kind of exaggerate. People would say, well, in the past we hired real experts and gave them real authority but had real accountability or some similarly meaningless thing. The problem with all of that sort of reasoning is it's just a platitude, right? And I thought, okay, there's a prima facie case to be made here, which is we won World War II and built the Interstate highway system and put a man on the moon, and now we do not very much of any of those things. But given that we pulled this stuff off back then, there must have been concrete nuts and bolts, things that we did differently. So I wanted to know, like, how did we write job descriptions for the Tennessee Valley Authority's engineers and how did they hire them? How did they do budgetary oversight for the New Deal infrastructure? How did they train managers for the Interstate Highway System program? Right. Questions like that. And I've in fact, written pieces about all of those things. Those aren't just like, meaningless Random illustrations. But the point being there's just very, very, very little written about this. There's a lot of discussion of the high politics of things, but it sort of treats the stopping point as being a law is passed or a consensus was brought about or something like that. But the real question is what are bureaucracies doing right? Like how are they budgeting for things and hiring people and training people and this and that and the other thing, because like I said, at the end of the day, the civil service is a bunch of dudes who work for the government and who do stuff for the government. And the question of public administration is like, who were those dudes and how did they do the stuff they did? Okay, so that was the question that I wanted to know. And it turned out, first, that there's almost nothing written about this. But second, it's not actually that difficult to find out. Most of this stuff is just public domain government office manuals or whatever that has long since been digitized on Google books. And you could look up the answer to a lot of the questions I've asked without getting up from your desk. So the starting point for what I was interested in is just this question. How did it actually work? Like not taking anyone else's word for it, what did the agencies internally say they were doing about how they were hiring people and picking out projects and this and that and the other. So for my sources on bureaucracy on my reading list that you mentioned, a whole lot of them are just the primary sources of agencies explaining what worked well and why and how they did it, which I find is just vastly more interesting and actionable than the secondary literature, which is often quite vague summaries that sans away almost all of the technical details of like how did they budget for projects, how, how did they classify jobs? Questions like that. So for the first stab at it, a lot of the answer is just primary sources. Primary sources are way better than secondary literature because it's the word words of the bureaucracy talking about itself. It's how it thought, it's what people thought they were doing and why they thought they were doing it, which is just something you don't get except by reading primary sources, even for things like budgeting or personnel. Then you get to what you're sort of talking about, which is old fashioned books about the history of the civil service written probably from the 1920s to the early 1960s. And the question is, why do I recommend books like that rather than more modern books? So just as a anecdote here, in my early days of studying public administration and bureaucratic history. I saw a monograph about the Canadian budget system that was written in like 1915 or something like that, Some such ludicrously ancient dinosaur of a book. And I have a friend who worked for the budget office of Canada, so I sent it to him and I said, is it accurate? Like, how's the book? And he said, well, I'll read it for a laugh, but Americans talking about the Canadian budget system more than a hundred years ago. He's like, I'd be, you know, surprised if they got even one thing right. So then like a month or two later I get a text from him where he says, I finally finished it. He said, not only was it good, it's probably better than anything that's been written since then. And it answered several questions I've always had at the back of my mind about why my job worked the way that it does. So these old fashioned books, they have something to be said for them. And the reason for it is I think just that the culture of academic work was very different back then. To briefly lapse into the register of one of those annoying Roman statue people from Twitter. We were a serious country back then. So the way that a lot of research worked was it was very much focused on collecting all of the raw mass of facts and taxonomizing it and just saying here is everything there is to know about the subject with not all that much big picture interpretation, but just utterly comprehensive in its collection of facts and description of the way that things worked. Today that just isn't the fashion for doing either academic research, and certainly not think tank policy research. There's much more a focus on having the right kind of like big picture idea or a sort of vision or an interesting narrative or something like that. But in the past, a lot of these studies were content to just collect everything that is known about the subject, organize it logically, and say, here's kind of how it looks for us, but we're telling you everything that we know. And you know, come up with your own conclusions if you like, my friend. The good thing about that is you can come up with your own conclusions if you like. And a lot of these books will just teach you things you would have never even thought to ask for. About the fairly bizarre experiments that were tried at different times, or just how, which sometimes worked very well, sometimes were astounding failures, sometimes you're surprised that anyone even tried to do it. But there's just a lot of benefit to having a resource that says here is everything that has ever been tried or even thought of. And here's how you should think about the entire field based on that. It was a lot of focus on policy was like the stamp collection for people who wrote these books. They wanted to just collect all of it and arrange it carefully. And they believed that you would be just as fascinated by all of the different ways to do budgeting as they were.
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A
So let's come back to our timeline.
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B
Then.
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A
How does it all fall apart?
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B
KEVIN okay, so I've given you paradise, and now it's time to give you paradise Lost. Right, so we have. Let's recap the scene in the 1910s, the 1920s. We have a beautiful scene of in the bureaucracy. We've got entomologists who just spend their entire day thinking about ants. We've got civil engineers who look at roads more often than they look at human faces. We've got all of these people in the bureaucracy. And then in civil society, they're supported by researchers who just spend their days writing 400 page books comparing the US budgetary system to the Canadian and British budgetary systems. Okay, a beautiful time to be a bureaucrat. What happened? So when I mentioned earlier that the agency names for the U.S. department of Agriculture were old fashioned, to recap, Bureau of Entomology, Bureau of Plant Industry, Bureau of Soils, Forest Service, they sound old fashioned because most of those things don't really exist. Like we don't have agencies like that anymore. And what do we mean by that? And why don't we. So in about the 30s to the 50s, there was a movement called. It wasn't really like an official movement, but what they called it was functional reorganization. So there was this viewpoint that the government was organized in a kind of unscientific way where it was just a random collection of, you know, entomologists and soil scientists and whatever, but it was just a grab bag of random vocations that had managed to plant their flagpole in the federal government. What reformers said is what we really need is a very clean, tidy org chart that can expand or contract to do anything that the government wants to do. In particular, they said that the government should be reorganized in order to separate by function rather than subject matter. What that meant in practice was let's take the US Department of Agriculture. I'm going to stylize this a little bit. This isn't quite literally true, but very close. So for the Department of Agriculture, it had the Bureau of Entomology, which researched insects, it regulated insects, it did grant programs about insect proofing crops you have the Bureau of Soil, which again, it researched soil. It did grant programs to help farmers prevent erosion and it regulated the sorts of things that cause erosion and so forth and so on. Functional reorganization said, we're going to grab each of these functions from the different agencies. So starting with research, they said, we're going to create a new bureau that's the Bureau of Agricultural Research. And we're going to take the soil research and we're going to take the insect research and we're going to take all the other types of research and put it in here. They said, second, we're going to have a Bureau of Grant programs. So we're going to take the programs about insect proofing crops from the entomologists. We're going to take the grant programs about preventing erosion from the soil surface. We're going to keep taking these programs and we're going to put them all in a Bureau of Grant writing. Then they said, finally, we're going to have the Bureau of Just Agricultural Regulation. So we're going to take the regulations about condemning diseased crops that have insects over here, we're going to take the regulations about runoff from the soil Service over there. We're going to take every type of research and we're going to put it into the Bureau of Research. So now there is nothing left in the Bureau of Entomology, the Bureau of Soil Soils. They were reorganized out of existence and the new org chart was around functions. It was like all grant outreach here, all grant programs here, all research over there and then over yonder, all regulation. It was no longer organized around topics like entomology or shipbuilding or soil or roads. The organization of the government was after that based around functions. And that is kind of why the names of these old bureaus sound old fashioned because they're very concrete and today we have pretty vague names that are about functions rather than things you can look at and touch.
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A
And why is this the worst thing to happen since the invention of the forward pass?
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B
Well, backing up what made these agencies so good in the first place? Right. It was the fact that they said we have a really unified mission that ought to be really appealing to any technical person. They said, if you want to do entomology, then if you work at the Bureau of Entomology, you're going to get to do grants about bugs. You're going to get to do research about bugs. You're sure gonna regulate the bugs. So if you're just wild about bugs, this is the place to be. And entomologists loved it. They went bananas. So what happens when you completely undo that and organize according to the opposite principle? Right. Well, first you no longer have that pitch. Let's say you're a really good entomologist and the U.S. department and you're considering Monsanto versus Department of Agriculture. Department of Agriculture says, would you like to work on the Bureau of Agricultural Regulation? Maybe. Would you like to work in the Bureau of Agricultural Research where you'll be one of the many priorities we have? Maybe. Would you like to work doing aid in processing paperwork? Probably not. And then Monsanto says, would you like me to pay you 10 times more and fly you around to industry conferences and all that jazz? You say sold to the highest bidder. Right. So the government just didn't have a pitch to recruit technical people because it didn't really have a place to put them anymore. There just isn't really a logical place for technical communities to exist under this system. On top of that, the new agencies had much more pathological cultures in the old fashioned system. The subject matter systems I was talking about earlier, the Bureau of Entomology, they had sort of a balanced mission where sure, they gave aid to farmers, but that was never all that they cared about because they wanted to get back to doing their research eventually. And sure, they regulated the farmers, but that wasn't all they cared about because eventually they would want to get back to doing their research or helping out with grant programs or something like that. No one element was dominant, but under the functional system, there was much more of a monoculture in agencies. If you're the Bureau of Regulation, there's a lot more incentive to be a lot harsher to the entities that you regulate because you don't have to really work with them and see the consequences. You don't administer any programs with them. Then if you're the Bureau of Just Research, it rapidly became very academic and not very applied because they weren't really working with real people anymore, like farmers and state regulators and people like that. Then probably the worst behavior was what happens when you create bureaus just devoted to grant programs and aid programs. The problem here is if you're an agency that distributes grants, the only way that you can have more prestige, more funding, more personnel, is to open up the spigots further and get even more money flowing to your grantees. So agencies devoted to grant writing just completely and totally identified with their interest groups and it really decreased a lot of the autonomy that agencies had had and the independent technical judgment that they used to embody. So the functional reorganization from about the, really the 40s and 50s was when it was carried out. To me, that is my, my sort of original sin. That's what takes us from paradise to paradise Lost.
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A
All right, so Kevin, what's the path back?
- [47:27]
B
The path back? Well, that is a good question. I guess the first implicit premise of this is is there a path back? So the, the fortunate. It would be nice if there is a path back, because that is ostensibly what I talk about for my day job. So it would be a problem for me if the answer was no, we're screwed. So luckily, I think the answer is there is a path at least to point us more in the right direction, and I think there's an opportunity for it. Today you see a lot more interest in rethinking the ossified and outdated bureaucratic processes that we used to just put up with for a long time. So here I'm no longer talking about functional reorganization per se. I'm just talking about how dysfunctional lots of bureaucratic process is about permitting or about, or about federal hiring or something like that, which is something that is the opposite of a technical viewpoint that focuses on achieving actual results. So the government was in, is in not a very good state with lots of red tape, just dysfunctional processes. And for a long time there was sort of learned helplessness, like people in policy world would kind of say, well, maybe things could be 5% more this way or like 5% the other way, but things could never be all that different from the way they are right now. Today we live in the era of Trump Round two and doge and whatever else can be said, it cannot be said that they are limited to making things 5% more one way or 5% the other way. So there has been a real, shall we say, an expansion of people's conception of what is possible. Where I've heard this even from some Democrat friends, they've said things along the lines of, well, what fools we were in the Biden admin to care so much about doing things just the way they're always done, because that's the correct way. When the Trump admin is just going out and doing stuff, they're like, well, we should have. You know, they, they claim we're going to care about the law a lot more, but like, we won't care about anything else besides that. We're just going to go do the stuff if we're, if we're smart. So the Trump Round two experience of shaking things up has changed at least the conception of what's possible what can be done. And you could make a good case that the end results will be a lot worse than we had thought would be possible. You could make a good case they'll be a lot better than we had thought that would be possible. But the range of outcomes is much, much wider. There's also a lot going on that doesn't make the news quite as much, but it's shaking things up in a probably more lasting way than Doge of blessed Memory did. Where, for example, the administration is doing a lot of revamping of federal hiring. It used to be the case that federal resumes were like 10 or 15 pages long, absolutely insane, like crazy by any private sector standpoint. And the administration, well, people have talked about improving this for years or decades. And the administration hit on a simple solution, which is they said we're going to just change USA jobs. So it's going to reject anything that's more than two pages long. Figure it out. Right. So that would be an example that hopefully makes. Makes it a bit more concrete what I'm talking about, where it's just going out and doing something and now things are pretty different from where they were, even though people thought it couldn't really be changed. So there's stuff going on politically that expands people's conception of what's possible. I also think is the United States has an incredible capacity to get ourselves deep into a problem and also has an incredible capacity to find the solution in our hearts all along, or something like that. The there's a lot of excitement in civil society about the idea of just trying to be more competent, trying to make things run better and caring if they do. We see this kind of with I think the abundance movement that saw the rage these days. There are people who said, okay, we have to promise to promise our firstborn child for debt peonage to buy a house, and wouldn't it be nicer if that weren't the case? So the end result is they've organized and they're trying to make it easier to build houses and roads and have just a better, more abundant future, as they would say. And that's just really a very United States thing to do. The belief that you really can just make things better if you get together and argue and fight hard enough to change the rules of the game. Then for more, what we're talking about specifically, there's a lot of excitement around what people call state capacity. And by people, I include myself because that is my job title. But the, the idea that just government should be able to do stuff right, and it can't do stuff, but it should. And why can't it? And the answers are because it can't hire people, because it can't update its IT systems, this, that. But there's excitement about actually diving into these gory details and trying to fix things. So I'm just not to talk too much about my day job, but at the foundation for American Innovation, I'm really just constantly struck that this is actually a great time to be in policy because there are lots of other think tanks that are kind of recent, Institute for Progress, Niskanen Centre Place, places like that where they really do care about hiring younger, harder charging people who want to argue that things could be much better than they are, not just 5% better or 5% worse. There's also a lot of movement in philanthropy world about this. There was a, A, a fund that raised like a hundred million dollars to improve things about IT process and hiring process, the Recoding America Fund. So the path back is first, is there like a groundwork? And I will say you have to have a sort of optimistic spirit to interpret it this way, but there is definitely a groundwork and there is definitely a semi realistic world where things get better. And the reason for that is things have been shaken up politically and culturally, socially, institutionally. People realize that things have had, have to change and they're putting resources towards it. So that's just my foundational opinion is I said earlier we were a serious society back then, kind of jokingly, I see evidence that we are at least interested in becoming a serious society again. That's one step removed from bringing the bug scientists back to the government. But it's, I think, kind of the foundation for absolutely any big change.
- [56:00]
A
Anything else we should close on, Kevin?
- [56:07]
B
Well, I guess the biggest thing would be to make sort of a pitch here. I always enjoy ranting about the history of bureaucracy, but as I said, it would be nice to go from I talk about bureaucracy to we become a serious country again. So if there's anyone out there who thinks that it does sound cool to read 400 pages about the, the budgetary system of the United Kingdom and 1910 and talk about what that means for it procurement today, please get in touch with me. Message me on LinkedIn, substack, wherever, because there are just a few enough people who care about making things work well. And I'm hoping that some of your listeners do. But in any event, it's really a pleasure to talk about this and look forward to listening to more of what you've got cooking up.
- [57:09]
A
For what it's worth, I've really been enjoying Kevin's scholarship activism around this stuff. I found his writing and deep dives into this space to be fascinating. And this world needs more young, hungry historians, policy entrepreneurs trying to make the civil service more exciting and vibrant place. So hats off to you, Kevin. Do reach out if you thought this stuff was cool. And yeah, keep digging. We need more entomology stories from the 1910s.
- [57:45]
B
All right. Right. There will be more bugs to come.