I’ve been reading a lot about Richard Clarke lately, his book, his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, the sustained effort by the Republican Party to smear Clarke without actually addressing the substance of anything he has written or said. And a lot of good writers have written well about the impact on our national debate about the war on Al Qaeda (or War on Terror if you must) and about the impact on this year’s presidential election.

I on the other hand just want to jot down some thoughts regarding Clarke as bureaucrat and why what he did is incredibly important to the functioning of a modern democracy. We have a large non-partisan civil service in this country. There are a large number of slots at the top of the federal government that are filled with political appointees but it is a limited percentage of the federal workforce. It didn’t alway work like this - in the 19th century, the federal government (albeit with a much smaller workforce) was almost entirely partisan with each election turning over most of the federal workforce. Reforms by Roosevelt and his successor Taft, I believe were largely responsible for turning the federal workforce into the non-partisan, career-oriented civil service we have today.

In any agency than you have a large percentage of continuing employees who in theory are there to work for the public good generally and the specific mission of the agency in particular. Agencies are essentially chartered by Congress to work at specific statutory tasks (all agencies act under authority of and within the scope of statutes - statutes passed by Congress and signed by Presidents). In the best of all possible worlds the employees of any Agency would work to implement the statutory missions they have been give as best as they know how and would go about their tasks without concern for the short term priorities of any particular administration’s political appointees. Agency employees would feel an independence to offer to the political appointees (these folks do actually run things so they ultimately decide what the agency does) the best possible advice without regard to what they think the head of the agency wants to hear. The head of the agency and his political appointees would listen to this advice and while they obviously do not have to heed it they would have heard actual non-partisan advice from employees who often have a tremendously deep knowledge and expertise in very specific, specialized areas. In fact, agency employees should work hard to implement all legal actions they are directed to do by the folks in charge of the agency even if those employees believe they are mistaken actions. (If the actions are illegal though agency employees should blow the whistle on that activity.)

It generally doesn’t work that way. There is a much different dynamic at play where civil servants possess a range of attitudes towards their political superiors in accomplishing their tasks. Some employees frame their entire approach to work as to what they believe their superiors want to hear. Some do not. Most change their approach in different situations. Obviously the problem with a failure to independently assess any task is that if what the boss wants to hear is wrong and there is a better option, the boss never gets a chance to hear what the better option is since the employee(s) limit their approach to what they think the boss wants to hear.

A further problem occurs when the political appointees of an agency (or for that matter of the White House) don’t even bother to listen to the advice of the civil servants. At some point the conscientious civil servant reaches a point where he or she knows that there is no process for providing advice to the proper decision makers. Those decision makers have drawn such a tight circle around their decision making process that they make no use of the tremendous intellectual resources of the federal government. What exactly is the conscientious civil servant to do in that case? There is never a clear answer, because any effort to go public so to speak is basically a matter of civil disobedience and has tremendous consequences to that individual.

Sure there is a stereotype of bureaucrat as anal-retentive ninny focused on forms and pointless meetings. There are a lot of those to be sure but in a workforce as large as the federal government there are a lot of extremely bright and dedicated people. Taxpayers pay for these people to know a lot about specific tasks that Congress and some President (remember nothing happens without a law being passed at some point) thought was pretty damn important. We’d all be a lot better off if the political appointees viewed those people as a resource and not simply as an obstacle to whatever goals and ideas they bring with them to Washington.