Things Come Undone

One of the often ignored (and often maligned) but important parts of our Democracy are our professional civil service employees. Aside from the work they do, they also provide as important of a "check and balance" as anything. Sure, we all learn about the 3 branches of government which check each others' powers, but there are also other important checks on power - in particular the civil service, which is technically part of the executive branch but in large parts supposedly independent of the political process, and the media. When either of these become too politicized, we have problems. As Jack Balkin explains:

And here's the problem. The more political appointees you have displacing the professional class of civil servants, the greater the danger that the policy process will get corrupted by short-term political considerations. If the political appointees play fast and loose with the facts on a regular basis, they will undermine the efficiency of the administrative state in any large and complex democracy. The danger of this is always greater in presidential systems than parliamentary systems, (although it can happen in the latter too!) but it's usually kept more or less in check.

Unfortunately, things seem to have come apart in the current Administration. I don't know whether this is due to the example set by Bush and his most senior political advisors, whether the Administration has ignored career people and paid attention only to information coming from political loyalists, whether a tipping point has been reached with too many political appointees in positions they should not hold, or whether the problem is an accelerating duplication of functions that have effectively shut out career employees from important information gathering and policy implementation decisions. Whatever the reasons, the corruption of the policy making and implementation process seems to be a real problem for this Administration.

The next Administration needs to seriously reconsider the structure of political appointments in government and the flow of information and advice from career officials to political officials. It needs to reduce existing incentives for short-term political considerations to infect policymaking and it needs to reform executive branch institutions to promote the production of accurate information for governmental decisionmaking. If it does not, the consequences for the country could be quite serious. We've already seen how mismanaged information practices have affected environmental policy, health care policy, and even the decision to go to war. If the production of accurate information for use by government officials continues to be corrupted, matters will only get worse.