We quoted a news article in The Brussels Effect about how Americans feel when it comes to federal agency performance:
‘On balance, Americans view 13 of 16 federal agencies we asked about more favorably than unfavorably, according to our survey of 9,424 adults conducted July 1-7. Of those 13 agencies, 10 have net favorable ratings of 15 percentage points or more.
‘Topping the list are the National Park Service (76% favorable), the U.S. Postal Service (72%) and NASA (67%).’
The ones that are smaller, deliver palpable services to the public, and don’t intrude on their lives are the most favored. The others seem biased. At least that’s what the large partisan differences might suggest. Pick an agency seen as invasive and incompetent and you might even get some bipartisan loathing. I’m looking at you, IRS.
Joe Lonsdale wrote recently about what he sees as a periodicity of mediocrity in public service that is amplified by other more secular factors.
‘Throughout American history, the federal government has tended to expand dramatically during periods of war and crisis. About a generation after each crisis subsided, there tended to be a reset, an attempt to claw back the cronyism and dysfunction that results from large growth in budget, personnel, and authority. We’re in desperate need of such a clawback today.’
Cronyism and dysfunction. How many Americans who don’t work for the government or collect benefits from the government would disagree with that sentiment?
Jimmy Carter was a bureaucracy reformer. That’s not what people remember him for, but it was a noble initiative with long-lasting consequences. Lonsdale doesn’t think it worked. There are things Carter did that I think qualify as success. When you consider what he was up against, in the broader context of America’s contemporary malaise, I think he did what he could.
‘Evidence had been mounting over the previous decade that the economic regulatory agencies were susceptible to political capture by their regulated industries, and that price controls—supposedly aimed at protecting consumers from monopolistic pricing—seemed to accomplish exactly the opposite result. President Carter enticed Cornell economics professor Alfred Kahn to Washington to head the CAB. Although not initially inclined to remove price regulation altogether, Kahn, with support from President Carter, soon realized that complete deregulation was the only hope for a more competitive and consumer-focused airline industry. In 1978, President Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act, clearing the way for the CAB to be abolished a few years later.
‘President Carter later appointed Darius Gaskins, one of Kahn’s deputies at the CAB, to chair the ICC. The great success of airline deregulation paved the way for deregulation in other transportation modes and in telecommunications. In 1980, President Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act, which deregulated the trucking industry, the Staggers Rail Act, which introduced competition in rail rates, and the Telecommunications Act, which removed restrictions on long-distance phone service. These actions allowed new entrants into the markets, increased efficiency, lowered prices, offered consumers more choices, and likely contributed to declining inflation. Thanks in no small part to President Carter, competition in formerly regulated markets has not just reallocated resources but unleashed innovation and generated tens of billions of dollars in lasting benefits for consumers and society as a whole.’
Two words, Mr. President: “political capture.” The irony is that the political capture of the agencies today is by the bureaucratic, interventionist, progressives. Political capture by anyone isn’t desirable. In a constitutional republic or in a democracy, the ends does not justify the means.
Lonsdale is unrelenting.
‘The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which had the possibility of being the biggest reform to bureaucracy since the Pendleton Act, was crippled by special interests, judicial activism pushing a form of proto-DEI, and union influence. What could have been a Constitutional restoration ended up solidifying two extremely damaging trends that we are still facing: after a century we stopped using merit-based tests, and we gave near-ironclad employment protections to federal employees. We can’t hire the right people, and we can’t fire almost anyone.
‘Our bureaucracies have been getting steadily dumber, more bloated, and more broken for decades. And it’s breaking the country.’[emphasis added]
This may parallel the dumbing down of American undergraduate populations:
‘According to a widespread belief, the average IQ of university students is 115 to
130 IQ points, that is, substantially higher than the average IQ of the general population (M =100, SD =15). We traced the origin of this belief to obsolete intelligence data collected in 1940s and 1950s when university education was the privilege of a few. Examination of more recent IQ data indicate that IQ of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population. The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.’
It's generally seen as legal but risky for employers to use pre-employment tests. The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures prohibit anything in employment screening that leads to an “adverse impact” on candidates from protected groups.
For many employers, it was easier to let the universities do the testing for them. This is the basis for Nobel Laureate Michael Spence’s Job Signaling theory:
“In the job market, potential employees seek to sell their services to employers for some wage, or price. Generally, employers are willing to pay higher wages to employ better workers. While the individual may know their own level of ability, the hiring firm is not (usually) able to observe such an intangible trait—thus there is an asymmetry of information between the two parties. Education credentials can be used as a signal to the firm, indicating a certain level of ability that the individual may possess; thereby narrowing the informational gap. This is beneficial to both parties as long as the signal indicates a desirable attribute—a signal such as a criminal record may not be so desirable. Furthermore, signaling can sometimes be detrimental in the educational scenario, when heuristics of education get overvalued such as an academic degree, that is, despite having equivalent amounts of instruction, parties that own a degree get better outcomes—the sheepskin effect.”
It's no wonder Lonsdale thinks government is getting dumber. They’re not allowed to test for intelligence or to use other merit-based examinations because of disparate impact concerns, and the signal they use as a proxy for qualification has attenuated to meaninglessness. People who work for the government should be the best of us, or at least in the top decile of performance. We deserve excellence. Does anyone believe that’s what we’re getting?
There is much talk about Schedule F:
‘A Schedule F appointment was a job classification in the excepted service of the United States federal civil service that existed briefly at the end of the Trump administration during 2020 and 2021. It would have contained policy-related positions, removing their civil service protections and making them easy to fire. It was never fully implemented, and no one was appointed to it before it was repealed at the beginning of the Biden administration.
‘The purpose of the provision was to increase the president's control over the federal career civil service. While proponents stated this would increase flexibility and accountability, it was widely criticized as providing means to retaliate against federal officials for political reasons. It was estimated that tens or hundreds of thousands of career employees could have been reclassified, increasing the number of political appointments by a factor of ten.’
Frustrated by his inability to move as nimbly as he assumed he could upon being elected in 2016, Donald Trump signed an executive order at the end of his term to give him control over the appointment of civil servants who touched policy. It was one of the first executive orders President Biden reversed with his own countermanding flourish of the pen.
We wrote in Maginot Line that Trump, should he win the 2024 election, could tweak the Schedule F order to face the reality of an onslaught of litigation contesting it.
‘The lightning strike here would be to cut the senior civil service in every department on day one, not by firing them, but by putting them into a box. Take them out of the line and stick them in a Faraday rubber room without Internet access. Replace them with political appointees straightaway. It’s a way to implement Schedule F overnight. Call it “Schedule F - Modified,” in an ironic form of bureaucratic mockery. You’re not firing them. They still receive their paychecks. They still vest their pensions. They still have their ample benefits. Then, proceed with Schedule F and the attendant litigation.’
Lonsdale would like to see the return of merit-based testing. So would I. Doctors have to pass exams. Lawyers have to pass exams. Accountants have to pass exams. Why shouldn’t people who have much broader impact on the lives of every American have to do the same? But let’s take it a step further. Let’s combine new merit-based testing with Schedule F. It would inoculate the argument by assumption that anyone Trump appoints is unqualified. Some of the middling current cadre would not pass, weakening their arguments that they deserve to retain their employment. The only people who would oppose this should be those who benefit from the contemporary political capture of the civil service. O