Role of Career Bureaucrats in Government Dylan Dusseault Leadership Seminar

Career Bureaucrats as Operators Operators are specifically tasked with carrying out the tasks of an organization. This can be defined several ways: Using Goals: What are they supposed to be doing? Is it getting done. Meeting situational imperatives: Are they handling the immediate task at hand? Peer Expectations: Only truly works in organizations with small, relatively consistent groups where significant peer relationships are formed

Bureaucrats as Managers Faced with certain constraints not found in the private sector Cannot be devoted to private benefit or organizational earnings Cannot allocate resources to their preference Must serve goals not of their own choosing Causes the incentive of focusing on process over outcomes Managers develop SOPs They are risk adverse They focus on equity over effectiveness.

Effect of careerists on organizational culture Organizational Culture: A patterned way of thinking about the central tasks of, and human relationships within, an organization Organizations can have several organizational cultures, depending on the missions of individual departments When a culture is widely accepted and sustained, it is considered a “sense of mission” Career employees are the defining factor of organizational culture Their ability to continue on in a department throughout administrations sustains a way of thinking and methodologies of executing tasks within an organization Central sense of mission of SNAP or Medicaid does not change if the administration becomes more conservative

Institutional Memory “Organizations spend a lot of time and resources developing knowledge and capability. While some of it gets translated into procedures and policies, most of it resides in the heads, hands, and hearts of individual managers and functional experts.” – Ron Ashkenas Career bureaucrats are essential in adding the expertise to an organization Knowledge of what has and has not worked in the past Subject matter expertise on specific areas of operation

Importance of Institutional Memory It is not simply about familiarity with the day to day events, but the cool heads and experience needed to handle disruptions and crisis People who have been through major events in defense, the economy, health, or more are able to deal with these using a wealth of experience. Example: British Treasury during the Financial Crisis Young staff was highly knowledgeable, but had never even experienced a recession, much less a major banking crisis “We might have been able to stop the (bank) run, but we were all operating on first principles” - Sir Nicholas Macpherson (Former Treasury Secretary)

Case Study: The George W. Bush Administration "Loyalty and ideology were valued over expertise, and policy and management suffered as a result.“ – Professor Donald Moynihan Professor David E. Lewis of Vanderbilt looked at 242 program managers in the Bush Presidency 75% of program managers were appointees, and 25% were career civil servants Appointees had extremely successful careers in the private or political sector Appointees were better educated than the career civil servants on average

George W. Bush Administration (Continued) He found that despite these advantages for the political appointees, the career civil servants displayed better strategic planning, program design, financial oversite, and results The assessment he used was done by the Bush Administration itself: The Program Assessment Rating tool from OMB Bureaucrats held institutional memory and were already operating projects previously, political appointees were less familiar with patterns of operating in government. Were more comfortable with constraints and familiar with the organizational culture.

Sources Ashkenas, Ron. "Three Ways To Preserve Institutional Memory." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 9 Dec Web. 10 July Vedantam, Shankar. "Shankar Vedantam - Who Are the Better Managers -- Political Appointees or Career Bureaucrats?" Washington Post. The Washington Post, 24 Nov Web. 10 July Wilson, James Q. Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. New York: Basic, Print