Froomkin's critical question: By politicizing the bureaucracy, what has Bush done to our government?

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: What Has Bush Done to the Government?
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, September 24, 2007

....It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the president's public acts and statements get the most attention from the media. But it's well past time to ask ourselves: What has Bush done to our government?

Bush's two top advisers -- Vice President Cheney and just-departed political guru Karl Rove -- made little secret of their desire to have the wider federal bureaucracy serve their purposes. But just how much has the exertion of absolute White House political control, through a network of loyalists put in key positions, damaged government agencies' ability to accomplish the tasks the American people expect of them? How many long-time senior career employees have been marginalized, micromanaged or driven out of government? How low have the standards dropped for senior-level appointments amid the need to find people who would be sufficiently loyal?

David E. Lewis is a political scientist at Princeton University and author of an upcoming book, The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance. Over on NiemanWatchdog.org, where I am deputy editor, Lewis today raises some important questions the press should be asking about the federal government under Bush. Among them:

"Have Bush political appointees taken away hiring authority from senior-level career employees elsewhere besides the Department of Justice? Is there any evidence that those career hires have been made on a partisan basis? . . .

"Are presidential loyalists being placed in jobs with direct influence over grants, contracts, the granting of licenses, etc? If so, was there a centrally directed effort to use these powers for the benefit of Bush's reelection or the Republican Party?"

Lewis also asks: "(I)s there a competence gap developing? Have this administration's actions to politicize the bureaucracy in order to get control of the bureaucracy and satisfy patronage demands done serious damage to government competence? My research shows that politicization hurts performance. Apart from the competence gap between new hires and those departing, politicization of the bureaucracy creates systematic management problems that hurt the agencies more generally. It makes it difficult for agencies to recruit and retain high-quality civil servants; it reduces incentives for careerists to develop expertise; and it leads to increased management turnover -- three factors that can hurt performance even under the best of conditions."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/09/24/BL2007092400717_pf.html

[Hekate]

1. KnR FEMA/New Orleans laid it out there for the whole world to see. No conscience, no competence...

...no sense of what a government is supposed to actually do for the people.

Career civil servants are the institutional memory for politicians who come and go with each election cycle; career civil servants are the actually machinery of the government; and I believe most of them have a sense that they perform a public service.

BushCo went out of their way to wreck the federal civil service.

Hekate

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Here's a mention from the article --

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency's tragically botched response to the catastrophe in New Orleans in 2005 briefly turned director Michael 'heck of a job, Brownie' Brown into a poster-boy for incompetence, but didn't lead to any sort of rigorous administration-wide assessment."

[Hekate]

5. People seemed to assume it was an anomaly, but it wasn't...

I have a friend who worked in the Dept of Agriculture in DC and I visited her in the immediate aftermath of the drowning of New Orleans. I mean, it was so fresh in people's minds that as I passed through airports people were watching reports on CNN and commenting on the racism of the government response.

At any rate, she took me to lunch with a group of her co-workers from Ag, and a more bitter bunch of people I never hope to meet. I finally asked them if Bush had done to Ag what he did to FEMA, and they assured me he had.

It pretty much confirmed what I had already learned from reading articles posted here at DU. We are so screwed.

Hekate

[DeepModem Mom]

8. Thanks for posting that real-life info, Hekate! nt

[KT2000]

3. Good to see this

in the WP. This is what will last after he is gone if Congress does not investigate.

[aquart]

4. Investigate and PUNISH.

We were far too lenient with the subversives in Nixon's and Reagan's administration.

NO MORE MR. NICE DEMOCRAT.

[The Backlash Cometh]

6. Isn't "politicizing" the system, against the law?

Let's start there. This was no ordinary reshuffling of government policy. This was breaking the law and politicizing government agencies to abuse the public trust. Why is everyone acting like this is just another one of Karl Roves strategic dirty tricks?

[DeepModem Mom]

7. That's a really good question. I wish we had someone working on...

exploring just how much of this politicization is illegal. I'm certain some of it is.