Megan at From the Archives makes an interesting point about the warring incentives of legislators and bureaucrats:
This doesn’t surprise me either, that the work was done in a state agency, then lingered for years. The work of the state is huge and sprawling and only barely managed. People at the top, the political appointees and the legislators, give instructions and change them with the new exciting trend. Mid-level civil servants finish their reports (perhaps even a nice thorough job) and the person who commissioned the work is long gone for another job. Or the legislator is swamped with exciting new problems. Flood! Climate change! Relentless plodding is the mark of low and mid level bureaucracies, but long-term follow through fails at the top. That is because of news driven governance in some part, and you fickle voters in other part. Really though, it always goes back to a constituency. If you cared about prison health care, those reports and audits would get implemented.
The politicians, like the public they serve, have the attention span of a gnat. Bureaucracies, on the other hand, are built to work in geologic time. Neither has any control over the other to force them onto their time frame. From my limited experience as a government contractor, this seems to result in less getting done than would if one party managed to force the other into its time frame; we spent a fair amount of time trying to sort through the competing demands of the "This is how it's done" bureaucracy and the "Everything's changing! News at 11!" fly-by reformers. Result: paralysis.
"From my limited experience", which won't stop you from bloviating about yet another subject you know next to nothing about.
Megan, thanks for the link. That other Megan really captured the essence of government's failure. I worked for the administrations of a liberal Democratic governor who was not fiscally responsible; succeeded by a liberal Republican turned Independent who was a great speech maker and not much else; succeeded by a conservative Republican who became a common criminal and a federal inmate. From this a bureaucrat learns to be wary of politicians with a mission.
It is pretty common for state agencies dealing directly with human services to be placed into receivership. Unfortunately, compassion cannot be institutionalized. Is not the receivership like a coup d'etat in which a general steps in to overthrow squabbling politicians?
Generally, those in closest contact with the people served by these agencies are from similar backgrounds. On the one hand there might be some contempt for those in similar life circumstances who have failed in life; on the other hand is a feeling of there but for the grace of this state job go I. Advancement in state service means gaining greater distance from the clients served by the agency. Teachers become principals. Principals become superintendents. Workers become supervisors. Supervisors become managers. Managers become commissioners.
Then there are the unions. It is not bashing unions to say that their mission is the protection and advancement of their membership. As that other Megan points out, the membership is blamed by the media, politicians, and the public for the failings of the state agency that employs them. The unions are, by law, equal partners with the state in determining pay and working conditions. Any change in either pay or working conditions is preceived as a threat unless it increases pay and eases responsibilities. In politics, unions are more than equal players because they are organized and have specific interests that can only be addressed by government. For those workers who do not aspire to management, the union offers an alternative career path of worker to shop steward to elected union official.
I do not agree with your libertarian contempt for government. Neither do I have as much faith in court-appointed dictators as that other Megan seems to have. We cannot stand to see people dying in the streets or to hear of children abused by their parents or to let brutal criminals run amok. We will always have these problems, and will always turn them over disfuntional government. It is democracy inaction.
By the way, since your migration to the Atlantic, why are so many of your commenters, myself excluded of course, such idiots? There were some great discussions at your old site, and they seem to be missing here.
I don't think the result is paralysis.
I think the result is that the state agencies do whatever it is that they want, largely unchecked and undirected (as Megan says "unmanaged").
They may not do it well or quickly -- it's hard to run any large organization -- but they do do stuff, and it's stuff that state employees think is a good idea.
I would bet that it increases the number of state employees, too.
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