WASHINGTON 2002
Eternal Washington
To get the real stories, know the real city
There are some eternal truths that journalists need to understand about Washington and the way it works. Or perhaps I should say tendencies instead of truths, because these principles are seldom true all the time. And eternal could also be more modestly defined as the forty years I worked in Washington as a participant in and an observer of the institutions of government. But if the press is to play its role, it must understand the culture of Washington. There may be more guards around the White House and the Capitol since 9/11, but the cultural tendencies governing the city’s behavior have hardly changed at all.
The first of these tendencies involves what I call make-believe. Memos are written, meetings are held, and legislation is passed, all to make the participants seem “concerned” and responsive but usually with little or no impact on the problems they are supposed to solve. I sometimes suspect that writing memos and attending meetings rank among Washington’s most treasured rituals precisely because they give the appearance of action. Congress gives this appearance when bills are passed by one chamber but not the other or the House and the Senate pass different bills and fail to reconcile them. The net effect of all of that effort is zero. Perhaps the clearest examples of negligible impact are to be found in the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect our health and safety and provide for economic fair play.
For example, since I have been in Washington it has been the custom, after air disasters, for Congress to pass laws requiring the FAA to act to protect the safety of air travel. Then Congress proceeds to weaken whatever regulation is proposed by demanding that the new rules not be implemented in a way that inconveniences the airlines. It remains to be seen whether this charade will be repeated with the new Transportation Safety Administration, but I would not regard the prognosis as hopeful. Already there has been a cutback of the measures that were adopted after 9/11: continuous fighter protection over major cities has been canceled. The deadline for inspecting luggage will be pushed back a year. Of course, the original deadline may have been so unrealistic as to have been make-believe. The Washington Post reports that there are not air marshals on every flight into Ronald Reagan National Airport as promised. The fantasy of that promise is obvious from the fact that, as of 9/11, the total number of air marshals was only thirty-two.
A make-believe technique often employed by Congress is to establish an agency to do a job and then not give it the money needed to perform the assigned task. When it was discovered that used-car dealers were tampering with odometers, Congress passed a law requiring sellers to disclose the actual mileage a car had been driven. There are tens of thousands of used-car dealers, of course, but to enforce the new law, Congress gave the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration enough money to hire four new inspectors.
Similarly, the Securities and Exchange Commission has a staff of 340 to monitor reports of 15,000 publicly held corporations, many of them giants capable of generating vast reams of paper. To deal with this mountain of work, according to The Wall Street Journal, each staff member is required to analyze six reports a month. The temptation is to choose smaller companies and to place the voluminous filings of the corporate giants on the back burner. “Before Enron collapsed,” reported the Journal, “its annual report hadn’t been thoroughly examined since 1997.” The Food and Drug Administration has fewer than 1,100 inspectors to inspect 120,000 plants, including those of multinational food conglomerates and giant pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Merck.
The difference between make-believe and real results comes down to implementation, but that is a word much of the press does not seem to understand. Since I am from West Virginia my favorite example is any mine safety bill. The media may take note of the committee hearings, of the bill’s passage, and of the presidential signing ceremony. But few, if any, reporters go down into the mines to find out how the law is actually being implemented. Does it really improve mine safety or does it unduly burden mine owners? No one knows unless reporters find out the truth.
When the savings and loans were deregulated, how many journalists bothered to find out what they were doing with their new freedom? The answer is none, until it was too late, after financial scandals became unconcealable. The result was a federal bailout that cost taxpayers $150 billion.
Or during the stock market’s explosive growth in recent years, how many reporters asked if the SEC was effectively protecting investors against fraud and corporate manipulation? The honor roll is not long.
One of the reasons for the failure is the media’s overall inattention to government outside the glamour beats — the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, as well as a few executive branches, including the Pentagon and the State Department. Most of the government is pretty much ignored except by specialized newsletters that charge $1,000 or more a year for reporting details that rich individuals and corporations need to know: the latest tax loophole or how to bid for a Pentagon contract.
Unfortunately, the agencies overlooked by the regular press are ones that have tremendously important roles in our lives — agencies responsible for the economy, medical care, our children’s education, the safety and efficiency of transportation, protecting workers’ health and safety, making sure taxes are collected fairly and efficiently and protecting the environment (see “Invisible Agencies,” page 57). The FBI and the CIA do receive attention, but usually it comes only after the apprehension of an Aldrich Ames or after disasters like Ruby Ridge, Waco, or the monumental one, 9/11. Rarely does the press look at a government agency in a way that might enable it to predict and possibly prevent disasters, not to mention help the agency better serve the public interest.
A second major Washington tendency is the downward trend of the civil service. Although there are dedicated and talented exceptions, the overall quality of personnel has been steadily declining since the 1960s. Not since John Kennedy has any president referred to public service as a proud and noble calling. Various officials took a stab at this theme after the September 11 attacks, with their cheering of policemen, firemen, and the armed forces, but almost none made the larger point that public service in general matters. Recruiting for jobs in the civilian agencies is pathetically inadequate. Think of all the recruiting commercials you’ve seen for the military. How many have you seen for the civil service?
Another personnel problem is the near impossibility of firing poor performers. Theoretically, civil servants can be fired, but it takes a superior who is willing to devote a vast amount of time and attention to the task. That’s why a transfer instead of dismissal was the reward for the four Immigration and Naturalization Service employees who issued student visas to Mohammed Atta and his pals months after 9/11.
A third major tendency of government agencies is to focus inward instead of on external responsibilities. The focus on the inside has some absurd consequences. Stanley Meisler of the Los Angeles Times once attended a country team meeting at the U.S. embassy in an African country where the main subject of discussion was how to divide the latest shipment of Skippy peanut butter to the embassy store. A friend gave me a letter from a former colleague at the Agency for International Development mission in Saigon. The letter was written after North Vietnamese troops had launched the final attack, which led to our withdrawal from Vietnam six weeks later. The letter, however, was concerned solely with how office space was being allocated and how careers were being affected by the latest reorganizations.
Reorganizations are classic examples of both inward focus and make-believe. Sometimes the purpose is sensible, but often they are intended as a substitute for real action to meet real problems. Instead there is the appearance of action. Walls are knocked down, new partitions are constructed, desks are moved, and so are people. The real test is whether the agency can accomplish its mission better. In the case of Bush’s Office of Homeland Security, will the different elements it comprises it get better? For example, simply moving the INS into the new agency will do no good unless attention is paid to making the enormous improvement INS needs.
The inward focus is accompanied by a tendency to think in terms not of what is best for the public interest, but of what is most convenient for those inside the government. On 9/11, according to The Wall Street Journal’s David Cloud, the CIA’s only agent assigned to Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, was spending half his time at his home in the Virginia countryside. Jerry M. Brown, a top official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, left on vacation one day after the 1989 California earthquake when FEMA’s manpower had already been strained to the limit by Hurricane Hugo just weeks earlier. His excuse: he had a nonreturnable airline ticket.
Yet the mention of FEMA is a reminder that something can be done about the unfortunate tendencies I have been describing. FEMA became a much better agency during the 1990s. This was because the media did a good job of reporting its failures, particularly after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. As a result of the media’s attention, when Bill Clinton became president, he knew the agency had to be fixed, so he appointed James Lee Witt, a man he knew to be a talented administrator, to be FEMA’s director. Witt turned the agency around. It went from being a disaster itself to being close to a model agency. It may have declined since Witt left, but its story still provided heartening evidence that government can get better.
So government can work, but it is definitely not easy to make it work. For one thing, the political parties are major obstacles to reform. Democrats tend to be prisoners of the public employee unions, and to resist reform of the personnel system, especially any that might make it easier to fire poor performers. Far too many Republicans have adopted a simplistic antigovernment attitude, coupled with uncritical faith in free markets. This makes them less than eager to support efforts to make government more effective.
The press is our best hope. The media can bring out the best in the two political parties by continually exposing their worst tendencies, and by explaining who opposes reform and why. It can do the same for the rest of Washington by resolving not only to report what goes wrong but to explain why it went wrong. But this can be done only by reporters who try to understand our capital’s culture, which is defined by certain common traits — such as the tendency to make believe — but which is divided into subcultures. The worlds of lobbyists, politicians and consultants, Congress, the White House, the civilian bureaucracy, the foreign services, the military, and the courts — all have their own distinct tendencies.
Thus the press needs an anthropological approach, the kind that is well established in business journalism. For years we have read about the internal culture of IBM or GE or, more recently, Enron. But despite The Washington Monthly’s thirty-three year effort to promote it, the approach has barely gained a foothold among Washington journalists. What follow are a few examples to illustrate why this anthropological understanding is useful.
- Why does the Army resist Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to scrap
its unwieldy 15,000-to-20,000-soldier divisions in favor of
smaller units suitable to the kind of military actions characteristic
of the present era? The reason is that the Army’s whole
rank-and-promotion system is based on unit size. A lieutenant
commands a platoon, a captain a company, a major a battalion,
a colonel a regiment, a brigadier general a brigade and a major-general
a division. Similar considerations govern the Navy’s bias
in favor of supercarriers and giant submarines and its legendary
resistance to abandoning its battleships.
- Why does the FBI have so much trouble connecting dots, like
the warnings from Phoenix and Minneapolis field agents that
terrorism suspects were learning how to fly big planes? One
reason is that, within the culture of the FBI, the role of analysis
has long been disdained. The analysts are seen as office-bound
theorists, in contrast to the “real” agents in the
field. Needless to say this attitude has not encouraged the
agency’s best and brightest to become analysts. The result
is that the FBI is importing analysts from the CIA. This is
like hiring the one-eyed to lead the blind, since a similar
disdain, only not as severe, has long existed in the CIA’s
ranks.
- Why do campaigns cost so much? Again there is an anthropological-economic
factor. The media consultants who drive the campaigns are paid
by commissions based on how much television time and other advertising
is purchased by the campaign. This means that every dollar spent
on the campaign increases the consultants’ income. It is
thus not puzzling that they are constantly whispering in the
candidate’s ear about the need for more TV spots.
- Why did the media condemn Bill Clinton for inviting campaign
donors to White House coffees and to spend the night in the
Lincoln bedroom? They seemed to forget that every other president
in memory invited big contributors to state dinners and other
White House social events. The really bad thing for a president
to do is alter a policy position or take an official action
in return for a contribution. So good politicians are always
looking for clean favors they can do for a donor. A social invitation
is probably the most common. Clinton’s pardon for Marc
Rich, however, does not qualify as a social favor; it was an
official act and thus deserved the condemnation it got from
the press. But the media failed to understand the culture of
politics well enough to perceive the difference between clean
and dirty fundraising.
- How do bureaucrats pull the wool over the eyes of Congress
and the press? One way is the clever use of definitions. Washington’s
Department of Public Works is supposed to move abandoned cars
from the streets. It says it moved 8,000 last year, but the
actual figure was 4,225. The agency had counted not only cars
moved from the streets but the cars it moved from one impoundment
lot to another. During the gulf war the Pentagon counted a bombing
mission as “successful” if the plane had arrived at
the target and the bombs were dropped, even if they missed the
target by a country mile.
- In what ways is the White House like the media? It pays little attention to the large areas of government that the press tends to ignore — unless, of course, the agency somehow gets in the news. There are several reasons for this. One is that the White House, when it’s not pushing its own agenda, spends its time reacting to the news. Two recent examples: Before this year, the Bush administration’s interest in regulatory reform or in mediating the Israeli-Palestinian dispute ranged from minimal to nonexistent. Only the series of stories about corporate scandal and about violence in the Middle East inspired the White House to at least appear to be doing something about these problems.
Another reason the White House ignores government agencies is the conviction that changing these agencies will take so long that it won’t happen on the current administration’s watch. A similar despair about prospects for reform is a factor in the failure of veteran newspeople to write about reforms they know need to be made. They are convinced, for example, that whatever they write, incompetent civil servants are not going to be dismissed, so why write about the problem? That kind of fatalism has also governed health-care issues since the flop of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s proposal. The wise guys in the press think overall reform of the health care system is so improbable that they don’t write about the need for it even though the need is great.
If the press is to play the crucial role I see for it in improving government, it is essential that it understand cultural truths. There are two ways to obtain this understanding. One is to serve in government. Unfortunately, only a handful of reporters have done so. Even fewer have served in the executive-branch agencies. In part this failure is traceable to a loony assumption in the world of journalism that working on “the other side” leaves a reporter tainted forever. In fact, it can illuminate his reporting with genuine understanding of the other side. There are two recent examples of what experience in the field he or she is going to cover can do for a reporter. Both Bethany McLean, who broke the Enron story in Fortune, and Gretchen Morgenson, who revealed in The New York Times how brokerage analysts are bribed to favorably evaluate stocks, had worked on Wall Street before entering journalism. So they had a nose for where the bodies were buried. They knew what they were talking about.
Another way for reporters to acquire this understanding is through
reporting in depth. Every time reporters take the time to go into
a story thoroughly, they are increasing their intellectual capital,
their understanding of how Washington really works. And, if they
continue to do these kinds of stories on government, they will
gradually learn what the insiders know and the public needs to
find out.
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