He also notes that the last president who got the bureaucracy staffed properly was Bush I and identifies various crises for which the government dropped the ball since. Most of his somewhat long column deals with the structural shortcomings of the federal bureaucracy, which are legion.
Balz notes civil servants' operating out of hard-learned reluctance to go "beyond the book" when a crisis demands it. Doing so is much more likely to bring punishment, during or after the event, than praise, even if the irregular action helps.
He also notes how difficult it is for governments to allocate resources to events that have yet to occur, and may not occur for decades, if ever. There are always more immediately pressing needs crying out for resources, and politicians anxious to assuage constituent demands to "do something."
Balz cites Stephen Goldsmith, a former NYC deputy mayor and current faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School.
Goldsmith assesses the situation this way: "I think we've gotten relatively good as a country - local, state and federal government - at the professional performance of routines. Our ability to accomplish the important routines of government on a daily basis is very high."Balz concludes, somewhat vaguely, that as a nation we're not as good at "getting the job done pragmatically" as we once were. No kidding.
But there are limitations, he said. "One is, are they conducive to imagination? Second, do they value the exercise of discretion throughout the system? And third, are they good at calculating the risk across agencies? What are the trade-offs of closing a country?"
