People think that it is odd that the proposed solution to the problem of group think is to put people in a bigger group. That is true but the real worry about the 9/11 commission report is the people that it leaves out of the big box it is trying to draw around intelligence collection. The people that didn’t communicate are the ones that are left out of the reorganization. The FBI.
This is no accident. The reorganization fails for the same reason that the reorganization was necessary in the first place. The structure is mean to ignore problems, to make them go away. The whole set up of our bureaucracy is an instance of what James March would have called solution of a problem by flight, by not solving the problem.
What he meant by that was that there are some trade-offs that we don’t want to face. The trade-off between security and personal privacy is one of them. The trade-off is avoided by putting the two goals in two different organizations. The FBI pursues security with maximum solicitude for personal privacy and without worrying about the effects on privacy, the CIA pursues security without worrying about privacy. The organizations are meant to not cooperate. They have different goals. We don’t think of it this way. When something goes wrong because of the trade-off we have institutionalized in the form of our bureaucracies we blame the bureaucrats for not doing their jobs when in fact the whole problem is that they have been doing their jobs, as those jobs have been defined by policy makers, all too well.
The reorganization ploy is one of a family of political arguments that come under the rubric of arguments that we use to avoid facing up to problems. To solve them by flight. Blaming things on government waste, foreign aid. The idea is to find some problem that everyone can agree upon that does not force us to face up to a trade-off we don’t want to make. Deficit politics are the most obvious example. Making unpleasant trade-offs, explicitly saying how many of one thing are you willing to give up for a given number of the other, is exactly what budgets make you do and exactly what people do not want to do. That is the reason for the perennial appeal of cutting foreign aid and government waste. It does nothing to solve the problem but it provides an excuse for ignoring it. I wouldn’t have to think about this thing if you would just stop doing X. Remember that the trade-off is being made whether people are admitting to it or not. In the end we have a fixed number of dollars and the things we spend them on are not the things we don’t spend them on. Behaviorally we make the trade-off and don’t mind making the trade-off as long as nothing forces us to make it mentally.
The whole pitch of the 9/11 commission is to find a non-partisan solution to what went wrong. This is a virtual guarantee that we will not address, let alone fix, what went wrong on 9/11. The non-partisan parts of the problem are the purely technical parts of the problem, the parts of the problem that don’t call for making a choice between fundamental goals, that don’t ask us to specify how much of one goal are we willing to give up for a given amount of the other. Those questions, the value trade-off questions, are the political questions.
That accounts for much of the mendacious tone of the hearings. Everyone talks about the way the partisans attacked the members of the other party in the televised portions of the hearings, but what was really hard to take was the way bureaucrats were attacked. The people that were attacked on competence grounds. The commission didn’t have a lot of complaints about competence of the bureaucrats because that was a leading cause of 9/11. They, as members of the political class, had an incentive to make it a competence question. If it had been a value trade-off question then it would have been a political class question and they would have been the ones at fault. The political class as a class has an incentive to avoid these value conflicts in the face of disaster (though at other times they may have an incentive to play them up as mobilizing tools).
No comments:
Post a Comment