In the past few months, I’ve read or engaged in several head-scratching discussions on social media. From these discussions I’ve emerged with the strong impression that many people have a drastically different idea of how local governmental bodies typically work at the staff level. In these instances, I’ve found many people to be uncharitable at best and conspiratorial at worst, fixated on minor controversies while blind to systemic issues, and alternatingly cynical or naïve about the enterprise.
It’s an experience that has led me to think more deeply about many of my own assumptions. In about a decade as a planning intern, planning student, and now planning professional, I have worked inside and alongside state and local government departments and seen how they operate. These experiences form a lens through which I observe other government actions—actions about which I have no firsthand knowledge—and help me understand how they came to be. Sometimes that makes me more sympathetic, sometimes that makes me less sympathetic, but I hope it always makes me a better consumer of news, advocate for my preferred policies, and citizen.
But then I’ll find on social media a different environment with different lenses. I think plenty of this is an artifact of the way that social media can impoverish conversation, including the kind of flattening of analysis for different places and circumstances that I complained about a few months ago. But I also think some of the dispute is ideological, and that’s interesting to think about as well.
Originally I thought about condensing my argument into a couple tweets. But I hope a blog format might be better suited for what I’m trying to say.
Ordinary People, Ordinary Jobs
When the public thinks about government, they usually think about elected leaders like the President, Governors, Mayors, Senators, Representatives, and City Councilmembers. Maybe they think about the judicial branch as well.
But as a certain American President was keen to remind us, there is a huge part of the government that is unelected, permanent, and very influential. He called it “the deep state,” but I’ll call it “regular people with government jobs.”
Three things about this part of the government:
First, it’s really important to keep in mind that aside from elected officials and maybe their immediate staff, government work is just an ordinary job that is done by ordinary people.
This is not meant to be a demeaning depiction, but rather a humanizing one. I have friends and colleagues who work in the private sector and friends and colleagues who work in the public sector. There is nothing intrinsic about their characters that differentiates one group from the other and plenty of people move between them over the course of their careers.
In earlier eras of government, having a government job may have signaled that a person either had special skills or special connections. But in the United States we are now the better part of a century into a period of state expansion and civil service reforms. Working for the government today is normal and not drastically different than working for the private sector. At the core of it, the the work is just work. Most of the experience that people have with their government is with these people and this work, just as the majority of people’s experiences with a corporation are with ordinary staff and not the the board, the CEO, or her deputies.
Second, because government work is done by ordinary people and because ordinary people make mistakes, so too does the government make mistakes all the time. Sometimes these mistakes are big and sometimes they are small. Sometimes they are highly public and embarrassing, while other times they go unnoticed or are only recognized much later on.
Because the government is so often the single most important and powerful entity in our society, mistakes by the government can take on a different character. At minimum they feel wrong and improper in a way that private sector errors don’t. At maximum, they can become scandals and front page news in a way that is matched only by the most serious of corporate malfeasance.
This is not to excuse the government when it screws up. The government holds public trust, which is more sacred than investor money. As citizens we fund the government, we select its upper management, and we indicate its broader direction. We are entitled to accountability. But I don’t think we are entitled to surprise. All institutions made by humans are imperfect.
Third, with a big, multi-layered government that is operated by ordinary fallible people who are constantly getting things wrong, it is impossible for citizens or their elected representatives to respond to every error. So it would be smart for all of us to prioritize a bit, and spend our energy working on reforming systems and processes instead of castigating individuals.
Unfortunately social media often directs our energy for us, promoting highly digestible and visual—but also frequently low-stakes and unrepresentative—controversies. A lot of this is empty calories. It’s fun for consumption, but it shouldn’t be taken as a process for achieving meaningful change.
Nevertheless, with a government run by humans, we should target bigger problems instead of smaller ones. We should focus on correcting widespread issues instead of isolated incidents. We should identify strains of bias and skip over cases of random disparity. We should attend to repeated blind spots and not dwell on oversights. We should use Hanlon’s razor to distinguish malice from incompetence, and then further distinguish incompetence from inadequate training, overwork, lack of sleep, imperfect knowledge, and other more prosaic sources of error.
Any large organization made up of humans is going to get things wrong. What distinguishes those that run well from those that run poorly is the extent to which they catch and correct for the errors of individual staff and prevent them from becoming the errors of the entire organization. In order to build and maintain such an effective and transparent system, elected leaders and their voters need to share the premise that individual errors are inevitable and not indefensible. This encourages openness and course correction instead of secrecy and obstinancy.
Revealed Discomfort With Liberalism
Maybe this is all excruciatingly obvious? Certainly nobody acts surprised when Ticketmaster or United Airlines screws up.
Rarely is the question asked; is our governments learning?
So why is government different? Certainly its size, its universality, and its unique position as a custodian of the public trust all play roles. Certainly neither Ticketmaster nor United Airlines claim a monopoly on violence, which affords them some important slack. But this article is really about small, everyday, screw-ups. If you’ll bear with me through some broad generalizations, I think there is an ideological element at play. Both the American right and the American left are less statist than their counterparts in other countries, and I think I detect this innate suspicion of government in how our society responds to its mistakes.
For those on the American right, the idea that the government is fallible is considered to be a given. These rightists point to the lack of a profit motive, more generous employee benefits, and added difficulties of hiring and firing as reasons for errors by government staff. I’m skeptical that these differences account for much. Many people in public service have experience in the private sector and visa versa. There are mission driven people in both areas and people punching the clock in both areas. I think people of this persuasion want to assume that the government cannot function and then reason backwards from there. In the process, they often miss how the ideology of hoping government will fail can help make it so.
For those on the American left, government errors are often assumed to be the work of shadowy monied or privileged influences behind the scenes. It is certainly true that at the high levels of government there is sometimes a revolving door between public service and corporate enrichment. Still, I doubt that ordinary staff members are similarly compromised. If outside interests dictate the staff work of government to a meaningful degree, it’s a far less of a command and control relationship than a subtle undercurrent of bias, and it does not apply uniformly to all government initiatives. Moreover, the same pressures are often features of our society writ large (influential people will always seek to use their influence) and governments may be more impervious to them, not less, than more financially precarious groups like non-profits.
In overreacting to the mundanity of human errors by government staff, ideologically-motivated people of different stripes reveal a shared discomfort with a government that is just muddling through, as we all do. The idea that the most powerful force in our lives is roughly as capable as our society as a whole is an unsettling concept. Instead, there is a need to come up with a more grandiose theory as to why things go wrong in government; it must be either intrinsic incompetence or exceptional corruption.
But a government of people who muddle through is an inherent feature of all types of government, whether the dictatorship or the commune. Only liberalism is honest with you about it. People are forever trying to find alternatives, but the results are typically worse. Liberal systems with distributed political power (including between elected officials and an administrative state) and regular elections (whereby policy directions can be reversed or affirmed) are our best ways of balancing the inherent instability and face-planting of a government by humans and for humans.
We’re just going to have to deal with it!
Large Adult government
At the end of last year I wrote a piece about how member of the public should think about their local planning commission. These bodies are not made up of government staff, but there are strong similarities. In both cases, we are talking about ordinary, unelected people with some domain knowledge who have been granted a small share of government authority in exchange for submitting to a quasi-legal framework. For the purposes of this article, I again want to emphasize the “quasi.”
The work of government is too much for elected officials to do on their own. So we hire non-partisan staff or we appoint citizen commissions, or we appoint private sector contractors and we deputize some level of decision-making to them. Anyone who believes that an arm of government has made a mistake can appeal its actions through a chain of accountability that ultimately ends at the elected officials, with a pressure valve of an independent judiciary, all of whom are people with different degrees of competence and different personal incentives. It is a scary thought sometimes to think about what an opaque and errant foundation we build our lives upon. But this is a system designed to manage and mitigate error—not eliminate it. This system of delegation of authority and shared power is the only way that government could feasibly manage its vast responsibilities and get things right on balance.
This is a resilient system that has distinguished itself over time. We should strive to make it better every day, fully aware at every moment that we are always setting ourselves up for some unknown helping of disappointment.