They Can't Handle The Truth, But They Sure Can Manhandle It.

Dick Meyer introduces us to Bushworld.

I've written about the Administration's tendency to fudge the facts where science is concerned before. Let me offer a more serious take on this story. Here's the basic lesson: You can't have a successful administrative state in a complex democracy unless science and intelligence are insulated from politics.

This leads me to a short digression on comparative constitutional design.

Parliamentary systems in robust democracies generally produce a professional civil service whose basic job is to carry out the policy demands of whichever party is in power. (Knowing that the government may change at any time, the civil service will strive to present themselves as reliable technocrats, not as ideologues). Because their job is administrative efficiency, and they have incentives to put themselves at the service of whoever controls the government, their professional ethos places high value on factual accuracy and technical expertise.

Presidential systems that feature separation of powers, by contrast, cannot guarantee the same degree of loyalty from civil servants, because the latter can also appeal to Congress for political support and play one branch off against the other. Hence presidential systems tend to include a significant number of political appointees-- much larger than you will find in most parliamentary systems-- layered over the civil service in order to ensure loyalty at the top levels. Moreover, mature presidential systems-- like the United States-- may often duplicate existing functions performed by civil servants-- like intelligence gathering or environmental or foreign policy advice-- and staff them almost exclusively with political appointees.

And here's the problem. The more political appointees you have displacing the professional class of civil servants, the greater the danger that the policy process will get corrupted by short-term political considerations. If the political appointees play fast and loose with the facts on a regular basis, they will undermine the efficiency of the administrative state in any large and complex democracy. The danger of this is always greater in presidential systems than parliamentary systems, (although it can happen in the latter too!) but it's usually kept more or less in check.

Unfortunately, things seem to have come apart in the current Administration. I don't know whether this is due to the example set by Bush and his most senior political advisors, whether the Administration has ignored career people and paid attention only to information coming from political loyalists, whether a tipping point has been reached with too many political appointees in positions they should not hold, or whether the problem is an accelerating duplication of functions that have effectively shut out career employees from important information gathering and policy implementation decisions. Whatever the reasons, the corruption of the policy making and implementation process seems to be a real problem for this Administration.

The next Administration needs to seriously reconsider the structure of political appointments in government and the flow of information and advice from career officials to political officials. It needs to reduce existing incentives for short-term political considerations to infect policymaking and it needs to reform executive branch institutions to promote the production of accurate information for governmental decisionmaking. If it does not, the consequences for the country could be quite serious. We've already seen how mismanaged information practices have affected environmental policy, health care policy, and even the decision to go to war. If the production of accurate information for use by government officials continues to be corrupted, matters will only get worse.