The Peter Principle is that in an organization someone will be promoted to a level where they are incompetent. The intuition is that if you prove successful in a job, you will get promoted. You only stop getting promoted when you end up in a job that is beyond your capability.
Now apply that same intuition to a successful government agency. If it does its job well, it will be given additional responsibilities, until it reaches the point where it does nothing well.
The CDC has taken on a very broad mission, and it has bungled its narrow mission. It seems to me that political leaders keep broadening the missions of the military and the Fed, and this probably will not turn out well.
But what made me think of this is the issue of police reform. My first thought was to whittle down the mission of the police and train them more rigorously. But then I thought that if we did that and it worked, the result would be that they would get a good reputation. And then we would give them a broader and broader mission, until. . .
What a cheerfully optimistic post. Thank you. Hopefully a sign that the good doctor has fully recovered his good spirits.
The best example of the truth of the peter principle in government might be the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970 and it began operation on December 2, 1970 pursuant to his reorganization plan executive order that pulled together a bunch of disjointed programs scattered around the government. Congress later ratified the reorganization plan. At the time, there were substantive concerns that many people thought appropriate for government to address. Facing such a real challenge, the EPA had a fairly concise and actionable mission:
Per the reorganization plan:
“The principal roles and functions of the EPA would include:
• The establishment and enforcement of environmental protection standards consistent with national environmental goals.
• The conduct of research on the adverse effects of pollution and on methods and equipment for controlling it, the gathering of information on pollution, and the use of this information in strengthening environmental protection programs and recommending policy changes.
• Assisting others, through grants, technical assistance and other means in arresting pollution of the environment.
• Assisting the Council on Environmental Quality in developing and recommending to the President new policies for the protection of the environment.”
Nixon’s plan succeeded and many significant risks from air and water pollution were mitigated.
Now, however, federal environmental law has become a lucrative cash cow for the barratry guild and the agency has taken on impossible and meaningless tasks like trying to control the weather a century from now. And Congress has larded up the agency’s mission with dozens of additional programs. EPA is charged with administering all or a part of each of the following:
Atomic Energy Act (AEA)
Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act
Chemical Safety Information, Site Security and Fuels Regulatory Relief Act
Clean Air Act (CAA)
Clean Water Act (CWA) (original title: Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments of 1972)
Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA, or Superfund)
Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA)
Endangered Species Act (ESA)
Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA)
Energy Policy Act
EO 12898: Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations
EO 13045: Protection of Children From Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks
EO 13211: Actions Concerning Regulations That Significantly Affect Energy Supply, Distribution, or Use
Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA)
Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA)
Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments – See Clean Water Act
Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) – See also FFDCA and FIFRA
Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act (MPRSA, also known as the Ocean Dumping Act)
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act (NTTAA)
Noise Control Act
Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA)
Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA)
Ocean Dumping Act – See Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act
Oil Pollution Act (OPA)
Pesticide Registration Improvement Act (PRIA) – See FIFRA
Pollution Prevention Act (PPA)
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)
Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA)
Shore Protection Act (SPA)
Superfund – See Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act
Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) – See Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act
Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)
And although it is charitable to believe that this expansion was due to competence, one might also consider the frequency with which one hears some chucklehead or another impugning a particular Congress for not passing as many bills as another Congress. There is definite merit to Yuval Levin’s contention that institutions are being corrupted by those who use them to achieve personal branding, and nowhere more so than in Congress. Getting a bill passed, regardless of its merits, redundancy, inefficiency, or general irrelevance, is all that matters to far too many members.
Since the Doctor’s post was inspired by considerations of law enforcement, law enforcement responsibility. Under 18 U.S.C. 3063 “any law enforcement officer of the Environmental Protection Agency with responsibility for the investigation of criminal violations of a law administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, may— (1) carry firearms; (2) execute and serve any warrant or other processes issued under the authority of the United States…”
(As an aside the Inspectors General of the federal agencies are the most loathsomely corrupt of oversight agencies with nearly all staff designated to carry firearms so as to collect administratively uncontrollable overtime pay, a form of premium pay of up to 25% of base pay but not less than 10% and not that substitutes for payment for irregular, unscheduled overtime work, even though overtime pay for such work may still be collected, and is paid on an annual basis instead of on an hourly basis. Among the most villainous of ongoing scams in government.)
Now that the USA has dropped out of the top 20 nations on the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, it might be worth considering that the USA courts have plaid a major role in butchering the notion of self-discipline and restraint in the government. Our embarrassing Supreme Court has led the way, the justices taking it upon themselves to reach their level of incompetence in their attempts at social engineering, the opinions for which are largely devoid of any semblance of legal reasoning and consist mostly of brazen sophistry and naked assertion. When the courts behave so reprehensibly, is it any wonder that police lack self-discipline and bureaucrats feel that they can take it upon themselves to ignore law and regulation and do whatever they feel their ill conceived notion of social justice might happen to be?
Building upon Levin’s branding observations, we may look to modern, advanced countries that have achieved substantively discernible practice in the rule of law. Denmark in particular affords a cornucopia of best practices to adopt in USA reforms. First Denmark has retained the distinction between jurist and lawyer. A jurist being someone who studies the law to understand and conform to it, and a lawyer being someone who uses the law to persuade others to come to a preferred conclusion. USA court benches are filled with lawyers and nary a jurist to be found. The USA can remedy this by separating legal education into two types of schools: schools of jurisprudence for future judge candidates and schools of law for lawyers. Lawyers should be removed from the bench and replaced by jurists who would be nominated by a commission based upon performance upon written examinations of competence for 6 year terms and in much larger numbers, so as to undo the current cult of personality that afflicts the high courts. Appeals would be handled by randomly selected panels from among the body of jurists. In addition, in all civil and criminal trials, the presiding body would consist of one jurist and at least two lay judges so as to prevent corruption and to bring pragmatic and common sense perspectives to bear. With such reforms, the USA might see its way out of its current devolutionary trajectory.
Shakespeare: 1st thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers
This post makes me pause. I’ve looked at the last several months thinking increasingly that we are a. “specifically smart & generally stupid” but also thinking that its possible that b. “all of our institutions are rotten at their core”. If their core is where they should be “specifically smart”, how can both of these be possible at the same time? On a. my thought was – Maybe someone is an accomplished epidemiologist but has no clue about economics – so their opinion on “reopening society” has to be taken with a grain of salt. They aren’t smart about the general world. However, this post + the accountability post yesterday combine to push me away from the “specifically smart” piece of my evaluation and more to just b. “all of our institutions are rotten at their core”. The combination of incredible mission creep into areas not squarely in the realm of initial “specific smarts” of an organization coupled with a lack of accountability has lead us to be stupid across the board and failing everywhere without admitting it. The culture of scientism feels like a direct result of this. Let’s have the CDC tackle gun violence as an epidemic! Is it working? All answers are opinion based while littered with irrelevant math formulas. Now there’s a global pandemic – here’s a bunch of opinions with irrelevant math formulas. It’s science just like the science we have been doing at the CDC for the last decade… Have a nice day indeed.
I suggest a new government agency with an ever expanding scope. Every year, it’s mandate mandate to reduce and remove, reduce, consolidate, and simplify government activity should expand.
This was kind of tried with Executive Order 13771, “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs”.
It has been a complete, embarassing failure, and any reports of success at limiting or slowing rules are basically lies or people being suckered by the various easy circumventions used to route around the technical requirements.
This is not *just* because of the courts, though they certainly played a role, illustrated by the fact that it took three years just to decide (for the third time) whether certain groups even had *standing* to challenge the effort.
By the way, if you think three years for standing is egregious, you should check out Michael Mann’s defamation lawsuit against Mark Steyn, for which, just six months ago, Justice Alito authored a dissent from denial of cert on the question of whether the still-in-process suit could continue to proceed even further, but which surrounds a few words in a blog post from *eight years ago*.
The courts no longer deserve any respect.
Cheap cop are cheap for the tax payer.
Once we head down the path of national cop reform then we get involved in very nasty union battles at the local level.
So, I get the Peter Principle metaphor joke, and it’s a funny one, but of course it actually has nothing to do with why various USG offices and agencies are incompetent at what they do, the answer to which is “overdetermined” by a combination of many factors, to say the least. But this is not among them.
The incompetence of the CDC or FDA (the regulatory apparatus) is of a different origin and nature than the incompetence of the police and the military (the enforcement apparatus).
The regulatory apparatus suffers from fundamental institutional defects that – in the absence of changes so radical so as to be equivalent to a change in the Constitution – would apply no matter how narrow or broad the mandate of any particular organizational entity.
The enforcement apparatus is different. In that case, the incompetency is imposed by those who don’t want it to be competent, and who have the power to cripple it, and who thus tend to cripple it as much as they can get away with without totally destroying the capacity of those institutions. The enforcers try to circumvent this crippling by discovering loopholes or innovating new techniques or technologies – usually at tremendous, obscene expense – and this works for a while, until the evolutionary struggle iterates and they are crippled again.
Narrowing of focus is absolutely no cure at all for that kind of “incompetency”, which is really an artificial disability. If I were to race anyone who qualified to compete in the Olympics, they would crush me. If I had the power to force them to only use one leg and hop the whole way, then I would win every time and they would seem ‘incompetent’ at racing. But again, it’s not really a competence problem, or an overbroad mandate problem.
Reforming the police is an impossible task in today’s society. We want them to be on their best behavior. But the worst crime is in the bluest of cities. It will not be possible to reform the police without disproportionately arresting blacks. This will always be a source of dissatisfaction. Moreover, the ideal police in this world will not be 100% perfect. So any abuse can be blown out of proportion. And good, smart people will be reluctant to work for the police given the potential for them to get the dirty end of the stick in any questionable calls.
The net result will simply be less policing such as in Baltimore or strict policing which will lead to more calls for reform and more outrage even in the best real world case. Add to that the public choice aspects which will mean hard to remove unions, and persistent affirmative action, and we have a cluster bomb that cannot be disarmed.
Your logic is fine as far as it goes, but one assumption is faulty, in that you take as a given the current technological level of the approach to surveillance and incentivization on the marginal criminal.
As for the first factor, the Fourth Amendment is already on the way to being a dead letter with a modified version of Brin’s Transparent Society becoming a reality, but in which the database of everywhere everyone goes and everything they do being transparent not to everyone else, but only to a few large, rich, and powerful entities, which includes the state.
The point is, these developments will make detection and conviction near certainties.
As for incentives, if you can’t arrest and imprison people, you will have to find other pressure points they care about and press hard into those. If you can immediately identity every person at a standoff distance by face and other characteristic and electronic emanations, then you can conceivably connect to all their “accounts” that form the basis of a normal modern life and simply threaten to shut them all down so that the individual faces a kind of excommunication in place like Hester Prynne or Mitchell Chaplin from The Twilight Zone episode “To See The Invisible Man”.
These not only throw up the prospect of terrific inconvenience and condemnation to unemployability, but they directly target the applications and augmentations that score up to higher status within the target individual’s social milieu. That is, if you threaten to turn a baller into a scrub who doesn’t have a car and can’t even send a text message, he will back down to avoid the massive reputational hit and the loss of esteem and major social advantages.
There is a reason this sounds a lot like China’s Social Credit System, and this is inevitably where we too are heading, and we may even surpass them, because we will have to in order to maintain public order. We might have avoided such a system and outcome, or done so for a longer time, if we stayed sane with regards to policing. But we didn’t.
A very similar scenario occurs in Isaac Asimov’s A Perfect Fit, from way back in 1981. He had been asked to write a story about the social impact of computers. It’s not bad, and pretty short.