Introduction: From Law to Action
When government bureaucracies lack competence, legislatures become little more than debating societies. Legislatures make decisions about what the government should do: build battleships, speed up permitting, cancel wasteful spending, et cetera. However, only competent government agencies can make these decisions consequential. When agencies cannot administer the programs Congress creates, laws become merely expressions of intent, and the bargaining that produces them ultimately proves to be fruitless.
The ability of government agencies to turn political goals into results is often called state capacity, and how to build it has become a central question of government reform. The lack of state capacity is easiest to see in major national initiatives. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a signature Biden administration accomplishment signed in November 2021, put $7.5 billion toward a national network of electric-vehicle chargers along major highways. By early 2024, only a handful of stations had been built; by the November elections, there were merely roughly 200 charging ports. Legislators who had supported the law were left with nothing to show voters and gained nothing in return for paying the political price of bargaining.
For laws to matter, government agencies must take responsibility for actually carrying out the task, whether that means building battleships or electric vehicle chargers. Carrying out such a task means acting amid uncertainty and inertia, and overcoming resistance from the losers of a legislative conflict. The conflict continues both outside government, as established vendors attempt to hold on to lucrative contracts, and inside it, as bureaucracies protect their turf and employees cling to “the way we’ve always done things.”
A competent bureaucracy is one that can nonetheless take responsibility for delivering the results Congress demands. Someone must be in charge of a program, have the authority to act, and be personally responsible for failure. That responsibility must include the authority to strip away inherited processes and cancel nonperforming programs that divert resources from the task at hand.
Agencies today are not built to take responsibility in this manner. Inside the agency, responsibility is divided across offices; outside it, much of the work is carried out by contractors, grant recipients, nonprofits, and other partners. When programs succeed, it is often because a few capable officials manage to hold this loose arrangement together. Rebuilding agencies to exercise responsibility would require an entirely different operating model, and even an entirely different way of speaking about bureaucracy—one the United States used to possess.
The contrast is visible in two documents that directed the federal government to improve its management. The first, from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, was a self-assessment circulated to help agencies improve their management during World War II. The second, from the Biden administration, was a plan for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Both asked agencies to examine and improve how they operated, but spoke about bureaucracy in entirely different terms: the former used the language of authority, hierarchy, and personal responsibility; the latter speaks in terms of participation, inclusion, and loose coordination.
The 1940s document was blunt about its goals: “tightening up operations, reducing margins of safety, and simplifying methods.” The DEI document speaks in softer and vaguer terms: agencies are to “work collaboratively to drive innovation and organizational outcomes, draw from the full diversity of the nation, and position the federal government to serve as a model employer that values and promotes equity for all Americans.”
The DEI plan summarized an earlier self-assessment conducted as part of the same initiative. That self-assessment, in its entirety, had called for agency heads to:
(i) assess whether agency recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, performance evaluations, pay and compensation policies, reasonable accommodations access, and training policies and practices are equitable;
(ii) take an evidence-based and data-driven approach to determine whether and to what extent agency practices result in inequitable employment outcomes, and whether agency actions may help to overcome systemic societal and organizational barriers;
(iii) assess the status and effects of existing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives or programs, and review the amount of institutional resources available to support human resources activities that advance the objectives outlined in section 1 of this order; and
(iv) identify areas where evidence is lacking and propose opportunities to build evidence to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and address those gaps identified.
By contrast, the older self-assessment’s questions included:
- “Are we measuring the manpower and money cost of recording, checking, and auditing operations against the losses that might occur if we eliminated the operations?”
- “Have we formally announced a policy of aggressive, persistent efforts to find better, more effective, and less expensive ways of doing our agency's job?”
- “Have the idiosyncrasies of prima donnas in the agency dictated the kind of organization we have? If so, has it been worth the price?”
- “Does anybody know the reason for each of the motions we go through? Is it a good reason?”
- “In short, do we have an imaginative, spirited attitude toward getting the job done in the easiest, cheapest way? Or, honestly, can we be fairly charged with being sunk in ‘bureaucratic’ ineptitude?”
The documents diverged most sharply in the follow-through each required. The DEI plan calls for agencies to develop a strategic plan, annual goals, and quarterly reporting. The World War II management questionnaire said that “No formal reports to the Bureau of the Budget on the results of the self-appraisal are considered necessary. Rather, it is expected that management improvements will be reflected in the quarterly requests for personnel ‘ceilings’ and in budget estimates hereafter submitted to the Bureau.”
The older document treated responsibility as a basic feature of bureaucracy. Its questions addressed specific officials, forcing them to look directly at waste and pushing them to eliminate processes that distract from the mission at hand. The modern document, by contrast, requires new reports and meetings in order to show concern for the favored cause of the moment. Bureaucracies designed to satisfy these demands cannot take responsibility.
This paper discusses how to rebuild a bureaucracy capable of taking responsibility for delivering a mission and being held accountable if it fails. It begins by contrasting this model with other prevailing accounts of state capacity, then identifies three areas in which agencies must take responsibility for their programs. It concludes by considering the political consequences of bureaucratic competence.
