Ten secret truths about government incompetence: what you can learn from the management mistakes of Obama and Bush.

• Author: Ketti, Donald F.
• Position: Barack Obama and George W. Bush

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

To: President-elect

From: Donald F. Kettl

Subject: Ten Secret Truths About Government Incompetence: What you can learn from the management mistakes of Obama and Bush.

Congratulations! You've won the nasty 2016 election for president of these United States. It was a long slog through more bad chicken dinners and dusty halls than anyone could be expected to tolerate. You won because you listened carefully to Republican strategist Frank Luntz's take on the 2014 midterm election, that the "results were less about the size of government than about making government efficient, effective, and accountable." And that's just what you built your campaign on.

On January 20, 2017, you'll be sworn in at noon, give a great speech, sneak out of the Beast for as much of a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue as the Secret Service will allow, cheer your hometown high school band, and dance the night away.

And then you'll take over as chief executive and actually have to do what Luntz said: make government more efficient, effective, and accountable. As you settle into your new chair in the Oval Office, here are ten handy truths worth keeping in your pocket or purse.

1. GOVERNMENT WORKS BETTER THAN PEOPLE THINK. MOST OF THE TIME.

   You told us during the campaign that government programs fail often, and a September 2014 Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that most Americans agree. Of those surveyed, 74 percent said they were dissatisfied or angry with the way the federal government works. Another 23 percent were satisfied--but not enthusiastic. Those enthusiastic about the federal government's performance? Just 1 percent.

   In fact, however, much of government actually works pretty well, most of the time. The Heritage Foundation points to "the breathtaking, long-term improvements in safety in the airline industry," with tough, smart work by the National Transportation Safety Board leading to just a single fatal accident on an American airline since 2009, when a commuter jet crashed near Buffalo. For all the (often overblown) concerns about the long-term fiscal strength of Social Security, the bureaucracy that actually administers the program, the Social Security Administration, makes monthly payments to sixty-four million Americans with an accuracy rate of more than 99 percent and administrative costs that are (at 0.7 percent) but a fraction of those of private pension plans. Harvard University researchers found that stronger government regulations for air quality have led to longer lives. Even at the troubled Veterans Health Administration, a new technology system shrank the claims backlog by 60 percent.

   Government usually gets only the hard problems--the puzzles that the private sector cannot or will not tackle, or that the private sector itself creates. In 2009, the United States found itself the majority stockholder in General Motors and pumped billions into Chrysler. Government bailouts saved an insurance company (AIG) and a bank (Citigroup). With its $49.5 billion bailout, the feds saved GM and millions of jobs, lost just $11.2 billion in the turnaround, and got out of the car business by the end of 2013. The government actually made money--$22.7 billion--on the AIG bailout and another $15 billion on Citigroup, far offsetting its auto-industry loss. Six years after the government launched these bailouts, it's still staggering to imagine how bad things would have gotten if the government had left private enterprise to itself. And these weren't aberrations. Again and again over the years, Washington has bailed out companies deemed vital to the economy, like Lockheed in 1971, Chrysler in 1980, and the entire airline industry after 9/11. Each time, the actions saved the companies and Washington made a profit on its investments.

   A huge part of government works pretty well most of the time, as we take for granted every time safe drinking water comes out of the tap. You start your administration with a lot of points on the board, even if not many citizens notice the score.

2. GOOD MANAGEMENT DOESN'T WIN ELECTIONS--BUT BAD MANAGEMENT CAN RUIN PRESIDENCIES. FAST.

   The painful experiences of your two predecessors create a stark warning: voters don't reward good performance, but they fiercely punish bad management. For George W. Bush, the point at which his negatives exceeded his positives and never recovered was not "Mission Accomplished" or Abu Ghraib. Rather, it was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. Barack Obama tumbled down the same road after the failed launch of the Obamacare website in October 2013, at almost the same point in his presidency.

   It isn't an inevitable part of second-term-itis. Bill Clinton fought off the impeachment barrage and Ronald Reagan was besieged by Iran-Contra, but neither took the hit in presidential approval that Bush and Obama suffered. The difference? The Clinton and Reagan battles were fundamentally political. The Bush and Obama problems were at their core managerial. The managerial failures created a negative narrative into which other problems played and on which their opponents relentlessly piled. For Team Obama, there's been Benghazi, the IRS, the Obamacare website, the VA, the Secret Service, Ebola, and a lengthening list of other managerial mishaps. The Republicans turned this into a winning play in their battle for Congress in 2014: the president didn't know what he was doing, they said, and Democrats needed to pay.

3. WE DON'T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN FAILURES THAT ARE TRULY CONSEQUENTIAL AND THOSE THAT HAVE LESSER IMPACT.

   You've benefited from the "Obama is incompetent" narrative. It increased the public's appetite for getting you--and some fresh air--into Washington. But let's be honest: you lucked out because of the media's inability or unwillingness to notice, care about, or explain the difference between hugely consequential management screw-ups and only modestly consequential ones.

   Failing to plan for the occupation of Iraq? Disbanding the Iraqi military? Putting inexperienced political cronies in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and downsizing the agency prior to Hurricane Katrina? Now those were screw-ups--big, far-reaching, world-historic blunders that led directly to the deaths of thousands.

   But Ebola? In the United States (as opposed to Africa) Ebola claimed two victims through the first few months, both travelers from West Africa who arrived at hospitals already gravely ill. In all, three health care workers, two in Dallas, one in New York, caught the disease--and then they recovered. The media's freak-out over this story was insane. True, administration officials fed the frenzy with some inaccurate early assertions and advice--for instance, that the safety protocols the Centers for Disease Control had provided hospitals were not as careful and detailed as they needed to be. But within a few days the administration had better calibrated its media presence, the CDC had issued stronger protocols, and the outbreak had died down, just as the agency predicted. Meanwhile, in Texas alone, twenty children died in the 2012-13 flu season, and annual deaths from the flu across the nation range from 3,000 to 49,000--numbers that provoke mostly yawns from reporters.

   The media mis-calibrated other big stories. In the Obamacare website fiasco, no one died. It took people a few extra months to sign up for care. Early press reports that forty...