An Old-Fashioned Honorable Resignation

Today the director of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson, submitted her resignation.  She did so after being ripped by Congressmen of both parties for a series of appalling security lapses by the agency charged with protecting the President, including most recently the disclosure that the Secret Service had somehow — astonishingly — allowed the President to get on the elevator with an armed man.

Pierson said she resigned because it was obvious that Congress had lost confidence in her ability to run the agency — and she was right.  I can’t defend her management of the Secret Service, but I can applaud her decision to do the honorable thing and resign.

Pierson’s candor and approach is refreshing and, unfortunately, all too rare in Washington, D.C. these days, where embattled agency heads seem to routinely try to batten down the hatches and blame somebody else for the failings of their agencies.  Kathleen Sebelius presided over one of the worst, most expensive debacles in federal government history during the rollout of the healthcare.gov website, and she hung around for months afterward.  Who has resigned to atone for the obvious failings in security along the Mexican border, for allowing a whistleblower to spirit away a huge cache of top-secret government documents, for allowing the IRS to target groups because of their political orientation, or for countless other disasters?  Has anyone?

Pierson’s resignation reminds us that the people serving in government used to serve at the pleasure of the President and Congress and were decent enough to take the blame and submit their resignations when screw-ups occur on their watch.  Julia Pierson, at least, understood her proper role and had the class to do the right thing — but such an act of personal accountability is incredibly rare.  What does that tell you about the people who now serve in our government and don’t seem to be accountable to anyone?

The Governmental Accountability Problem

On Thursday the State Department’s Inspector General issues a report stating that $6 billion in contracting money spent by the Department over the last six years cannot be properly accounted for. The report noted “significant financial risk” and “lack of institutional control” and, astonishingly, reported that the State Department could not even produce contract files documenting precisely how $2.1 billion was spent.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of the report is the apparent utter lack of concern about accountability in spending our tax money. In the State Department, the inspector general position — which is supposed to be a kind of public watchdog — went unfilled for almost six years. Moreover, there have been fraud warnings and prior reports about slapdash controls and accounting for money shoveled overseas and paid to private contractors, and the State Department failed to address the problems.

I have two reactions to this news. First, this is the kind of story that feeds the fury of fiscal conservatives, who believe that the federal government takes too much of our money and then simply wastes a lot of it. The government takes in and spends so much money that even an astronomical sum like $6 billion is only a drop in the bucket — but we’ll never know precisely how that $6 billion was spent and how much of that money was lost to fraud, corruption, or simple overspending by unconcerned bureaucrats. How could an important position like inspector general go unfilled for six years?

People who support big government spending tend to pooh-pooh the focus on “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but I remain convinced that a federal government that actually had to tighten its belt because of budget reductions would find lots of places where money could be saved or spending reprioritized. At present, with the federal government awash in cash fueled by constant, large-scale deficit spending, the government has no incentive to be careful and prudent in its spending — and as a result reports and warnings about financial accountability tend to be ignored.

Second, this story can’t help whatever presidential aspirations Hillary Clinton may have. She ran the State Department for much of the period when accountability was lacking and warnings apparently were disregarded. As I understand it, part of her pitch is that she would be more fiscally conservative than other Democrats who might seek the presidency — but this report really undercuts the perception of careful stewardship of the public fisc that Hillary Clinton is trying to project. If you strongly believe that the government needs to get its fiscal house in order, how can you vote for someone who presided over a department that couldn’t even document how it spent $6 billion? If a public company were in a similar situation, the CEO would be fired, the SEC investigators would be knocking at the door, and private lawsuits would be inevitable.

It may never happen, but wouldn’t it be refreshing if we elected administrations that actually paid attention to the unglamorous nuts and bolts of accounting for their spending, reassessed whether long-time programs were still truly needed, tried to save a penny here and there, and acted like they took financial responsibility seriously, rather than worrying about immediately jetting off to some faraway location for a photo op with a reset button?

In Thrall To The Administrative State

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who appears frequently on cable TV news shows, has an thought-provoking article in the Washington Post that captures some of my concerns about the incessant growth of the administrative agencies of the federal government and what it means for American citizens.  It’s an important issue that is well worth pondering.

In my view, there are two key points that should be part of our thinking about this issue.  One is laziness, and the other is accountability.

Part of the reason why the administrative agencies have grown so vast is that the President and the Congress have been, and continue to be, lazy.  (And, just so no one thinks this is an attack on the current President and Congress, let me be clear — this is something that has occurred, without significant interruption, since the 1960s, under Presidents of both parties and Congresses controlled by both parties.)  Presidents and members of Congress don’t want to roll up their sleeves and grapple with the details of how a particular federal law should be implemented or applied, so they write legislation in broad strokes and then yield huge amounts of discretionary authority to the administrative agency that is charged with writing the specific rules and then supervising enforcement of the law.

The justification for that approach is that administrative agencies are “subject matter experts” that can make finely honed decisions about how the law should be applied, what forms should be submitted, what fees should be charged, and what punishments should be imposed in the event of non-compliance.  That justification sounds good — but what makes us believe that the agencies really have such expertise, or that they exercise it in a dispassionate, apolitical way?  And, even more fundamentally, why shouldn’t we demand that Congress develop such subject-matter expertise?  Before Congress writes a law that may have an enormous impact on a particular segment of the economy, is it so unreasonable to expect that the members of Congress on the committee that writes the legislation actually have some reasonably detailed understanding of what they are doing?  I would be happy to see members of Congress spend less time on fundraising and cable TV appearances and more time on actually mastering the details.

The accountability issue is equally important.  Well-educated, reasonably attentive Americans know the names of the President, the leaders of Congress, their Representatives and Senators, and the major members of the Cabinet.  But who, at any given point in time, can name the head of the IRS or the FDA or the FTC?  When an issue arises with an agency like the IRS and not only the President, but also the leadership of the IRS, take the position that they had no idea what was being done, we have reached a critical point of non-accountability.  That kind of shrug of responsibility is not acceptable, because in a representative government our elected officials must know, and be accountable for, the actions of the agencies they are charged with supervising.  If they don’t, we must demand that they develop some mechanism to keep track of, and direct, the regulatory actions.  Part of that mechanism has to involve shrinking the bureaucracies and removing some of their power and discretion — because obviously it is easier to supervise and direct a smaller agency with rigidly defined authority than a sprawling entity that is given broad, poorly defined authority.

If we don’t get the growth of the regulatory state under control, we may move into a truly Orwellian scenario, where citizens can be trapped in a bureaucratic maze with no hope and no recourse.  If the President and members of Congress are viewed as powerless to do anything about it, we may see still further erosion in the number of Americans who care enough to vote in elections.  I don’t think you have to be a Constitutionalist — or for that matter a Democrat or Republican — to conclude that we don’t want, and cannot tolerate, that kind of government.