The squabble between Congress and the CIA continues:
Earlier today, House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) wrote in a letter to the committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) that he had obtained information that there were serious problems with the CIA’s briefing of lawmakers and that the CIA “affirmatively lied to” lawmakers.
“These notifications have led me to conclude this committee has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to,” Reyes wrote in his letter.
Sounds similar to a subplot of the John le Carré novel Smiley’s People, in which the higher powers of the British government seek to neuter the intelligence services. They succeed. However, intel services being what they are, there are still plenty of moves available under the guise of state secrets, bureaucracy, or normal mistakes. I suspect the CIA spat will play out similarly.
Alas, we’ll never know. The “information” will most likely be available for evaluation decades after the event. What plays out in public is allegations that don’t have to be backed up, and rebuttals that are equally unencumbered by the burden of proof. One wonders whether the discussion needs to be public at all.
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy · international relations
Tagged: CIA, Congress, George Smiley, John le Carré, Smiley's People
Nascent rumblings on the possibility of a second stimulus package:
From a strictly economic perspective, the jury is still out. Congress passed the Recovery Act six months ago, but job losses continue, with nearly 500,000 jobs shed in June. The unemployment rate has now reached 9.5 percent, the highest in nearly 26 years. That’s worse than the administration’s baseline job-loss scenario without the stimulus. Paul Krugman is now calling for “a second round, ASAP.” Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research says “I think we can make that call already.” But Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com says give it a few more months: The rollout so far, from tax cuts to state aid to infrastructure spending, has been “pretty much what we expected.” Former Reagan-administration economist Bruce Bartlett argues it’s too soon to double down, since a huge chunk of funds don’t get spent until 2010 and 2011.
When the first stimulus package was rushed through Washington by a coterie of economists and policy wonks with hair afire, I didn’t much question it. After all, I’m no economist–what would I know except that US$787B seems like a lot of money? Yet, I was not particularly surprised when the chorus of complaints about stimulus mismanagement emerged. When that many politicians move to spend that much money that fast, it’s certain that it will not be managed to perfection, and the need for speed sacrifices some measure of planning and control.
That said, I look at the quote above and wonder whether the real weakness of the stimulus package was that it didn’t move faster and risk breaking a few more eggs. Okay, unemployment is pushing 10%, but maybe the reason this scenario is so close to the one without the stimulus is that the stimulus hasn’t really started. There are tax cuts, most of which logically wouldn’t be expected to show up in the economy just yet, and there are infrastructure projects–construction–that take a long time to design and build. Aside from that, there are funds earmarked for unemployment benefits and proposed initiatives. Very little of the package (to my admittedly basic understanding) appears to have gone to direct, near-term job creation and preservation. The Slate article mentions some ideas should a second round become necessary:
Another relatively speedy way to jumpstart the economy would be to give more money directly to state and local governments. That money gets spent a lot faster, since the programs it goes to—food stamps, for instance, or unemployment insurance—already exist. Construction projects, by contrast, take a while to plan. That’s why less than 5 percent of the money allocated to the Department of Transportation has so far been spent. (That presumably includes the “shovel-ready” projects that began right away.) Giving states money makes sense from a need-based perspective, too. If the downturn continues, state budgets will be at risk of collapse. (See California, State of.)
In other words, invest in going concerns. The thinking here appears to be that an investment in an established company is more likely to pay immediate dividends than investing in a start-up and waiting for it to turn a profit, should that ever happen. That seems logical.
Caveat: I never read the Recovery Act in full, so the opinions above are based on what I can glean from what others have said.
MORE: The US government has a web site tracking federal spending.
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy
Tagged: economy, going concern, Recovery Act, stimulus, unemployment
File this under “defensive cooperation”:
The nation’s hospitals agreed last night to contribute $155 billion over 10 years toward the cost of insuring the 47 million Americans without health coverage, according to two industry sources.
The agreement that three hospital associations reached with White House officials and leaders of the Senate Finance Committee is the latest in a series of side deals that aim to reduce the cost of revamping the nation’s health-care system and to neutralize influential industries that have historically opposed such reforms.
What if this were the endgame from the beginning? The end may look very much like the public-private partnerships I suspect would be most effective at getting the system under control–and in line with where such a powerful country’s general level of health should reasonably be.
Of course, PhRMA is playing its own game in preserving the status quo–or as much of it as can be preserved. Despite a pledge of US$80B toward a new system, the industry knows how to play the influence game. Also, 155+80=235, which is about US$765B ahead of the estimates of what it would cost to get to full coverage in the US. With two of the biggest players having placed their bids, it’s hard to imagine who other than government can come up with that kind of cabbage.
By the way, I don’t entirely buy the US$1T figure. Surely a collaborative, innovative approach can do better than that.
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy
Tagged: health care, hospital, insurance, pharmaceutical, PhRMA
Diego Rodriguez of metacool understands why it is often better to play with a team than play with yourself:
If you’re going to get innovative stuff done in the world, odds are you’re going to do it with other people. If you haven’t looked out the window lately, we’re living in an ever more connected and interdependent world. If there ever was a time for lone inventors to thrive, this is not it: smart, action-oriented, high-EQ, multidisciplinary, interdependent teams are uniquely positioned to take on the broad, systemic challenges so in need of innovative thinking today.
So if you’re going to do remarkable stuff, you’ve got to learn to grok the gestalt of teams.
Never cared much for the word “grok”, but the usage and alliteration fit here. The “T-shaped people” point is an especially valuable one.
Categories: Current Events · Decision-making
Tagged: Diego Rodriguez, gestalt, grok, innovation, metacool, teams
An early investigation has indicated that a technology failure contributed to the recent Metro crash that killed nine and injured scores:
A senior Metro official knowledgeable about train operations said an internal report confirmed that the train control system failed to detect the idling train when the crash occurred about 5 p.m. on a curved section of track between the Fort Totten and Takoma stations.
Metro has temporarily reassigned the top official in charge of the train control systems that are supposed to prevent crashes. Matthew L. Matyuf, superintendent of the Automatic Train Control Division, has been assigned to a “special project,” spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said yesterday.
…where “special project” = something unrelated to investigating his division’s presumed failure. It is noteworthy that the tests replicated the conditions and malfunction presumed responsible for the crash, and telling that NTSB was not prepared to state definitively that the malfunction caused the crash. Saying so would likely prejudice the inevitable legal proceedings.
Some questions naturally fall out of this test, most of them fairly obvious:
- Why did this not happen before?
- Why did testing not identify this as a critical risk (if it didn’t)?
- Where else might this problem surface within the system?
- Are the newer-model trains definitively immune to the malfunction?
- Are there other identifiable malfunctions?
- Who signed off on the design, and based on what criteria?
- What trade-offs has Metro made because of funding?
- Was this malfunction a known problem?
With apologies to my many friends in DC who take Metro daily (and, it should be noted, without incident), the accident casts a shadow of doubt on the integrity of the system. That doubt may not be justified given the safety record of the system as a whole, but it is there and must be addressed.
In my writing and teaching, the same three factors are invariably cited as causes of failure in projects and systems: poor communication, lack of clear objectives, and absence of senior leadership support. It isn’t always all three that are at fault, but one almost always shows up. It’s a well-worn trope here at the blog, but like 9/11, the space shuttle, and any number of other postmortems, one would hope that an organizational analysis accompanies systems findings. The root causes almost certainly lay there.
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy · leadership
Tagged: crash, Matyuf, Metro, postmortem, system failure, Washington DC
Categories: Week in Public Organizations
Tagged: bureaucracy, distrust, drone, Federal Reserve, green revolution, Iran, Metro, pirates, regulation, Securities and Exchange Commission, shotgun wedding, Tehran
Alex Tabarrok highlights an interesting study highly relevant to the debate on health care in the US:
In an interesting paper, Aghion, Algan, Cahuc and Shleifer show that regulation is greater in societies where people do not trust one another. The graph below, for example, shows that societies with a greater level of distrust have stronger minimum wage laws. Note that the result is not that distrust in markets is associated with stronger minimum wages but that distrust in general is associated with greater regulation of all kinds. Distrust in government, for example, is positively correlated with regulation of business. Or to put it the other way, trust in government (as well as other institutions) is associated with less regulation.
That has some interesting parallels in the financial meltdown, but it is healthcare that is on my mind at the moment. Much of the debate against comprehensive coverage (and, thus, regulation) seems to stem from distrust of government. The thinking goes–as I understand it–that government cannot do anything efficiently, and I don’t want to pay for waste or crack moms when I have a job and pay my bills and… That’s not only distrust in government but also distrust in fellow citizens.
Government has given plenty of cause for distrust, and I suppose the current regime in Iran represents an extreme case. The study is something to ponder as the health care debate goes forward, and one question for which I have not even a guess is: how might this apply to public-private partnerships?
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy
Tagged: health care, regulation, Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, Aghion, Algan, Cahuc, Shleifer
I wonder if the epilogue to the stages of grief is bureaucracy:
Asked to identify her body, they pinpointed the mole on her lip and her finely arched eyebrows. Their daughter’s life was now boiled down to a bureaucratic moniker — Case No. 09-01458 — on a Proof of Death certificate.
…
As they wheeled into an expanse of parking lots, they had a hard time finding the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Straight up? No, go to the right! I know where it is! No, that’s the court supervision building!
They parked on a gravelly lot, littered with crushed soda cups, plastic forks and flattened cases of mints.
“Here we go,” Erwin said, climbing the stairs to the morgue, “Bldg. 27″ written on the front door. “Big one.”
These vignettes, in typical Washington Post human interest story style, say little about the background processes of the bureaucracy that will remain invisible to all but the families of the nine fatalities, the seventy some injured, and the Metro organization and NTSB who try to piece together what happened. Of course, there will be lawsuits and other claims that make it into the public record, and these processes will drag out possibly for years.
Behind it all, it seems unusually cruel that the victims–both physical and organizational–will be thrown into the bureaucracy to work out its processes while working out their pain. Yet, it is only the worst system except for all the others.
One would hope, but with little optimism, that the inevitable review study will take into account organizational factors in the same way the Columbia board and 9/11 commission did. It’s not much, but it’s a start.
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy
Tagged: bureaucracy, DC, Metro, crash, stages of grief, NTSB
File under “shotgun marriages”:
Rep. Darrell Issa said the Federal Reserve “engaged in a cover-up” by withholding key details of Bank of America Corp.’s takeover of Merrill Lynch from the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a statement from his office.
The ranking member on the House oversight committee claimed The Fed “deliberately hid concerns and pertinent details” of the merger — and gleaned the details from a new batch of documents obtained from a committee subpoena.
The entanglements of oversight and the seeming dearth of penalties is too taxing to contemplate at this late hour. The toothpaste is so far out of the tube that we might as well just get to brushing.
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy
Tagged: Securities and Exchange Commission, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Federal Reserve, Darrell Issa
This post examining the debate on whether Iran is headed for revolution gets my vote for post of the year in both orgtheory and foreign affairs:
It also gets to a central set of questions in orgTheory right now. This movement, like a few other recent revolutions, seems to have emerged relatively spontaneously. Networks and identity formation processes are emerging in real time before our eyes (which, remarkably, we can watch in real time through Facebook and Twitter). If it had sustained itself through the weekend, this might have been enough to force a political confrontation. At this point, it doesn’t look like that’s happening (though I could easily be reversed by events on that). But if this lull does persist, then this identity and network revolution will have to give way to a movement built around organizations. Stay tuned.
Sorry to lead with the final paragraph, but it doesn’t take away at all from the juicy fisking in the many paragraphs that preceded it. The “assertion, then what the literature says” approach really does it for me.
Categories: Current Events · foreign policy · international relations
Tagged: Iran, orgtheory, Rachman, revolution, Sean Safford
