The Making of A Bureaucrat

One insider's inquiry

The federal bureaucracy now employs 2.8 million people and spends about $461 billion a year, too much of it wasted. President Carter pushed through a bill that would reduce the machine and streamline it, but veteran bureaucrats expect little change. Their methods of resistance were described in unusual detail in the New Republic earlier this month by a Department of Agriculture insider who called himself James North. He also changed the names of his fellow employees. Excerpts:

The first day I went to work as an economist for the Department of Agriculture, I was assigned to a nine-by-twelve cubicle, to be shared with my supervisor. Bob Barnet had a Ph.D. in economics, but was prouder of a pin he had just been awarded marking his 20 years of Government service. Barnet showed me the ropes, then leaned back and laid out his philosophy of how to succeed in the bureaucracy: please your boss, cover your ass and always, always be cautious. Patience was the greatest virtue. The way to get ahead was not to outshine everyone else, but to do precisely what your superiors wanted, prove your loyalty and get to know everything you could about the bureaucracy's inner workings.

Barnet followed his own rules to the letter. He arrived early every morning --not to get any work done, but to peruse the desks of everyone else in the office, thus keeping one step ahead of his superiors. He would gleefully fill me in on his findings the moment I arrived, the first wave in a day-long deluge of chatter that made it impossible for either of us to get any work done. My life became a mind-numbing swamp of monologues about who got what promotion, why it was undeserved, which employees hated each other and why. "That goddam Elizabeth," Barnet would rant, "she's in there with Cobourn [his own boss] every day, pushing her way into everything."

Bob's formal responsibilities were far broader than mine: to review and edit my written reports on price-support levels, and to keep tabs on all developments affecting domestic agricultural production. I soon discovered that his idea of keeping tabs consisted of reading a few magazines and departmental circulars. As for passing on my analyses, he concentrated mostly on perfecting my painfully learned bureaucratic jargon. So at a cost of $15,000 a year to the taxpayers, I slowly cranked out reports that Bob could have (and once had) written. Bob himself got $30,000.

Bob's own supervisor, F.D. Cobourn, was neither an economist nor a manager by training. A classic case of the Peter Principle, he had been promoted fairly rapidly until he hit a position he couldn't handle, and there he sat. An introverted man who had once apparently been a fair researcher and writer, he simply could not manage an office. He would grunt hello in the morning and then disappear into his office, where he spent his days rearranging the commas in our reports.

Georgia Buck, a black secretary in the office, at least had a reason not to produce: revenge. Several years earlier she had been involved in an affirmative-action suit, and since then she had been shuffled--"detailed," in bureaucratese --among offices in the department. When I knew her she was on her fifth detail, felt very persecuted, and on the rare occasions when she was given anything to do, worked far below her abilities.

What was it with these people? They were all intelligent, potentially competent, as honest as the next guy. They had probably all entered Government service with enthusiasm and dedication. But somewhere along the line they had all settled for far less than expected--and some had virtually embraced incompetence. The odd thing was that most took no joy in their malfeasance. A few delighted in petty corruption, but most were frustrated and dissatisfied. They felt that theirs was the only rational course open, that the system demanded incompetence.

But why? The traditional explanations were threefold: that lacking a profit motive, there is no incentive to run Government bureaucracies efficiently; that such organizations are, by size and character, unwieldy and unmanageable; and that the job security offered by the civil service system makes it impossible to fire incompetent employees.

There is probably some truth in the first two, and the third reason is important. But none of these three factors really answered my question of why individuals so often choose to be incompetent.

One answer is obvious: the pressure toward mediocrity is simply too enormous to resist. To stand out one need perform only slightly better than the prevailing level of incompetence. To do much more is to play the fool--doing others' work --and invites the hostility of coworkers.

Ambitious employees have two ways to get out of this trap, both of which tend to compound the problem. The first is to jump sideways as you jump up, finding high-paid jobs in other agencies that you often are only remotely qualified to fill. Most hiring officers prefer the relatively unqualified but established civil servant to the highly qualified outsider because all outsiders are unknown quantities.

The second road to glory--and mediocrity--is to join the rank of management. This is typically accomplished by building a small empire. For lack of a better index, one's importance, and thus one's grade, is ultimately determined by the number of employees supervised, the number of publications issued, the number of projects undertaken. This of course leads to the creation of unnecessary work.

When President Carter's Civil Service Reform Act finally passed, I asked a few of the oldtimers if they expected it to have any impact. Needless to say, they didn't.

The act's emphasis on improving management is important. But I wonder --will encouraging competition among managers lead to more efficient Government, or simply to more and better empire building? No new standards for what constitutes good management have been laid down, and in their absence, it's fair to assume that the bureaucrats will continue to respond to old ones.

Reaching these conclusions brought only limited satisfaction. It's nice to understand why you face 30 years of intolerable boredom and frustrations, but it hardly eases the pain. Two years after arriving, I'm about to leave.

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