What Is Really Going On at Federal Agencies?

Years ago as an intern in D.C., and long before the agencies all locked their doors to visitors, I had the occasion to putter around the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
These were obviously not normal workplaces. To my amazement, they were mostly dark, empty, and quiet, and the employees did not seem in the slightest bit busy doing anything at all. It was all kind of spooky.
It then occurred to me that these many hundreds of agencies and millions of employees are not really covered well by the media much at all and certainly not in any detail. They mostly operate without any oversight but for the periodic reporting done for Congress and the sporadic accounting reports from the Government Accounting Office that are mostly ignored.
It’s rather strange, isn’t it? The business pages are packed with details on the hirings and operations of every publicly traded company. We know sales, products, locations, and management structures and changes. But as regards these agencies that are supposed to be responsible to the people, there is a strange lack of curiosity about what they really do and how they do it.
Thanks to nearly a century and a half of gradual accumulation, these agencies have a permanent life. The employees cannot be fired except for egregious actions. And the elected president has no control over them. The president can appoint agency heads but then the battle becomes hundreds versus millions, and the hundreds of appointees are new at their jobs and easily driven out with a hint of financial impropriety, real or made up. The permanent class of middle-state bureaucrats with all the institutional knowledge know precisely where the power resides. It is with them.
This system of administrative hegemony has not been seriously tested in court. It is likely contrary to everything the Constitution ever imagined. True, Congress created these agencies but they exist within the executive branch. Congress cannot simply outsource its job to another branch and then wash its hands of the result. That practice makes a mess out of the original Constitutional structure.
Leaving those fundamental issues aside, what’s striking is how little oversight of these agencies really takes place. Very little reporting is done on them at all apart from perfunctory reprinting of agency press releases by major media. The reason is that many reporters rely on the permanent government for information sources and protection after the fact. There is a hand-in-glove relationship going on here and it’s been building for many decades, even dating back to the Great War.
Every once in a while, we get a glimpse of the reality on the ground. The work of OpenTheBooks makes life briefly hard for agencies that never like to be in the news but very little if anything is ever done about the problem.
There has been some much-welcome talk lately of untangling the cozy relationships between these hundreds of agencies and the industries they oversee. That’s good. We really should not be building a corporatist system that runs contrary to the ideal of free enterprise. But the idea of ending agency capture is also not a permanent solution to the problem.
We must think more fundamentally. With an ideal president and legislature, we would pursue something like what is going on in Argentina today. Whole agencies need to be deleted entirely from the federal budget. And then let the chips fall where they may. So long as I can remember, every Republican president has promised to get rid of the Department of Education. Great. But why does it never happen? I would like to know the answer. Plus, that is only a starter: there are hundreds of such agencies that should be on the list.
The real solution is a complete rethinking of government itself. Every single candidate should be asked to explain their answer to a basic question: What in your view is the role of government? Whatever the answer is, all existing practices of government need to be assessed in light of that. Also, voters should evaluate their answers with an even more fundamental question: What kind of society do we want to live in, a free or centrally managed one? That’s the core question.
The goings-on at the Department of Commerce provide a slight glimpse but the real scale of the problem is far more vast. I have no doubt that if a serious think tank really looked at the details, provided fully and transparently, we would be astonished at what we find. As some news organization has been saying for a while, democracy dies in darkness. Let’s shine the light of truth on the vast complex of civilian agencies that purport to manage our lives better than we can ourselves.