Bureaucracy
stifles human activity. The Maine Department of Human Services was established
to improve the health and welfare of its citizens. Because it is a bureaucracy,
it sets uniform rules to treat every citizen equally. One such rule
allowed nursing homes freedom of association and the right to read what
they wanted. Sounded good but, all of a sudden last week, the state
was forcing the owner of a small clinic, which cared for the mentally
retarded, not to deny these invalids -- with the capacity of 5 year
olds- the "right" to view pornography and to allow them to masturbate.
When the good people of Maine were dreaming of helping suffering patients,
somehow good intentions translated into something most would abhor,
Or take professional childcare. Mothers need a break and want the fulfillment
of a challenging job, but the children need care. So dutiful President
Clinton installed expert, professional childcare centers at every federal
establishment, and encouraged them throughout the nation in the private
sector. Along comes Littleton and now the emotive president shifts to
expanding "family leave" for federal employees from 13 days to 12 weeks
a year, citing a Council of Economics Advisers report showing American
parents spend 22 fewer hours with their children. Unmentioned was the
fact that the massive expansion of child care outside the home encouraged
parents to spend those 22 less hours there, encouraging the very problem
he now criticized, Government never has to apologize, because of the
short memories of the public and the media, who are suckers for any
claim of a federal solution to the problem of the moment.
Professionalize the police force has been the cry of the liberal establishment
for most of the century, Send the burly sheriffs to training school
and teach them responsibility and good manners. Along comes the Columbine
High School shooting rampage and the security forces are so professional
they hardly act. The first officer on the scene of exploding bombs fired
once at one of the killers at 11:28 a.m. The arrival of the first, informal
SWAT team experts at 11:51 ended aggressive action. The real pros arrive
at 12:15, and nothing. Another team enters at 1:00 and they, finally,
free some students from the cafeteria. Not until 3:30 do the SWAT teams
release the remainder of the students. Fortunately, the murderers killed
themselves because no else tried. It took four hours because the professionals
are trained to be cautious and bureaucratic after years of second-guessing
by courts enforcing complicated bureaucratic rules of procedure.
Today, almost everyone professes to oppose discrimination against minorities.
So, it would be assumed the widespread use of standardized tests would
be a major priority to eliminate any lingering effects of race bias
to select for jobs and school admission on the basis of merit alone.
But it turns out blacks and Hispanics do poorly on these tests compared
to whites. So the U.S. Department of Education just recently issued
a booklet called "Nondiscrimination in High-Stakes Testing" to let schools
know how to use standardized tests fairly, which
reads, in part: "The use of any educational test which has a significant
disparate impact on members of an' particular race, national origin
or sex is discriminatory," unless the school can prove it is educationally
necessary and there is no other means for testing. In English, this
means schools cannot use tests because they cannot explain why minorities
do worse on them. Thus a federal program to increase knowledge ends
forbidding the use of standards.
Alarmists? For four years, your reporter was in charge of testing for
federal government employment. The primary standardized test had been
refined for years to remove all vestiges of cultural bias and to increase
correlation to actual employment success. The usual suspects sued, claiming
the tests had "adverse impact" because a lower percentage of blacks
and Hispanics passed the tests than sat for them. After years of fighting
and despite a total commitment by yours truly to the validity and social
benefits of standardized tests, the Justice: Department ruled it was
impossible to prevail in court and this old right-winger was forced
to abandon them, at least until the Carter' administration-imposed consent
decree expired in five years. Fifteen years later, there still are no
real standardized Civil Service tests for the federal government. And
all this was imposed without law, by bureaucratic "guidance'' and a
sweetheart legal
When the direct interests of the bureaucracy are involved, things can
really get bizarre. At this very moment, the federal unions are pushing
to further subsidize government child care (is Bill paying attention?)
for the poor. Only the legislators, including most of the Republicans
on the committee, refused to define "poor," the unions expecting to
later interpret it expansively so that it could include half of the
world's best-paid work force. When forced to specify how this $10,000
per beneficiary goody would be paid for, these supporters of good government
management said, take it out of the agency salary account, assuring
under- staffing for the work the agency is supposed to perform to help
the outside poor!
As these examples show, it is not that some common sense could not minimize
some of these weird results of bureaucracy. Elected and appointed political
officials make the ultimate decisions and could correct some -- but
there is too - much to get all. The bureaucratic machinery grinds away
at good sense because it must treat human beings uniformly when they
are different. It is that simple, but it takes unusual geniuses like
the American Founders or Ronald Reagan, or unusual circumstances like
the fall of the Soviet Union, for any large number of people to appreciateit.
Attend, the only humane solution is keep as much social decision- making
out of the bureaucratic rule system as much as possible. Simple, but
profound.
Donald
Devine, former director Of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management,
is a columnist and a Washington-based policy consultant and a Vice Chairman
for the American Conservative Union.
