Public Administration and Public Affairs

Nicholas Henry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315530512
• Edition: 13
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Public Administration and Public Affairs demonstrates how to govern efficiently, effectively, and responsibly in an age of political corruption and crises in public finance. Providing a comprehensive, accessible and humorous introduction to the field of Public Administration, this text is designed specifically for those with little to no background in the field. Now in its 13th edition, this beloved book includes:

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• Engaging, timely new sections designed to make students think, such as "Why Are So Many Leaders Losers?" and "Even Terrorists Like Good Government"

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• Comparisons throughout of the challenges and opportunities found in the nonprofit sector vs. the public sector (sections such as "The Dissatisfied Bureaucrat, the Satisfied Nonprofit Professional?")

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• Extensive new material on e-governance, performance management, HRM, intersectoral and intergovernmental administration, government contracting, public budgeting, and ethics.

The 13th edition is complete with an Instructor's Manual, Testbank, and PowerPoint slides for instructors, as well as Learning Objectives and Self-test Questions for students, making it the ideal primer for public administration/management, public affairs, and nonprofit management courses.

PART
I

In Defense of Governing Well

Bureaucracy is in our bones. Prehistoric evidence unearthed at archeological digs suggests that the rudiments of a bureaucratic social order were in place 19,000 years ago.¹

DO WE NEED GOVERNMENT?

Not everyone agrees that bureaucracy and government are basic to society. Some contend, in a distorted extension of Thomas Paine’s dictum “that government is best which governs least,” that the very best government is no government at all. As a prominent conservative explains, “What holds together the conservative movement” is that conservatives “want the government to go away.”²

The Wrecking-Crew View

It has been argued that, when those who want the government to go away are in power, they deliberately delegitimize government in the eyes of the public. Restrained by only what is politically infeasible, these “no-government conservatives”³ act as a “wrecking crew” that sabotages governmental competence; tolerates, even encourages, corruption; and privatizes or sheds altogether core public responsibilities.⁴ It is this perspective that has encouraged the founding of roughly a thousand extreme anti-government groups (the number varies widely from year to year), such as those that influenced the bombers of a federal building in 1995, that killed 168 adults and children, and the armed takeover and trashing of federal facilities in Oregon, in 2015, resulting in one death by shooting.

Americans do not subscribe to the wrecking-crew view. Out of thirteen major issues, majorities state that the federal government should play a major role in twelve (the exception is space exploration). Most Republicans and Democrats agree that Washington should play a prominent role in controlling terrorism, responding to natural disasters, and managing food, medicine safety, infrastructure, and even immigration.⁵

Perhaps the clearest and most critical example of the wrecking-crew mentality is that of regulation, an area often touted by these advocates as a burden from which Americans demand relief. Yet, when queried about regulating specific industries, three times more citizens, on average, want more regulation than those who want less.⁶

Underlying the wreckers’ ideology is their belief that more governmental regulation equals fewer jobs, and vice versa. Research, however, consistently shows that there is no evidence supporting this view. In the aggregate, the jobs lost to regulation (for example, the jobs lost in a factory that produced lead additives for gasoline because of air pollution regulations) are replaced elsewhere in the economy (e.g., in a factory that makes catalytic converters, which control automobile emissions). It is, in short, a wash.⁷

Wrecking Government and Wrecking America

That the public could benefit from more responsible regulation of some industries seems plausible. Consider some evidence.

Wrecking the Environment On April 20, 2010, BP’s (formerly British Petroleum) thirty-story-tall Deepwater Horizon oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, listed, and sank. Eleven crewmen’s lives ended, and the most disastrous oil spill in American history began. Ultimately, nearly 5 million barrels of crude polluted the Gulf. The company could not have been drilling in the Gulf had it not received a federal permit to do so.

Which BP had indeed received, despite its spectacularly tawdry safety record. Over the three years preceding the spill, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration cited BP for 760 “egregious willful” safety violations. These are the agency’s most severe violations out of five types, and apply only to violations of those rules that are “designed to prevent catastrophic events.” How many citations for egregious willful violations had all other oil companies combined accumulated over the same period? One.⁸

The regulatory agency that had licensed BP to drill in the Gulf was the Minerals Management Service (MMS), a little-known bureau of 1,700 employees created by the interior secretary in 1982. It is charged with issuing permits to, and collecting royalties from, companies that drill offshore.

MMS’s regulatory record was at least as tawdry as BP’s safety record. The agency, which collects more non-tax revenue—$9 billion per year—than any other, had for decades failed to collect billions in royalties due it.⁹ MMS’s administrators “routinely overruled staff scientists whose findings highlight the environmental risks of drilling,” and scientists “repeatedly had their scientific findings changed to indicate no environmental impact.” It would slander boilerplate to apply that term to BP’s 582-page “oil spill response plan” that it submitted to MMS to establish the Deepwater Horizon. Besides stating that “no significant adverse impacts are expected” from a spill, it notes that walruses (which have not wallowed in the Gulf since the Ice Age) would be protected; provides an address for the “rapid deployment of spill response resources” that turned out to be that of a Japanese home shopping network; and “never once discusses how to stop a deepwater blowout …. Nobody” at MMS “read it.”¹⁰

Nor, apparently, had anyone read any of the nearly identical plans, “all written by the same tiny Texas subcontractor,” submitted by the four other major offshore drillers, all but one of which also referenced those walruses in the Gulf.¹¹ All five of the major companies’ spill response plans amounted to the longest works of maritime fiction since Moby-Dick.

MMS was also riddled with corruption. According to a federal report, the agency had a “culture of ethical failure.” Not surprising in light of the fact that three out of every four of the more than 600 lobbyists who lobby for the oil and gas industry are former federal employees, including two former directors of MMS. “Nowhere has government and industry coziness been on display more clearly than at MMS.”¹²

Besides being incompetent and corrupt, MMS’s administrators were just plain dumb. During the week following the president’s declaration of a moratorium on offshore drilling and the issuance of waivers, with oil still gushing into the Gulf, MMS granted seven permits and five waivers.¹³

In 2011, the Government Accountability Office belatedly declared the management of oil and gas resources to be a “high-risk area” that required extra federal attention to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse; it still remains one.

In the midst of the spill, MMS was hastily renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, an exhaustingly long moniker that should discourage future journalistic coverage of the agency.

Wrecking the Economy Three decades after the steady deregulation of the financial sector that began in the early 1980s, America’s foremost business magazine stated that, “It is chillingly clear that U.S. financial institutions have for a good while been regulated no more stringently than, say, demolition derby drivers.”¹⁴

Demolition is a fitting word. In the late 2000s, the United States narrowly escaped economic collapse. Near, or perhaps at, the heart of that barely-missed meltdown were over-the-counter derivatives, which are highly leveraged financial exotica, such as mortgage-backed securities, that many analysts think caused the crisis. In 2003, the legendary investor, Warren Buffet, dubbed these derivatives “weapons of mass financial destruction,” and warned that they involved “huge-scale fraud.”¹⁵

Derivatives were introduced in the 1980s and flourished in a secretive, “completely dark market” about which regulators were also in the dark.¹⁶ When the derivatives market peaked in June 2008, its face (or “notional”) value was an absurd and inconceivable $683 trillion,¹⁷ and almost all of it was owned by America’s biggest banks.

When the ...