Make-Believe

Why Washington doesn 't work

The bigger the government, the more it governs, right? Wrong, snorts Charles Peters, the irrepressible, iconoclastic editor of the Washington Monthly, who has written a sprightly, salty assault on practically everybody in the nation's capital, How Washington Really Works (Addison-Wesley; 146 pages; $10.95). The secret is that Washington does not really work, says Peters; it just appears to in a great game of make-believe. Claims Peters: "In Washington, bureaucrats confer, the President proclaims and the Congress legislates, but the impact on reality is negligible, if evident at all."

Officials in Washington, asserts Peters, are mainly concerned with their own survival and advancement. To that end, they all plug into "survival networks," exchanging favors to ensure that they will stay in power no matter what work they do or fail to do. Usually nothing so crass as a quid pro quo is involved, much less outright bribery, just an atmosphere of mutual backscratching.

Writes Peters: "Memoranda and meetings are where the survival and make-believe principles merge. Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing, and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy." Besides, if they actually did their jobs and, say, abolished poverty, they might then be out of a job. Bureaucrats show amazing energy, however, when it comes to protecting their turf against budget cutters. If ordered to trim, they invariably slash essential services so that howls of protest will force the cuts to be restored.

Congress could shake up the bureaucracy, says Peters, but it has too much of a stake in the status quo. "The more bureaucrats do wrong to the public," writes Peters, "the more favors Congressmen can do for their constituents as they right the wrongs--or as they appear to try to right them." They may not actually help, but they can always denounce the offending bureaucrat on the floor of Congress and then send a copy of their remarks to their constituents.

Peters proposes an astonishing cure: he urges a revival of that old ogre, the patronage system. He would make the bureaucracy more accountable by letting the President appoint fully half of the 2.9 million federal employees. There is no reason why political appointees cannot be as qualified as any others, argues Peters, and they would want to produce in order to help the President get reelected. Such a change would "allow the President to move the machinery of Government," and enable him "to rebuild the political parties as bulwarks against the threat of single-issue politics." Now all Peters has to do is persuade Washington--anybody in Washington--to go along.

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