Layer Cake

Judge Richard Posner, now blogging at a terrifying rate for The Atlantic, has a guest-post up at Andrew Sullivan's place in which he expresses some concern about two separate but intertwined problems. First, Posner worries about the magnitude of the challenges the Obama administration has taken on. Second, he worries about the concentration of management power over those agencies in institutions above the Cabinet level, namely the White House. Posner write:

The tendency in American government in recent times has been to centralize power more and more in White House staff. The effect is to insert a layer of managerial control above the Cabinet officers, who themselves constitute a layer of control above a number of other political appointees in their departments (laterals), who in turn are layered over the career civil servants. A recent and very pertinent literature in economics--"organization economics"--emphasizes the costs of hierarchical management in slowing and distorting the flow of information up the chain of command and the flow of orders down it. The problem is compounded when as in the federal government the top layers are political appointees who may have little experience with the operation of the agency they find themselves managing...But the capacity of brilliant people, appointed to high positions in the federal government from outside, to screw up is legendary. The danger is amplified when the government tries to do too much.