Are Mixed Missions Always Evil?

Here's columnist Bill Schneider in National Journal, on the fallout from the response to the Gulf oil spill:

The Obama administration has some explaining to do -- mostly to fellow Democrats. Why did the president announce his decision to expand offshore drilling in March, before he carried through on his promise to reform the cozy relationship between federal regulators and the oil industry? Why did the federal Minerals Management Service grant BP an exemption from the environmental assessment procedures?

The MMS is becoming the FEMA of this story. Why did it take a disaster for the president to address the obvious conflict of interest within the agency? Now the president says, "The part of the agency which permits oil and gas drilling and collects royalties will be separate from the part of the agency in charge of inspecting oil rigs and platforms and enforcing the law." Talk about locking the barn door after the horse has bolted.

Brian Friel has some interesting thoughts on that subject in his "Management Matters" column this week. MMS, he notes is far from the only agency with conflict of interest issues to deal with. The Forest Service, for example, must balance the twin roles of preserving national forests and encouraging their cultivation. The IRS has both enforcement and customer service responsibilities.

That doesn't necessarily make such agencies ineffective, Friel argues:

The Forest Service has maintained its dual roles despite many decades of criticism that it leaned too much one way or another. The argument against splitting the agency has long been that two separate entities with authority over the same land could end up in bitter bureaucratic battles. Keeping a unified agency allows competing interests to work out compromises through a single chain of command, rather than create separate power structures that would wind up in turf wars. The IRS has stayed intact despite criticism of its handling of enforcement and service. Instead of a split, Congress gave the agency a strong national taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson, who has run the office since 2001. The IRS' ombudsman model could help other agencies struggling with the twin needs of enforcing the law and aiding citizens.

It's not as though this is a new issue. Back in 2007, Katherine McIntire Peters explored the ramifications of the conflicting missions of the Bureau of Land Management in the West. And as far back as 2001, in assessing the results of the Federal Performance Project, in which Government Executive was a partner, Anne Laurent noted that conflicting missions were at the heart of many agencies' performance issues:

In the few agencies with clear missions and well-crafted measures, managing for results comes almost naturally. The National Weather Service, this year's top graded agency, has set out to be a "no surprise service," providing the most timely and accurate forecasts possible.

It'd be nice if every federal agency had such mission clarity. But in the real world, it's the exception, not the rule.