Fed Up With Government Waste and Red Tape? So are Feds

Shutdowns, sequestration, continuing resolutions and blocked appointments have long been recognized as symptoms of Washington dysfunction. Less widely known is the extent to which executive branch officials are hamstrung by congressional overseers who grab headlines and play politics with scant knowledge of programs and management challenges.

On Thursday, the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service will release a barbed report titled “Government Disservice: Overcoming Washington Dysfunction to Improve Congressional Stewardship of the Executive Branch.” Based on interviews with former agency executives, lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers, it explores and diagnoses the dynamics that produced a climate that “has often left federal leaders without constructive congressional partners to oversee their work or provide legislative authority to change or drop underperforming programs or embark on new initiatives.”

The timing, as Congress and the White House face a fast-approaching end of the fiscal year with no budget, is apt. “The current funding fight over fiscal 2016 and looming government shutdown are the latest examples of Congress’ failure to serve as a good steward of effective government operations,” said Max Stier, the partnership’s president and CEO. “Members of the House and Senate need to understand—and care—about Congress’ contributions to waste, inefficiency and ineffectiveness in our government. And then they need to do something about it, starting with the common-sense approaches to working better together that are outlined in this report.”

The interviewees from the Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton eras, some anonymous, speak candidly on how ideology and electioneering have left agencies to “cope with leadership vacuums that impede decision-making as well as funding uncertainties that disrupt services for the public, create inefficiencies, increase costs and make it difficult to plan and innovate.”

Scott Gould, former deputy secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, described how some congressional committee members would submit hundreds of questions for the record, requiring days or even weeks of staff time to provide answers in writing. The intent, he said, seemed “punitive” and designed to “tie you up,” not to develop a better understanding of the department’s operations. “Lawmakers who had asked for a thousand-page response in a short time frame would say publicly that the agency hadn’t responded to them and was withholding information.”

Former Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, who also headed the National Endowment for the Humanities, said a greater number of lawmakers than previously “simply do not take the time to gain knowledge about the agencies that fall under the jurisdiction of the committees on which they serve, making it harder to engage in serious policymaking. Professional knowledge is given less attention than it was decades ago,” Leach added.

In the lawmakers’ defense, former House Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Livingston, R-La., noted that many House members serve on multiple committees and subcommittees, and that hearings are often held concurrently. But in missing hearings, members miss important opportunities to learn about the agencies they oversee, he said. “When members don’t know what is happening in the agencies in their jurisdiction, they resort to their ideology.”

Divided Government

The two branches increasingly are talking past each other, pitting the power of the purse in “the people’s house” against the full-time managers of complex agency services. “There is a pervasive lack of understanding of and appreciation for the concerns of the executive branch among many members of Congress and staff, and agency leaders exhibit a similar attitude toward members of the House and Senate,” the report said. “Political appointees believe lawmakers do not appreciate how their actions negatively affect the management of agencies and the delivery of services to the public.”

 Members of Congress, by contrast, focus more on the battles over “policy, funding and the proper role and size of government than they are about effective agency operations. The executive-legislative divide is narrowed on many day-to-day issues, even in a highly charged partisan atmosphere, when individuals build relationships across the branches and across the aisle on a personal basis to sort out problems and reach an understanding,” the report said. “But such exchanges seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

The report offers data showing a decline in the amount of time spent by lawmakers at committee and subcommittee meetings to delve into agency operations, debate policy and legislate, more so in the House than in the Senate—the number of House hearings in the 111^th Congress (2009-10) was almost a fifth that of the 97^th Congress (1981-83).

Agency officials who testify are often not transparent due to the “gotcha culture,” noted one ex-Hill staffer. The agencies come to market themselves and avoid giving direct answers.

Steve Preston, head of the Small Business Administration and Housing and Urban Development secretary under President George W. Bush, said that while many of the SBA oversight hearings “covered important ground, more often they were politically motivated with little regard for our work or the progress we were making. There was very little political will to change or eliminate a program that was ineffective, especially if the beneficiary of the program had political leverage.”

Many of the report’s recommendations have been bandied about for years, such as reducing the number of political appointments requiring confirmation, adopting a biennial budget to improve agencies’ ability to plan, and reducing congressional committees’ overlapping jurisdictions. But the new report also calls for members of Congress and agency leaders to “take responsibility for developing personal working relationships across the aisle and across the branches to improve understanding, build trust and solve problems. To improve oversight, Congress should seek more and better information to understand agency programmatic and operational challenges,” it said.  “And agencies should communicate regularly and candidly with Congress about what is working well and where they need help.”

(Image via Felix Lipov/Shutterstock.com)