The complexities of the internal workings of government do not stop with the official hierarchy, inefficiency, and the various underground gorilla, and behind the back networks. Within the bureaucracy you mostly work “horizontally” in that you primarily work with others at the same level of the organization. Depending on the position you have you may interact with customers at the bottom of the organization, and with offices above yours in the bureaucracy, but usually not with those far above or below you. Piercing through the horizontal planes of the organizational hierarchy are programs or offices that get their funding and/or direction directly from the top of the organization. We in government informally called these, “silos”.

Silos are often walled off from the rest of the organization, but in order to explain them, let us back up a bit to explain how funding is distributed inside the government using VA as an example. For most existing programs, funding for the upcoming year is based on the funding from the last year. The funding model is tweaked each year to reflect the latest priorities and the funds flow down through the organization into the various fund control points without too much difficulty. There are, of course, a lot of discussions and points of contention, but overall it is straightforward because the decision makers are using the past as a starting point. New programs pose a problem. Often new programs are created as a response to a scandal or a specific problem that Congress or the Administration wants to target. The total amount of funding provided is based on input from the Department, but is often set externally. The challenge then becomes how to distribute the funds within VA. One way to do it would be to just add it to the funding going out to the various offices and facilities with instructions to spend it as intended. However, that would make it hard to determine how much was actually spent on solving the problem. The preferred way to distribute the new funding is to create a separate funding stream for the new program. If the new program aligns well with an existing office, then that office manages the funding going into that “silo”. If the program does not exist, or if the Congress or the Administration want the program managed by a dedicated office, then a new office is created using some of the funding. (This explains why VA has a Rural Health office, but no Urban or Suburban Health offices.) After a few years, management can see where and how the money was spent, and can then decide how to merge the program’s funding into the normal funding streams–unless legislation or executive actions require the funding to continue to be separately distributed. Sometimes, the new silo remains in control of its funding, but in other cases the funding stream may be merged into existing funding streams. In either case, the silo still continues to pierce through the horizontal layers of the organization, and the office responsible for the program may continue to issue directives and program guidance through the silo. Some silos are not really much of a problem. They do provide program guidance and are sort of like a benign tumor that could be removed but do not affect the actual work. Other silos do dictate how to do things, and can either be a strong force for good, or a force that kills innovation and defies common sense.

To government employees working only in the official organization plane with occasional silo interaction, the silos are just a part of the job, and a way for managers to perhaps get some funds for a pet project that can be twisted to fit the silo’s intent. To an underground gorilla network they can be a useful way to get to the top of the organization, especially if a silo manager is a part of the underground. For those at the top of the organization, silos are a key way that they can see what is going on at the bottom of the organization. The problem with that is that looking down through a silo is like looking through a tube or a straw. You only can see what it at the bottom of the straw. As I mentioned earlier, silos are often created in response to a problem or scandal. If, for example, a VA construction project goes far over budget, a task force “silo” might be created to study the construction process. If the problems were all a result of the construction process then that would be fine. If, however, poor planning and the unintended consequences of some procurement reform laws cause the problems, then it is unlikely that zeroing in on the construction process will reveal the real problems; let alone correct them. Another factor is that while the silo may be created from the top and inserted into the organization from the top down, the organization itself does help to position the bottom of the silo by, for example, who they allow to be interviewed by a task force investigating the problem.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that some silos are not created by external funding or mandates. Some are started and maintained by staff who have a passion for what they do, and who manage to create little empires within the organization.

Visualize a 3-Dimensional organization chart. The approved organizational chart is multi-level hierarchy. Each level of the organizational chart is a vast horizontal plane consisting of position boxes and supervisory relationships to the levels above and below. Piercing through the horizontal layers are silos created by eternal demands and funding. Plus there are smaller silos connecting some horizontal planes. Some of these silos even intersect and overlap.

As long as Congress and the Executive Branch continue to try to fix problems by creating specialized programs, the government will be burdened with funding and operational structures that are beyond the control of the managers in charge of normal operations. These separate funding streams and targeted programs make managing government more difficult while making it appear to the public that Congress and the Executive Branch are helping to properly manage the 4th Branch.

All of these complexities make the work environment complex, and even a little scary…

JSK

FDR famously said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” I have never been sure of exactly what he meant by that. It is not true, but it sounds clever. Fearing fear sounds like a never-ending circle, which is how it feels to work in the bureaucracy. I remember going to training where they talked about how we needed to drive out fear, or else bad things would continue to happen. What exactly we were so fearful of? It was not that we would be fired. In government, you might be more likely to be hit by a meteorite than to be fired, but fear is rampant anyway. In a private company you can be fired “at will”, and yet when I talk with my friends who work in the private sector, they do not talk about a work environment dominated by fear.

I recall working on a presentation on improving our planning and construction programs that began with past failures. Our boss agreed that everything we said was true, but she had us take out the most glaring failures. She told us that if presentations with negative information were seen by the very top of the Department and Congress, they might conclude that VA had serious problems. To which we said, well, we think they know we have problems—how do we fix problems we cannot talk about? Management saw our work as a potential problem because their perspective was quite different than ours. Top management was very aware that the White House and the Congress routinely use internal VA problems for political purposes. Someone in one or the other of the two political parties can almost always see a way to bash the other party when something in government goes wrong. An experienced government manager knows that the “help” the White House and Congress may provide may not actually help solve the problem, and may well make it worse since the White House and Congress frequently take no responsibility for the unintended consequences of previous laws and regulations that may have caused the problems in the first place. Once a top VA official knows that some of his underlings are naively idealistic, he has an additional fear: what if these well-meaning employees succeed in getting their facts to someone in Congress or the media who will use them to build their career and undermine VA while thinking they are helping? The presentation we were working on contained the truth, but it generated fear in us, and in management.

Since government workers often occupy positions for many years, it can be hard for a new manager to be able to work around employees who remain loyal to the ideas of the previous manager. A new manager naturally wants to surround himself with “his” team. If some of the existing support staff are truly substandard employees, the new manager may be able to remove them. However, if the existing support employees are qualified for their positions, and meet or exceed their performance standards, the new manager must either try to bend them to his way of doing things, or he must find ways to force them out. One of the ways that the new manager can get some vacancies is to become a stickler for the rules in order to start some disciplinary actions. The fact that it is hard to fire someone does not make the employee facing disciplinary action any less fearful. If anything, the long and tedious process is itself a cruel punishment. Whether guilty or innocent, an employee charged with an offense is often set-aside in the organization and is tainted for years even if innocence is eventually proven. When faced with the threat of potential disciplinary action, many employees will look for another position and move. Others who stay are sometimes moved to a “Special Projects” position carved out of some department with a vacancy. This way of clearing out the old staff by using disciplinary actions and dead-end transfers is extremely inefficient, and feared by employees. Fear sets in whenever a new manager takes over.

In response to a big problem of some kind a few years back, leadership decided that all employees should be trained in the nuances of the issue. I do not recall what the issue was, but it was of little relevance to most employees. Leadership decided that the best way to document that everyone understood the issues would be to require all employees to take an on-line course. The course required each employee to read a lot of material. I was a supervisor and was told that I was to make sure I allowed everyone time to take the course even though we all knew it was not relevant to our jobs, and that it would take several hours to complete. One of my employees told me that he had hit return a zillion times to get through the document. He had the entire thing completed and documented in a few minutes. Another of my employees told me it took him several hours to read every page and complete the course. The first employee did what was right as far as I was concerned. The second employee wasted a lot of time reading irrelevant stuff, but he had done exactly what management had officially told us to do. I could have taken disciplinary action against the first employee for not reading all of the material. However, this employee is the kind of person you want working for you—except he probably should not have told me that he did not actually read any of the material. Management hoped that employees would not spend a lot of time on the course, but they could not say so. The best employees realized management’s intent, and understood why management directed employees to do the opposite of what they really hoped they would do. Many employees resented having to make a choice between doing literally what was asked, and doing what management hoped. They wondered why management could not stand up to whatever was driving the requirement. Over time, as more and more of these kinds of things happened, employees lost respect for management, and become more and more cynical, and fearful of the consequences if they guessed wrong on what management really expected. Eventually, the first employee, an excellent worker, left government service.

FDR’s famous statement is wrong, but it sums up the government work environment. Government employees do fear fear. This is unnatural. In our normal lives we have nothing to fear except for what will happen if we do not do the right thing. Deep down inside, no mentally sound person feels good about doing something that is wrong. This is true for all people. In government employees can be punished for trying to do the right thing, which makes fearing fear an inherent part of the work environment. Fear in the government workplace is a direct result of putting positions, metrics, and rules ahead of doing the right thing.

JSK

Postscript

As I was completing this post, I got a call from a fellow VA retiree, I’ll call him RB. He mentioned that the young guy who took over his position after he retired called him and said that he was facing disciplinary action. He asked for the name of RB’s lawyer, an expert at defending federal employees from disciplinary actions. (RB and I both faced false disciplinary actions during our VA careers. We hired attorneys, and eventually won back our positions and pay.) The young guy who replaced RB trained under us early in his career and is an excellent employee. We agreed he would eventually win his case, but the fear of fear will continue unabated.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.” 1 John 4:18 NASB

The negative impact of government metrics and performance standards drive many employees underground into what I call Underground Employee Gorilla Networks. These networks thrive because they have resources available to them due to the inherent inefficiency of government. (Government inefficiency, metrics, and performance standards were previously explained in Sections 5.2 and 5.3.) These networks are not unique to government, but they are a much bigger problem in government than in business. I have talked with people who had long careers in the private sector. They may have had to work behind the back of a poor manager or a weird employee, but that is not the same thing. Those who have not worked in government can have a difficult time grasping these networks and the work environment that creates them.

I recall attending a meeting early in my career led by our VA medical center’s Chief of Staff. He began the meeting with a rambling talk on what was wrong with VA, and why it should not exist. This was a bit stunning since he was the senior doctor at our facility. A senior executive in a private company might sell his company stock or quit, but it is hard to imagine that he would tell his employees that his company should not exist. Our meeting with the Chief of Staff was unusual only because he said what a lot of us had wondered about ourselves. Imagine how you would feel knowing that Veterans are coming to the VA every day for help, but the bureaucracy is not doing everything it should to help them. In effect, our Chief of Staff was really telling us to do whatever we could to help Veterans even if it was not the way the bureaucracy is supposed to work. Some of my co-workers said he should just quit, but most employees respected him for venting his frustrations with the “system”, and our work environment.

Successful private firms look at their employees as people first so private sector experience alone cannot enable someone from the private sector to be able to see the difference between a government environment driven by metrics and run by positions, from a private sector company that must pay its bills to survive and will try to get as much as possible from each employee—not just enough to meet the position description and performance standards. Everyone in a private company wants, and needs, their company to prosper. Each individual may define success differently, but everyone in the company knows that they do not have any chance of being successful, or having a job, if the company fails. Compare that to government where it is very wise to “keep your head down”. There is zero danger of government closing down. One of the biggest dangers to a government employees’s career is to be caught doing something outside of his position description.

One of the things I liked about working in government is that if I wanted to take charge of a project, I usually could because so many others just wanted to “keep their head down” by staying within the “box” defined by their position descriptions in order to not draw any unnecessary attention to themselves. An Underground Employee Gorilla Network is made up of employees who are working on things in ways that are outside of their official responsibilities. Employees in these networks can work for or against good or poor management. They can be motivated to do the right thing or motivated to benefit themselves first. The employees who are working against poor management ideas want to work to their potential and do what is right. They are responsible for many of the successes within government. The employees who are working against good management ideas are the ones who keep the bureaucracy inefficient, hard to manage, and immune to outside interference.

Companies cannot survive for long if they have various groups of employees working at cross purposes to the company and each other. As discussed earlier, efficiency matters to a business. People working at cross-purposes is a threat to a company’s survival. It is ironic that the inefficiency of the bureaucracy provides Underground Employee Gorilla Networks with the resources they need to survive. Within government there is no official recognition of this phenomenon. An occasional employee gets frustrated by the official position “box” he works in, and, in effect, slips out of it. Then he realizes he is not alone. Others are also performing duties outside of those defined by their position descriptions, often without their managers knowing what they are doing.

One of the problems with getting things done with a group of “invisible” people is that it is not easy to identify them when you have to work with a new office. Those of us operating outside the box did not have any kind of a secret handshake or pins on our lapels to identify each other. We often identified each other by exchanging cynical anecdotes. When I needed help getting something unusual done, and the person I was asking for help said, “Forgiveness is easier to get than permission”, I knew I was in the presence of a fellow network member who was trying to do what was right. I actually sort of loved the complexity of it all: there is the official organization with strategic plans, mission statements, performance plans, metrics, and position descriptions. Some people work entirely in this official plane of government existence. Then there are people who slip (or storm) out of their position description boxes, and either work to get things done for the people who pay their salaries, or work primarily to expand government and to resist efficiency. These people lead dual lives dutifully toiling in the official plane while also working, for good or ill, in one or more of the underground networks.

In the course of developing a better way to approach planning and design of VA clinics, our team came across a primary care physician who had single-handedly created a clinically driven way to approach the design of VA clinics. We were surprised that someone from the clinical side of the organization had taken an interest in what our office was responsible for doing. We were thrilled that others in the organization saw the same problems we did. We were not so thrilled that our two efforts passed like ships on the high sea. Even though we wanted to merge and attack the problem together, we could not. How could we, analysts buried away in the Central Office strategic planning bureaucracy, work with a clinician from the “field” (a medical center)? If we applied genealogical terms to our organizational relationship, we would be fourth cousins, once removed. In other words, far too weakly related to be invited to a family Thanksgiving dinner, and too far apart organizationally to officially work together.

The existence of underground networks of employees working against management is not unique to our federal bureaucracy. We can find the same phenomena in any centrally run organization. I have read that the German army called this, “fuhren unter der Hand” which translates as, “leadership behind the superiors back”. If leadership is doing something bad but subordinates working behind the leaders’ backs push the organization in a better direction that is good. However, German history proves that leading from behind the superiors’ back does not work out very well. Plus, the existence of multiple Underground Employee Gorilla Networks in an organization means that the organization is inherently inefficient. Multiple groups working against each other can result in nothing but inefficiency. All of the gorilla groups use resources which are excess to the official “planes” of the organization.

Cutting funding is part of the solution to government inefficiency. Ironically, cutting funding to reduce government inefficiency can unintentionally take resources away from some of the good work being done by Underground Employee Gorilla Networks. Of course it can also stop the bad work being done by other Underground Employee Gorilla Networks. It is complicated…

JS Kline

The need to have built-in inefficiency is not the only thing that differentiates government from the private sector. Success in business and success in government are measured quite differently. In a business, metrics are an important management tool, but the true and unescapable measure of success is profitability. In government metrics are the only way to gauge success. A business cannot survive if more money is going out than is coming in. Profit, as noted earlier (in Section 5.2), is absent from government. so government must rely on metrics to measure program effectiveness and employee performance. Metrics are not a bad idea. Any organization can learn a lot about its operations by measuring progress toward goals and objectives. However metrics can have unintended consequences, especially in an environment that does not have to worry about profit.

A well-intentioned energy metric helped preserve obsolete and vacant Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) space. In order to encourage energy reduction, VA established a metric to monitor the amount of energy used per square foot of building area. For each medical center, the areas of its buildings were added together, and divided into the total energy used. Many medical centers have vacant or partially vacant space that does not use much energy because it is so lightly occupied. The removal of this obsolete vacant or underutilized space is a good thing, and would save money, but reducing the building area by tearing down underutilized buildings that use little energy would actually make the amount of energy used per square foot increase. Therefore, the energy metric created an incentive to keep obsolete and underutilized buildings. This would appear to be irrational to anyone who did not see the incentive created by the well intentioned metric.

Another example of unintended consequences involves the funds the VA medical centers receive to buy furnishings and renovate buildings. These funds typically must be spent in the fiscal year they are appropriated. Success is measured by getting all of the funding obligated in the fiscal year. Failing this metric is not acceptable, and a tremendous amount of effort is put into into planning how to spend the money as early in the fiscal year as possible. In our office we referred to this as the “burn plan”. I recall one year when one of our top managers called me late in the fiscal year and asked if we could buy $50,000 worth of chairs. I said, yes, and asked what kind of chairs were needed. He said it did not matter, just get the money obligated. The metric had to be met even if it wasted some funds.

The unintended effects of the energy and funding metrics above are a relatively easy to understand. Seeing the unintended consequences of government employee performance metrics is a bit more difficult.

Imagine that you are a physician running a small private clinic. In your practice, as in any business, you must take in more funds than you spend, and you must provide the services customers want and need. If your practice does not provide good care to your patients, then they will go elsewhere, and they will tell others not to go to your clinic. The survival of your clinic directly depends on meeting the needs and wants of each patient. When you decide which of your employees should be hired and fired, and which ones should get bonuses, you consider how each contributes to the interlocking goals of customer satisfaction and profitability. If one of the physicians is amazingly talented, and sees many more patients than anyone else thus generating a lot more revenue, and a lot more good will than anyone else in the clinic while helping other employees improve, then you can and would reward him accordingly. On the other hand, you would be forced to fire a physician who creates discord, is difficult to work with, and puts your clinic at risk of failing, even if he was a technically competent doctor. If you do not reward and promote your best employees, and do not correct or remove your poor employees, your best employees will leave to find better work environments and bosses, and your practice will become less and less viable, and may even close. Your practice may have a Human Resource department, and all sorts of performance standards and job descriptions, but you know that know your clinic’s success is directly linked to each employee’s contribution to profitability. The key thing to realize about your private clinic, and business in general, is that you are managing people.

Now imagine that you are a manager of a small VA clinic. Each of your employees has a position description, a competency checklist, and a performance plan. As long as an employee is doing what his position description says he is supposed to be doing, meets the competency requirements, and meets the minimum acceptable performance level, you are required to rate him as an acceptable employee. Productivity is important to the success of the clinic, and to VA as a whole, so the organization has established national performance metrics to be used to measure productivity for each physician. The number of unique patients seen per day is a simple example of such a metric. You have two physicians in your clinic who see about the same number of unique patients over the course of a year. One of these physician told the clerks to only schedule brief appointments. Anything that could not be done in the brief visit would have to be done in equally brief follow-up visits. His patients will have to make multiple trips to the clinic, but he will be able to see many patients per day. Your other physician scheduled the times for his patients in a way that minimized the number of times that each patient would have to return to the clinic since many of the patients lived some distance away. This resulted in longer patient visits, and fewer patients seen per day. The second physician was providing better customer service, but did not see as many patients per day. When you, as the clinic manager, evaluate these two physicians, you might well have to rate the second one lower on this metric even though you know he was providing better patient care. In government, employee ratings compare the employee to his position description and performance standards, but do not connect directly to the survival of the clinic because its existence does not depend on profitability .

I was often reminded that in government it is the position that you hold that defines what is appropriate for you to do. Many government managers do realize they are really managing people, not just positions, but they do have to mange people based on the positions they fill. Theoretically, if every position is filled, and the people in the positions are competent and do what their position description says, then the organization will function as intended. The problem is that people do the work and people are all unique with different levels of intelligence, knowledge, ambition, and skill. Positions are just empty boxes, a way to provide order in the workplace; they do not do any work. A position is part of the rules; it is not a person. A position cannot treat another position like it would like to be treated, and a workplace that defines its people by the position they hold is telling its employees that it values conformity and equal outcomes rather than the freedom and equal opportunity that are the products of America’s Christian principles and foundation.

Typically government employee performance plans cascade down from above. In other words, some of an employee’s performance standards support performance standards in his supervisor’s plan. The supervisor’s plan has performance standards that support his supervisor’s plan. This arrangement is logical, but it often results in some standards that really make little sense as they cascade down through the organization. These standards are normally sort of glazed over since it is difficult to see how they fit into day-to-day job performance. Because they often refer to things outside of an employees’s control, they may be unmeetable, but they can be quite useful when managers need them to give a problem employee a negative rating. They can also be misused to label an idealistic whistle-blower as a problem employee since he probably did not meet one of his unmeetable performance metrics. Even if no one else did either, it does not matter. When the Congress passes laws making it easier to terminate bad employees, some of the first employees at risk of being fired will be whistle-blowers.

Exceeding the standards established for each metric is the key to a successful government career. Many poor government employees are able to stay employed because they meet or exceed the performance metrics. (I knew of one high ranking manager who hired a brilliant analyst, and told her that one of her prime responsibilities was to monitor his performance standards to be sure that he exceeded all of them.) Sometimes the best way to get rid of a problem employee, like the metric-beating physician above, is to promote him. That seems crazy, but metrics are what the Administration and Congress emphasize, so having managers who are good at meeting metrics makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, unlike the private clinic, a VA clinic can survive despite incentives that may be at odds with customer satisfaction. The employees meeting the performance metrics continue to have a place to work, and the whole idea of managing through metrics gets reinforced. No matter how well intentioned and clever, virtually any metric can, and will, be gamed. This gaming has the effect of promoting the wrong people and making everyone else quite cynical. The key thing to remember about the government is that supervisors are managing positions first, not the people who occupy them.

Before going on, please allow my government-induced cynical attitude to illustrate how government might respond if challenged to move away from management by performance metrics: First guidance would be written in lofty language outlining the the goal of moving to a system that uses the talents of each individual employee by managing people instead of positions. Second a task force consisting of a Senior Manager, the usual consultants, a whistle-blower or two, Human Resource staff, Union representatives, Information Technology experts, and former senior employees would be created and tasked with implementing the guidance. They would come up with another name for position descriptions and a recommendation for a new Information Technology system that would make sure that everyone was treated like he or she would like to be treated. The task force would also identify the additional funding and staff that will be required to implement all of the changes. Additional subgroups would be created to develop new performance guidelines. After all of that, little would change and cynical employees would still have little reason for hope.

The solution is not to eliminate metrics, but to recognize their limitations. Government operations will improve when government is not managed as though it was a business. Attempts to manage a government office as though it were a business are doomed to failure. Government operations must be more visible, and government “civil servants” must be held to higher ethical standards than employees in private businesses. Solutions to the problems in government will be addressed in more detail in a future post. Until changes are made, metrics will continue work just as easily against employees as for them, creating an environment that creates cynical employees. Employees who are forced underground to do their jobs…

During my government career, I was a part of many project teams. Even though few career government employees are overtly vocal about their political beliefs, I knew that there were liberals, conservatives, and moderates on our teams, and that they had different value systems and beliefs that could be a barrier to teamwork. I thought it was worthwhile to address the team members’ differences by finding common ground. One way I attempted to bring those on the left, right and middle together was by saying that whether we believed in big government or small government, we could all agree on making government more efficient. No one ever disagreed, but, in hindsight, I was quite naïve. I was not wrong about universal agreement on efficiency, and agreeing on efficiency was a good team building exercise. No one in government is opposed to efficiency, but, neither, it must be pointed out, are they opposed to flower gardening, golf, or mountain climbing. They are all nice hobbies and all might be useful in building cohesive teams. What I was wrong about is my underlying presupposition that government itself benefits from and wants efficiency.

Imagine you are running a company making widgets and you are selling widgets as fast as you can make them. If you want to make more money, then it is pretty obvious that you need to make widgets as efficiently as possible and that making more widgets will make more money. If you determine that your company is pretty efficient and that the best way to make more widgets would be to hire more workers, then you would hire more workers. You would track the productivity and efficiency of your workers because they determine your company’s profitability and continued existence.

Now imagine that you have moved on and are now the manager in a government department. Your office has been given some new responsibilities. Based on your previous experience in the widget business you might ask yourself, “How do I determine whether the office can absorb the new responsibilities (through increased efficiency), or do we need to hire more staff?” Those questions are the kinds of questions you might ask in the widget company, but they are not particularly relevant to a government manager. In reality, the only time that a government office can create new positions is when it gets more funding. Funding is not directly based on the product or services being delivered by the office. One office may not have any measurable output, while another office may be chronically understaffed and overwhelmed with a backlog of work. Funding is based on what was spent in the past, plus what can be justified in addition to past funding. Adding to the complexity, government offices usually get funding that is “fenced” for specific purposes. (For example, Information Technology software and hardware funds cannot be used to build a building, buy furniture, or hire someone.) You, a quick learning and ambitious government manager, have kept some untapped capacity in your office so that you can take on some new responsibilities. Further, you realize that these added responsibilities are pretty visible and could be used to justify additional funds; after all, you have used up the capacity you had been holding in reserve and you know that an opportunity to get additional funding is rare. Even if hiring more staff is not possible, you might decide to use the opportunity to request more printers, replacement furniture, bonuses, or more space.

From the perspective of a government manager, a certain amount of inefficiency is highly desirable because it gives the office the ability to respond to new demands, and allows the office to devote resources to justifying its existence and lobbying for more funding. If you are a manager inside government and you get the opportunity to create a new position, you seize the opportunity. These opportunities often come as a result of a crisis or scandal. If you are a government manager you never want to let a scandal go to waste. There are managers in government who do want to be efficient and who expect their staff to work hard, but if they are to be successful they have to recognize that government is fundamentally different than a for-profit company. Those who say that government should be run like a business, do not understand the differences between the two.

Managers working in a business may also value having some excess capacity and inefficiency for many of the same reasons a government manager does. The difference is that a business manager still must cover his costs and make a profit. A government manager does not. The people inside government are no different from people inside companies. They are working to earn money and they need their employer to be successful so they do get paid for their work. In a company, profit means the company will continue to exist and that means good things for employees. In government there is no such thing as profit. The continued existence of government depends on maintaining and increasing the total amount of incoming funds. Increased funding means the same things as increased profits do in a business. While inefficiency is always a threat to a company’s profit and, therefore, its very existence, inefficiency is not a direct threat to the existence of government. In fact the opposite is true, inefficiency is inherent in government. Efficiency is important in government, but only indirectly to the extent it affects the government’s ability to maintain and increase funding. A loss of funding is the only threat to government.

My friend Colonel Thom likes the phrase “passive irresponsibility”. I like that too as a way of explaining our federal government’s frequent failures. No one really means for the health care web site not to work, for VA construction projects to go far over budget, or for Veterans to have to wait and wait and wait for appointments and benefits. Stuff like that just sort of happens again and again. The underlying cause of these failures is the existence of what I call the 4th Branch of government. Some call it the “Administrative State”, or the “Deep State”, but calling it the 4th Branch draws attention to the fact that it should not exist.

As you probably know, our national government was created about 250 years ago with three branches: a Legislative Branch to make laws, an Executive Branch to carry them out, and a Judicial Branch independent of the other branches. Our government still is organized that way, except that over the years a 4th Branch has emerged. This 4th Branch is a integral part of the Executive Branch, and does also answer to Congressional members, committees, subcommittees and the Congress as a whole. However, in many ways the 4th Branch is largely unsupervised. It operates independently under “an umbrella of systemic neglect” (another phrase Thom likes). Few pay much attention to the workings of the 4th Branch. In some ways this 4th branch is good because it fills in gaps between the laws passed by Congress and how they will be enforced, but in other ways it can said to be more analogous to a cancer eating away at our nation’s founding principles. The 4th Branch exists to keep itself alive and growing, and is not limited by anything except for its funding.

Mission creep at the Department of Veterans Affairs is a good example of how the 4th Branch thrives. In 1959 VA adopted a portion of President Lincoln Second Inaugural Address as its motto: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan”. Consistent with this motto, the primary VA mission was to care for those who had been mentally or physically injured in war. Today almost anyone who was in the military, whether in battles or not, is entitled to a wide range of VA services. What happened? Did VA change its motto? Did Congress pass a law redefining what “…borne the battle…” meant?

No. They did not. The change happened gradually under the “umbrella of systemic neglect” that provides cover for the 4th Branch to survive and grow. VA has been able to revise its mission because each federal Department largely defines its own mission, and how to use its funding. VA, Congress, Veterans Organizations, and the public seem happy to have organizations like Wounded Warriors take over more of the original VA mission of caring “…for him who shall have borne the battle…”. VA has instead been funding rural health expansion, transgender awareness, market share increases, and other initiatives that have little or nothing to do with caring for those Veterans who fought for our country.

Mission creep is going on at every level of the federal government from VA to the National Park Service to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Food and Drug Administration to the National Security Administration to the Bureau of Land Management. It is happening every day and everywhere in government. Mission creep is a key reason the 4th Branch continues to grow.

The other major key to the growth of the 4th Branch is funding. The 4th Branch never lets a crisis go to waste. Every government failure is an opportunity to get more funding. Each failure follows the same pattern. Someone reports a massive data breech, unsafe medical practices, or a construction project that is far over budget. The media reports on the failure. The Inspector General investigates and writes a report. The Department finds people to blame and reassigns them or occasionally fires them. Congress has hearings. Some top management at the Department is replaced. The new management implements new processes, and reports back to Congress with a request for funding to fully implement the changes. Congress grants the funding, but the underlying problem remains. The 4th Branch continues intact, and waits for the next crisis and the opportunities it will bring.

In our personal financial lives and in business, getting bigger and finding new ways to survive is a good thing, but government is supposed to be limited to what the law says it can do. The “passive irresponsibility” of the Executive and Congressional Branches has allowed the 4th branch to thrive under “an umbrella of systemic neglect”. Deconstructing the 4th Branch will not be easy. Aligning funding with Departmental missions defined by Congress and the Executive Branch will be a long process. The first step is to understand the scope of the problem. We have only scratched the surface.