NEW YORK -- Washington is having one of its odd debates as to whether the Obama administration's rollout of HealthCare.gov was worse than the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. But whatever the answer, if there is one, the real story is that both are examples of a major, and depressing, trend -- the declining competence of the federal government. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker has been sounding the alarm for years, pointing out that most Americans believe their government can no longer act effectively and that this erosion of competence, and hence confidence, is a profound problem for the country.
"The federal service is suffering its greatest crisis since it was founded in the first moments of the republic," writes Paul Light, a scholar who has studied the problem extensively, in his book "A Government Ill Executed."
Over the last decade, the federal government has been tasked with several major challenges: Iraq, Afghanistan, a new homeland security system, Katrina, and Obamacare. In almost every case, its performance has been plagued with mismanagement, massive cost overruns, long delays, and poor performance. It was not always so. In the 1940s, '50s and '60s, federal agencies were often lean, well managed, and surprisingly effective. Paul Hoffman, the administrator of the Marshall Plan, used to point out that his project -- of monumental scope and size -- came in on time and under budget.
Some federal agencies still maintain a culture of high performance, from NASA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Federal Reserve System and the Defense Department's research arm, DARPA. But they are now islands within a broader sea of mediocrity.
Why has this happened? Part of it is probably cultural and historical. Americans have always been suspicious of government. Talented young Americans don't dream of becoming great bureaucrats. The New Deal and World War II might have changed that for a while, but over the last 30 years, anti-government attitudes have risen substantially. Two national commissions on public service have detailed the dangers of too few talented people going into government. The ever-increasing obstacles -- disclosure forms, conflict-of-interest concerns, political vetting -- dissuade and knock out good candidates.
The problem is bipartisan. On the right, there are too many people who believe that their role in Washington is simply to attack, denigrate and defund the government. This relentless onslaught erodes public trust and robs federal agencies of any sense of mission and ambition. Continual budget cutbacks have limited their ability to take on new challenges. There is no attempt at ambitious thinking and planning today, whether in space or in infrastructure. Seemingly every agency is in cost-cutting and damage-control mode. The persistent politicalized attacks -- whether blocking confirmation of hundreds of officials or investigating them at every turn -- have helped create an atmosphere of caution and risk-aversion.
On the left, political agendas and wish lists have trumped a focus on excellence. The federal government has become a dumping ground for all kinds of objectives -- from staffing requirements to procurement rules to organizational structures. The rise of public-sector unions has made the workforce less flexible and responsive. Stanford scholar Francis Fukuyama notes that half of all new entrants into the federal bureaucracy have been veterans, many of them disabled veterans. It is admirable that the government wants to help veterans and it should search for ways to expand opportunities for them, but the federal government now operates with so many requirements, tenure policies, work rules and mandates that merit and quality inevitably get downgraded in importance.
Paul Light has outlined how, when Congress passes its mandates, new layers of management are usually created to enforce them. In a study of "frontline" government jobs -- revenue agents, air traffic controllers, park rangers -- that matter greatly to the public, he found that employees had to report up through nine layers of official management and 16 layers of informal management (like chiefs of staff and associate undersecretaries).
Why not launch a bipartisan push for a thorough streamlining of the federal government? The focus should be on improving the administrative structure, creating easier ways for talented people to enter government, and providing the right incentives so bureaucracies can work effectively and efficiently.
There are those who worry that if government works too well, we'll want more of it -- who simply want to starve the beast. But so much of what government is doing badly cannot be outsourced, privatized or abolished. National security, after all, is the core province of the federal government. If you add in all the private contractors doing government work, there are currently about 15 million people who execute the laws, mandates and functions of the federal government. Perhaps that number can be trimmed. But surely the more urgent and important task is to make sure that they are working as effectively and efficiently as they possibly can.
Fareed Zakaria is a columnist for The Washington Post. Email, comments@fareedzakaria.com.
By FAREED ZAKARIA