Civil Service: a Victim or a Villain?

Dominic Cummings and Jennifer Pahlka are both unhappy about the civil service. However, they have different understandings of what the problem is and how it should be solved.

Dominic is a politician. The problem, as he sees it, is that the civil service is disconnected from the electoral political system. Bureaucrats are appointed rather that elected, often in complex and opaque ways, and cannot even be fired by the elected politicians. This creates an self-standing, unaccountable ruling class, the bureaucracy, which does not have skin in the game and is thus focused on self-preservation rather than on solving real problems.

Jennifer is a former civil servant. The problem, as she sees it, is that the civil service is micromanaged by politicians to the point that it becomes incapable of solving real problems. Aware that bureaucrats are not politically accountable, politicians attempt to impose accountability by requiring them to fill out ever more reports, undergo ever checks and obey a labyrinthine and ever expanding set of regulations.

Despite their differences, their diagnoses ultimately converge on the same core issue: the government gives commands, but the civil service fails to deliver.

For Cummings, the failure stems from a lack of incentives and skin in the game. Why would bureaucrats inconvenience themselves, after all? For Pahlka, it’s because the regulatory thicket has grown so dense that, in many cases, no sensible course of action remains.

The case study of choice for Cummings is COVID and the underwhelming way in which governments responded to it. In his view, this can be blamed at incompetence, complacency and inflexibility of the civil service.

One of the things that we did to get the rapid testing to work was we got a guy who formerly was commanding officer of the SAS, British Special Forces, and this guy got a bunch of his friends from Special Forces also to work on rapid testing. When we first got this pushing from Number 10, I got the critical people from procurement, commercial HR, etc, into the Cabinet room with the Cabinet Secretary, the single most important official in the whole country, and the two of us said, “The PM wants rapid testing dealt with as if this is a wartime crisis.” We’re going to have a second wave. There’s going to be thousands more people getting CoViD, there’s NHS. People are dying, etc. We can’t have any of the normal civil service HR. We can’t have any of the normal civil service bullshit on procurement. Exactly the same as with the vaccine task force. Everyone sits around the cabinet table, they all nod their heads.

A week later, I call this guy, a former SAS boss and say, “So, how’s it going? Are you getting who you want and is everything working great?”

He says, “No, it’s all the same shit show.”

So I have to get all the people back in the same room with the country’s most senior official and say, who the fuck have we got to fire around here to make clear that these people doing testing don’t have to do all of your bullshit HR?

That’s how extreme things have to be. It was only by doing that a second time and making clear that I would get the PM to actually just start firing senior people in the Cabinet office. It’s only then that the system will kind of part and go, “Okay, this element is allowed to.” But you imagine as soon as that countervailing force is removed, all the normal sea floods back.

— Dominic Cummings, interview with Dwarkesh Patel

Pahlka’s the case study of choice would probably be Obamacare, where the failure to deliver a functioning website for people to sign up for the program nearly sank the entire political enterprise.

But for a more hands-on example, consider rhe U.S. Digital Service developing software to transmit data from satellites to ground stations, ensuring the continued operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS):

This issue of data transmission to the ground stations and back again was one of a few problems that was holding them back. There is an industry standard way of doing this, a simple, reliable protocol [UDP] that is built into almost every operating system in the world.

But this team wasn’t using this simple protocol on its own. Instead, the team had written a piece of software to receive the message from that protocol, read the data, and then recode it into a different format, so they could feed it into a very complex piece of software called an Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB. The ESB eventually delivered the data to yet another piece of software, at which point the whole process ran in reverse order to deliver it back to the original, simple protocol. Because the data was taking such a roundabout route, it wasn’t arriving quickly enough for the ground stations to make the calculations needed. Using the simple protocol alone would have made the entire job a snap—as easy as nailing a couple of boards together. Instead, they had this massive Rube Goldberg contraption that was never going to work.

The people on this project knew quite well that using this ESB was a terrible idea. They’d have been relieved to just throw it out, plug in the simple protocol, and move on. But they couldn’t. It was a requirement in their contract. The contracting officers had required it because a policy document called the Air Force Enterprise Architecture had required it. The Air Force Enterprise Architecture required it because the Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture required it. And the DoD Enterprise Architecture required it because the Federal Enterprise Architecture, written by the Chief Information Officers Council, convened by the White House at the request of Congress, had required it.

— Jennifer Pahlka: Culture eats Policy

All that being said, I cannot fail to notice that what the two are saying is not truly incompatible. They both want the civil service to be more flexible, to show greater initiative, to care less about the process and more about the outcomes and to respond to the challenges on the ground more quickly and creatively.

Pahlka complains that, given the tight regulation imposed by the government, they can’t. Cummings complains that, even if given the leeway, they won’t take advantage of it.

Cumming’s preferred solution is to make civil servants fireable by the government so that they get skin in the game and can be forced, under the threat of dismissal, to act creatively. (Good luck with that.)

Pahlka’s preferred solution is to replace the one-way flow of instructions, from the government to the civil service, with a feedback loop, allowing civil servants to point out problems inherent in the directives and government to revise the regulations accordingly. (Hm. Given how hard political renegotiation tends to be, good luck with that, I guess.)

All in all, it looks like a classic accountability sink: if you give your subordinates a clear process and make them accountable for following it, they will follow it up to the letter. They’ll follow it even if it does not help. They’ll follow it even if it actively undermines the actual goal. Because as long as they do, you see, they can’t be fired.

In the rare organizations where this dilemma has been resolved, it has been through superiors specifying WHAT it is to be achieved, but not HOW it is to be achieved. Subordinates are given a free hand in choosing the means, while superiors must place trust in their efforts and accept that failures may occur along the way.

But that, of course, requires mutual trust and politically, it’s a hard sell.