A Window into the Bureaucracy

 Newt Gingrich, Newt Productions: Rarely do Americans get so vivid a glimpse of their government at work as former Health and Human Services official David Wright offered in his resignation letter at the end of February. The letter, which the journal Science published on its website this week, is a detailed diatribe about just how dysfunctional the bureaucracy has become at every level.

Until recently, David Wright was director of the Office of Research Integrity, a division of HHS that investigates misconduct in federally funded scientific research. Wright was a professor at Michigan State University before he took the post at HHS two years ago–a post in which he now describes his predominant responsibilities as “the very worst job I have ever had.”

The reason, he writes, was that he spent at least 65 percent of his time as director “navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy” for spending approvals and permission to execute even the basic functions of his office.
Wright describes how bureaucratic higher-ups micromanaged his office so thoroughly that he had to seek these approvals “almost item by item.” There, he said, “people who are generally poorly informed about what [his office] is and does decide whether our requests are ‘mission critical.’”

Wright describes how, in one example of this insanity, he needed to convert a few audio tapes to CDs for an important presentation he was preparing. The bureaucrats whose approval he required waited two days before denying his $35 request.

It’s clear that Wright’s two years in the bureaucracy were a wake up call even for someone who expected his share of hassle. “I knew coming into this job about the bureaucratic limitations of the federal government, but I had no idea how stifling it would be,” he writes. “What I was able to do in a day or two as an academic administrator takes weeks or months in the federal government.” This is saying something, since university administrations are not exactly known for their speed and efficiency.

Whatever we decide we want the government to do, we want it to actually be able to do it. Unfortunately, the entire bureaucracy is as dysfunctional as David Wright describes his office at HHS–and not just incompetent, but also, as he points out, “secretive, autocratic, and unaccountable.”

The same dynamics Wright describes in his resignation letter help explain why Obamacare and its many new layers of bureaucracy were always a bad idea, and why the launch of the law has been such a failure. They also reveal much about why, for instance, the Pentagon procurement system has been broken for decades and its dozens of accounting systems can’t talk to each other; how NASA spent $150 billion in ten years without developing a vehicle capable of carrying astronauts into space; how the IRS sent 343 tax refunds to a single address is Shanghai and 655 to another address in Lithuania.

Wright says he came to believe that inevitably, “public bureaucracies quit being about serving the public and focus instead on perpetuating themselves.”

“I’m offended as an American taxpayer that the federal bureaucracy—at least the part I’ve labored in—is so profoundly dysfunctional,” he says. “…I’m saddened by the fact that there is so little discussion, much less outrage, regarding the problem.”

David Wright is correct, and Congress should hold hearings on his story and should solicit those of other federal employees. We desperately need a breakout from bureaucracy, which has grown frighteningly out of control in the federal government as well as in many states. As I discuss in my book Breakout, I believe communications technologies like the smartphones offer us an opportunity to circumvent many layers of bureaucracy and to take some of its functions literally into our own hands.

But the bureaucracy will never reform itself. Instead, it will resist all attempts at reform. The urgent political challenge facing the American people, then, is to replace it with modern, efficient systems that actually work. That task will be a real fight, and will take the help of lots of breakout champions like the newly-radicalized David Wright to make it happen.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via his  Gingrich Productions.

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