Fall 2010 Glenn Fellows Arrive in D.C.

Left to right: Alexandra Petrucci, Chandra Caldwell, Nichole Hill, Justin Canfil, Sara Hinds, Kyle Everett, Kathryn Heffernan, Brock Hutchison, Theresa Brenner, Kevin Ruppert, Lindsey Wilson, Christina Buckler, Claire Racine.

Members of the fall 2010 class are living in The Congessional Apartments at 215 Constitution Avenue, N.E. We held our orientation session on Monday. Tuesday was the first day of their internships. Seminars and study tours will be held on Fridays this quarter.

"In private industry, if you screw things up, you get the boot; in the civil service, if you screw things up, I get the boot"

In the Washington Academic Internship Program, we talk a lot about how public policy is made, which usually leads to consideration of the tension, endemic to the nation's capital, between politicians and civil servants. Indeed, the Washington Buckeye is convinced that it is this tension--and not the more celebrated rivalry of Democrats with Republicans, or liberals with conservatives--that makes this city tick.

There is no better way of gaining insight into the contest between politicians and civil servants than through the 1980s BBC comedy series called Yes, Minister and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister; they were Margaret Thatcher's favorite television shows. The main characters in the original series were Jim Hacker, a Member of Parliament of indeterminte party affiliation who serves as Minister of Administrative Affairs, and his Permanent Secretary (a senior career civil servant, in other words), Sir Humphrey Appleby. Wikipedia sums up their relationship as follows:

The different ideals and self-interested motives of the characters are frequently contrasted. Whilst Hacker occasionally approaches an issue from a sense of idealism and a desire to be seen to improve things, he ultimately sees his re-election and elevation to higher office as the only measures of his success. Accordingly, he must appear to the voters to be effective and responsive to the public will. To his party (and, in the first incarnation, the Prime Minister) he must act as a loyal and effective party member. Sir Humphrey, on the other hand, genuinely believes that it is the Civil Service that knows what is best for the country (a belief shared by his bureaucratic colleagues) which is usually what is best for the Civil Service. Most of Sir Humphrey's actions are motivated by his wish to maintain the prestige, power, and influence he enjoys inside a large, bureaucratic organisation and also to preserve the numerous perks of his position: automatic honours, a substantial income, a fixed retirement age, a large pension, and the practical impossibility of being made redundant or being sacked. In fact, a good deal of the tension in their relationship comes from Hacker's awareness that it is the politicians who are liable to lose their jobs if civil service ineptitude comes to public attention.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books there is an article by Philippe Sands on the inquiry undertaken by a blue-ribbon commission chaired by a senior civil servant, Sir John Chilcot, on the origins of British involvement in the Iraq War. Although the inquiry has not yet been completed, it already has brought certain documents to light that point to the key role played by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who firmly believed--right up until the last minute, when he was brow-beaten by advisors to President George W. Bush--that waging war in Iraq would be illegal without a clear mandate from the United Nations. In addition to the political pressures on cabinet ministers such as Lord Goldsmith, the documents reveal the civil service in all its glory, as if it were the reincarnation of Yes, Minister. Read it, weep.

Palladio Exhibit at National Building Museum

Often we start a new quarter with a quick trip to the National Building Museum, the main attraction being a more or less permanent exhibition on the history of the capital called Washington: Symbol and City. The building itself, also known as the Pension Building, and the other exhibits always reward a close look, also.

This fall, a particularly good case can be made for visiting the Pension Building, thanks to a special exhibition called Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey, featuring drawings and models of buildings designed by the great Renaissance scholar and architect, Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). Palladio was revered by Jefferson, who, through works such as the Virginia State House, did much to popularize Palladio's distinctive version of classical design.

A nice write-up of the exhibition appeared in today's Roll Call under the by-line of Kaitlin Kovach. We'll be visiting the exhibition next Monday afternoon with the Autumn 2010 class of Glenn Fellows.

Michael Tomasky's Critique of the U.S. Senate

The current issue of The New York Review of Books contains a piece by Michael Tomasky, "The Specter Haunting the Senate," that praises two recent books on the filibuster and cloture as they have been employed by that institution. The "specter" that haunts the Senate is, of course, the unlikely prospect of reform.

Mr. Tomasky clearly is one of those, like last quarter's WAIP guest speaker Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution, who thinks of Congress as a "broken branch." The Washington Buckeye commented on Mann's presentation on August 18, 2010, and published an earlier post on the Mann-Ornstein book, on January 31, 2010. Just last month, we noted George Packer's lively critique of the Senate in a recent New Yorker, and all of these accounts of the lamentable condition of the national legislature need to be read against the urgent need of incumbents to keep the campaign contributions rolling in. On January 4, 2010, we wrote about Robert G. Kaiser's book, So Damn Much Money, about fund-raising, lobbying, and Congressional earmarks. It all makes for fascinating reading, parental guidance advised.

Rufus Miles and Bob Gates: A Reposting with New Link

Rufus Miles (1910-1996) was born in Columbus and is remembered for having been a senior federal administrator for many years. Here is his New York Times obituary.

It was Miles who famously observed that "Where you stand depends upon where you sit," which is usually understood to mean that if you know what's in the best interest of a particular agency or department, you know the opinions of its senior staff. It has come to be known as Miles's Law, and it works almost every time.

As usual, it's the exception that proves the rule. And Exhibit A is Robert Gates, who recently announced that he would be stepping down as Secretary of Defense sometime in 2011. Fareed Zakaria profiled Gates in his August 16 column in the Washington Post. Here's a Secretary of Defense who has the temerity to suggest that there's something terribly wrong when the Pentagon has ten times as many accountants as the United States has foreign service officers. And now, in today's (August 17, 2010) Post, Walter Pincus talks about some of the radical changes Gates is willing to contemplate in his quest to "change the Pentagon culture and to cap spending."

Bob Gates will be sorely missed.

September 9, 2010 update: Gates is the subject of David Ignatius's column in today's Washington Post.