Reflecting on government work

“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help!” I’ve heard this enough times to remember it, but I had to look up where it came from. It came from a US president who was born about 50 miles from here, and, among other things, attended Eureka College. President Reagan called it the nine most terrifying words in the English language.

The irony, of course, is that Mr. Reagan was as much in the government and of the government as a person could be. When I was younger, I saw stuff in government that was icky and annoying, and I came to a similar conclusion as Mr. Reagan. That conclusion was, you have to be in the system to change the system. I wasn’t going to get very far by calling for reform from the outside (people make whole careers out of doing that, however).

Before I knew it, I was a very bureaucratic bureaucrat! As superintendent of schools, I was definitely on the inside, but the view wasn’t much prettier from there. Mostly, I disagreed with my fellow bureaucrats…..we all wanted to improve the educational outcomes of our children and communities…but I differed with most of them very markedly on how we would accomplish that. While they were lobbying Springfield for more money (EFAB was their friend!!), I was literally tracking how much time was wasted around the bells. Did you know that in an average class period of 50 minutes, 1/5 of the time was wasted with non-instructional time? Yep, 5 minutes at the beginning of the class period, and 5 minutes at the end.

Don’t pat me on the back….I failed pretty badly at being a superintendent. It took me about five years to figure out that nobody cared about instructional time. It never came up at a board meeting, a parent never complained about it, and a child never felt injured by losing 1/5 of their educational entitlement!

Maybe it’s like the FDA…nobody cares about the lives that would have been saved or made better by drugs that never make it through the approval process. Bureaucrats only care about approving something that WON’T hurt people. The incentive structure is asymmetrical…like hugely so!

I later did a stint as a small-town mayor. I think I was slightly more effective at that role, but I still had real difficulty understanding governmental incentive structures! I have some fun stories that are worth something now, such as the long-time resident who wrote to me, “are you trying to be the worst mayor Sheffield has ever had?”

So, I didn’t reform much of any part of any governmental system by being on the inside, and I reckon neither did Mr. Reagan. I do think it made me more sympathetic to public service roles and the strange incentives inherent in those roles…job security, not productivity. I am one of those strange people that likes gridlock in Congress. “Progress” gets you tariffs, taxes, and tyranny.