Hacker News Reader

Comment by mercer | Hacker News Reader

While dishonesty is a plausible explanation too, I think the article's argument makes just as much sense. In fact, I recall the same basic argument brought forward by a Political Science professor here in Holland: because the apparatus of civil servants and experts doesn't really change so much between elections, these people wield much more power than we think they do and policy often stays continuous as a result.

View on HN

Somehow it must be beneficial for the elected officials to keep these non-changing people in charge.

Obama was probably simply persuaded by the many-many human faces of the administration currently carrying out the atrocities (War on Drugs, NSA, foreign policy), and focused more on the soft-programs (stimulus, healthcare; and random acts of obama, that largely failed), plus got completely broken and stonewalled by an uncooperative House.

> Somehow it must be beneficial for the elected officials to keep these non-changing people in charge.

Yes, because the vast majority of them are simply the bureaucrats that keep things ticking over because they know how to do their jobs.

I suppose a big benefit is just not having to worry about it. I think in practice that's one of the most common reason to leave things be. Any change will create enemies within, might lead to worse outcomes, and will cost significant work.

I've been in a number of situations where a 'bad' manager remained while new upper management was busy with 'an entirely new approach' and changing things left and right. In one case, I had the luck of being a good friend of someone in upper management, so I could discuss this issue. This manager indicated that he was well aware of the problem, but he explained that it simply wasn't worth the trouble to deal with this 'bad' manager right now, for pretty much the reasons I mentioned above.

Of course, 'right now' remained the argument, since there were always more important things to do. For all I know the guy's still there, or maybe even promoted.

Hell, come to think of it, it's very much like the code I work with. Significant chunks are a mess, but there never seems to be time to refactor. New features and 'big changes' always take priority, and somehow the big changes rarely impact that shitty code, so it stays. I'm not sure if that's coincidental.

tl;dr: apparently refactoring is avoided in most (bureaucratic) human endeavors.

Perhaps the situation is different in Holland and the USA, but I know for a fact that favoritism towards party members, relatives and their friends is very common after elections among higher ranks of civil servants, both in Austria and Greece (where it was common in the 80's to "recolor" large parts of the public sector when the ruling party changed). This weakens the "static bureaucracy" hypothesis in my book.

As others have pointed out, the POTUS directly appoints many key people and therefore cannot be completely powerless to actually "change" policy (assuming there isn't a closed pool of like-minded people to choose from).

I must admit I don't know enough about Holland to say anything with certainty. However, I'm inclined to think that the 'static bureaucracy' is much stronger in Holland because we're very consensus-driven in our politics. As such, large-scale recoloring is probably either undesired by the new powers, deemed unnecessary, or frowned upon too much by everyone involved to be a viable option.

But I'd love to hear from someone who knows more about the Dutch system!

The US bureaucracy is vast, and although POTUS has the ability to directly appoint many, that ability is neither unilateral (since the Senate must confirm most of the most important appointees) nor wide-ranging. Civil service hiring rules has much more impact on the makeup of a bureaucracy than the President himself does. It's simply not possible to "recolor" the public sector at a whim in the USA.

And there's the narrative as told in the (much recommended on HN) book "Command and Control": Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon administrations all arrive outraged at the military's nuclear war strategy. And then after much attempt at reform, they leave with virtually the same strategy intact. Partly just due to getting draw into the military's way of thinking, partly due to not being able to present compelling alternatives to the military command. And then when changes do happen, they are driven bottom-up by particular events/catastrophes which make clear that the current strategies are utterly untenable. It's tough to a replace one leaky abstraction with another (potentially leaky) abstraction!

Pretty much. In fairness to Kennedy (and by Kennedy I mean McNamara), he at least did get the train rolling on buffing up U.S. conventional forces so that it was at least theoretically possible to deter Soviet use of armed force without being forced to immediately escalate to nuclear use.

AFAIK it took until Carter to significantly revise nuclear doctrine, and even that was only because Carter got tired of being publically outfoxed by the Soviets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com