Government Needs Someone in Charge

Introducing "Competent Bureaucracy," my manifesto for rebuilding government around authority and responsibility.

Government agencies exist to accomplish a mission, yet today they are organized in a way that evades responsibility. Managers are held responsible for programs they do not meaningfully control, while agencies rely on loose networks of contractors and grantees they only nominally direct. Decades of reform have prioritized consultation and procedural safeguards, but have left us with a government that cannot answer the fundamental question: Who is actually in charge?

In my new paper, Competent Bureaucracy, I offer an alternative model built upon the older administrative principles of authority and personal responsibility. The paper sets out its reform agenda in three parts, which it calls Build, Ship, and Scale.

• Build – Design programs so that the officials running them have real managerial control.

• Ship – Launch programs without surrendering responsibility to contractors, grantees, or other partners.

• Scale – Make successful practices repeatable across the government.

I’ve been writing about our (sometimes!) more competent past. This paper from the Foundation for American Innovation is about the more competent future we might yet have.

Read "Competent Bureaucracy" by Kevin Hawickhorst