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As a DC Area resident for 25+ years, I have met many federal government employees, some in professional settings, and many in casual settings. They remind me o

by atonse 7y ago

As a DC Area resident for 25+ years, I have met many federal government employees, some in professional settings, and many in casual settings. They remind me of Journalists. Most journalists I've met are not centrists in their personal lives. But in their professional lives, they try (they're not perfect, they are human) to stay impartial, but some of your bias will definitely leak into things. But most federal agencies are simply too large and bureaucratic for individuals to push their own political agendas. (Not talking about the leadership that's appointed by each administration, but career employees). And it's been my informal experience that their hands are too often (rightly) tied by the laws and regulations of the day, in exactly what they can do. So this idea of non-partisan people truly being partisan is often true at an individual level, but generally false at an agency level. And they do take the non-partisan side of their jobs very seriously.

excalibur 7y ago
Well stated, can confirm. You are far more likely to encounter fiscal corruption than partisanship in most agencies, appointed leaders aside.
s3r3nity 7y ago
> But most federal agencies are simply too large and bureaucratic for individuals to push their own political agendas. I think I agree with you, both in principle and from similar anecdotes I have from friends & colleagues in the area. The leadership piece to which you allude worries me, but also the idea that to have a successful non-partisan government office you need to invest a lot of tax dollars to make it SO big & bureaucratic that any individual can't have significant impact makes me a tad nervous from a perspective of favoring smaller government. Therefore, if the trade-off is between massive, expensive government office that can have some non-zero probability of corruption OR relying on the responsibility of States & Representatives from those States to hire consultants / experts / research the issues, I'd opt for the latter.
- Retric 7y ago
  You quickly hit massive bureaucracy at the national scale without actually being that expensive. Let’s say 4,000 people, which seems like massive overkill, costing 250k each (salary + benefits + office space etc). That’s 1 billion a year out of ~7630B total government spending. It’s still a cost benefit analysis, but a technology equivalent to the GAO or arguably the FDA could provide significant value.
  - ianai 7y ago
    I find all the talk about bureaucratic waste disingenuous when there are never reductions in the parts of governmental spending that benefit business directly. Ie private prisons and industrial complexes.
- ianai 7y ago
  I don’t understand the faith in state governments. I’ve seen just how awful they can be to trust them over the federal government, in the trend. The federal is a much larger sample of people. In order to function every part of it must pass some basic acceptability requirements from the entire voting public. Meanwhile, state governments can be outright hostile toward one locality at the benefit of another through their own laws and voting practices and budgets. State and local governments are much smaller than the fed - meaning corruption and influence are bought at much lower prices than the federal. I’ve personally lived through economic downfalls brought on by local governments outlawing and fighting new industry for political power and easy votes. I also saw my university’s tuition revenue taken from it and given to a smaller university in the state capital. All because the surrounding population hated the city hosting the university.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    >The federal is a much larger sample of people. In order to function every part of it must pass some basic acceptability requirements from the entire voting public. What is the mechanism for this acceptance passing? If the VA mistreats its veterans, or has a black mold problem in a facility housing elderly patients and then covers it up how does the public vote on that. A considered response should outline both 1) how that selection might work in principle, and 2) and how it might work in light of the fact that voters care about competing interests, e.g. whether or not candidate X has a position commensurate with voters line on abortion, global warming, if the candidate has a familiar last name, if they would like to have a beer with the candidate, etc.
    - ianai 7y ago
      Outrage on cnn or twitter, for one.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    It's not that state governments have better people in them, it's that there are more of them and they have more competitive pressure. If a local government is too corrupt then people and businesses will start moving away. Which is much easier for them to do than to move to another country. And since the local government doesn't want that, they have an additional incentive on top of voting to keep the local people happy. You also end up with more policy diversity, so that if you really hate living under the rules in one place, you at least have the option of going somewhere else. Consider whether you would rather have gay marriage legal in California and illegal in Mississippi than to have it uniformly either legal or illegal in all places, but the uniform policy is chosen by a coin flip and if it doesn't go your way then you can't override it with local policy. The result is that some places will be more corrupt or have rules you can't stand. But some places will be less corrupt and have rules you love that you wouldn't have been able to make into national policy. And if you live somewhere with a policy you can't stand, it's much more feasible for you as an individual to actually affect the local policy. And if that's still hopeless then you have the option to move somewhere else with a different policy, which isn't possible when you impose a federal uniformity that makes 45% of people unhappy. > State and local governments are much smaller than the fed - meaning corruption and influence are bought at much lower prices than the federal. That's not really true, because the influence you get is in proportion to the size of the government. If you capture 1% of the federal budget, that's ~50 times larger than 1% of a state budget, so it's worth spending ~50 times more to capture it. Worse, then the regulatory capture gets greater economies of scale and becomes proportionally more available to large players than smaller ones, allowing huge corporations to more easily steamroll over small businesses and individuals. And then the rules entrenching huge incumbents are uniform so you can't avoid them by moving your small/medium business to the next town over.
rayiner 7y ago
As someone who grew up in D.C. I disagree with this. Federal government employees try not to be overtly political, but they have a world view that is not necessarily representative of the country as a whole. You're going to find a lot more anarchists in Texas or Oregon than D.C. You're going to find a lot more religious people in Iowa than D.C. Folks in D.C.--on both sides of the aisle--tend to be predisposed to believing in the superiority of the educated upper middle class, seeing government as the solution to various problems, etc. I'd say the same thing about journalists. 90%+ of journalists are democrats. (Overwhelmingly, white and male democrats.) They try to chart a course of "objectivity" within an overall left-leaning Overton window. For example, 32% of Democrats are "extremely proud to be an American" versus 74% of Republicans: https://news.gallup.com/poll/236420/record-low-extremely-proud-americans.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/236420/record-low-extremely-pro.... It is impossible for such differences in world view not to affect your article selection and tone when it comes to areas like foreign policy, terrorism, national security, etc. I should point out that I'm not talking about blatant partisanship. Judges, for example, seek to be objective. That doesn't mean that their world views don't affect their decisions. Justice Kagan has said that American judges--across the spectrum--are textualists most of the time. How would they approach deciding a Constitutional case in the U.K., which doesn't have a written constitution? Policymaking and reporting are no different. Everything you write that has any substance at all must have an internal logic. It will makes assumptions, and inferences about cause and effect. It is impossible to be "objective" with respect to that reasoning process or those assumptions. For example, what is an "objective" article on AOC's new proposal for nationwide rent control? Do you think someone who believes deeply in markets would write the same article on that proposal as someone who believes that governments can legislate outcomes? I think a market-oriented person struggling to write an objective article about that proposal would either come across as partisan, or would have to write something utterly vacuous. It's one thing not to expressly take sides. It's entirely another to divorce yourself from your own modes of reasoning and assumptions about how the world works.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Within the actual, global spectrum of political philosophies, the difference between American Democrats and Republicans is remarkably small, especially in comparison to many European parliaments. Just look at the consensus about and subsequent lack of accountability for the Iraq War as an example. What do you think is an actual, meaningful consequence of something like “90% of journalists being Democrats.” In all the domains you cite, I see a general consensus around a right-wing perspective about America‘s place in the world.
dnautics 7y ago
As someone who grew up in DC and lived there for an adult I cannot disagree with this more.

by atonse 7y ago

excalibur 7y ago

Well stated, can confirm. You are far more likely to encounter fiscal corruption than partisanship in most agencies, appointed leaders aside.

s3r3nity 7y ago

> But most federal agencies are simply too large and bureaucratic for individuals to push their own political agendas. I think I agree with you, both in principle and from similar anecdotes I have from friends & colleagues in the area. The leadership piece to which you allude worries me, but also the idea that to have a successful non-partisan government office you need to invest a lot of tax dollars to make it SO big & bureaucratic that any individual can't have significant impact makes me a tad nervous from a perspective of favoring smaller government. Therefore, if the trade-off is between massive, expensive government office that can have some non-zero probability of corruption OR relying on the responsibility of States & Representatives from those States to hire consultants / experts / research the issues, I'd opt for the latter.

Retric 7y ago
You quickly hit massive bureaucracy at the national scale without actually being that expensive. Let’s say 4,000 people, which seems like massive overkill, costing 250k each (salary + benefits + office space etc). That’s 1 billion a year out of ~7630B total government spending. It’s still a cost benefit analysis, but a technology equivalent to the GAO or arguably the FDA could provide significant value.
- ianai 7y ago
  I find all the talk about bureaucratic waste disingenuous when there are never reductions in the parts of governmental spending that benefit business directly. Ie private prisons and industrial complexes.
ianai 7y ago
I don’t understand the faith in state governments. I’ve seen just how awful they can be to trust them over the federal government, in the trend. The federal is a much larger sample of people. In order to function every part of it must pass some basic acceptability requirements from the entire voting public. Meanwhile, state governments can be outright hostile toward one locality at the benefit of another through their own laws and voting practices and budgets. State and local governments are much smaller than the fed - meaning corruption and influence are bought at much lower prices than the federal. I’ve personally lived through economic downfalls brought on by local governments outlawing and fighting new industry for political power and easy votes. I also saw my university’s tuition revenue taken from it and given to a smaller university in the state capital. All because the surrounding population hated the city hosting the university.
- dnautics 7y ago
  >The federal is a much larger sample of people. In order to function every part of it must pass some basic acceptability requirements from the entire voting public. What is the mechanism for this acceptance passing? If the VA mistreats its veterans, or has a black mold problem in a facility housing elderly patients and then covers it up how does the public vote on that. A considered response should outline both 1) how that selection might work in principle, and 2) and how it might work in light of the fact that voters care about competing interests, e.g. whether or not candidate X has a position commensurate with voters line on abortion, global warming, if the candidate has a familiar last name, if they would like to have a beer with the candidate, etc.
  - ianai 7y ago
    Outrage on cnn or twitter, for one.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  It's not that state governments have better people in them, it's that there are more of them and they have more competitive pressure. If a local government is too corrupt then people and businesses will start moving away. Which is much easier for them to do than to move to another country. And since the local government doesn't want that, they have an additional incentive on top of voting to keep the local people happy. You also end up with more policy diversity, so that if you really hate living under the rules in one place, you at least have the option of going somewhere else. Consider whether you would rather have gay marriage legal in California and illegal in Mississippi than to have it uniformly either legal or illegal in all places, but the uniform policy is chosen by a coin flip and if it doesn't go your way then you can't override it with local policy. The result is that some places will be more corrupt or have rules you can't stand. But some places will be less corrupt and have rules you love that you wouldn't have been able to make into national policy. And if you live somewhere with a policy you can't stand, it's much more feasible for you as an individual to actually affect the local policy. And if that's still hopeless then you have the option to move somewhere else with a different policy, which isn't possible when you impose a federal uniformity that makes 45% of people unhappy. > State and local governments are much smaller than the fed - meaning corruption and influence are bought at much lower prices than the federal. That's not really true, because the influence you get is in proportion to the size of the government. If you capture 1% of the federal budget, that's ~50 times larger than 1% of a state budget, so it's worth spending ~50 times more to capture it. Worse, then the regulatory capture gets greater economies of scale and becomes proportionally more available to large players than smaller ones, allowing huge corporations to more easily steamroll over small businesses and individuals. And then the rules entrenching huge incumbents are uniform so you can't avoid them by moving your small/medium business to the next town over.

rayiner 7y ago

As someone who grew up in D.C. I disagree with this. Federal government employees try not to be overtly political, but they have a world view that is not necessarily representative of the country as a whole. You're going to find a lot more anarchists in Texas or Oregon than D.C. You're going to find a lot more religious people in Iowa than D.C. Folks in D.C.--on both sides of the aisle--tend to be predisposed to believing in the superiority of the educated upper middle class, seeing government as the solution to various problems, etc. I'd say the same thing about journalists. 90%+ of journalists are democrats. (Overwhelmingly, white and male democrats.) They try to chart a course of "objectivity" within an overall left-leaning Overton window. For example, 32% of Democrats are "extremely proud to be an American" versus 74% of Republicans: https://news.gallup.com/poll/236420/record-low-extremely-proud-americans.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/236420/record-low-extremely-pro.... It is impossible for such differences in world view not to affect your article selection and tone when it comes to areas like foreign policy, terrorism, national security, etc. I should point out that I'm not talking about blatant partisanship. Judges, for example, seek to be objective. That doesn't mean that their world views don't affect their decisions. Justice Kagan has said that American judges--across the spectrum--are textualists most of the time. How would they approach deciding a Constitutional case in the U.K., which doesn't have a written constitution? Policymaking and reporting are no different. Everything you write that has any substance at all must have an internal logic. It will makes assumptions, and inferences about cause and effect. It is impossible to be "objective" with respect to that reasoning process or those assumptions. For example, what is an "objective" article on AOC's new proposal for nationwide rent control? Do you think someone who believes deeply in markets would write the same article on that proposal as someone who believes that governments can legislate outcomes? I think a market-oriented person struggling to write an objective article about that proposal would either come across as partisan, or would have to write something utterly vacuous. It's one thing not to expressly take sides. It's entirely another to divorce yourself from your own modes of reasoning and assumptions about how the world works.

claudeganon 7y ago
Within the actual, global spectrum of political philosophies, the difference between American Democrats and Republicans is remarkably small, especially in comparison to many European parliaments. Just look at the consensus about and subsequent lack of accountability for the Iraq War as an example. What do you think is an actual, meaningful consequence of something like “90% of journalists being Democrats.” In all the domains you cite, I see a general consensus around a right-wing perspective about America‘s place in the world.

dnautics 7y ago

As someone who grew up in DC and lived there for an adult I cannot disagree with this more.