Washington's nice problem - too many nice people in Washington DC politics

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by David Segal

Niceness bedevils the bureaucracy in other ways. Much of the agencies' work these days is overseeing private contractors - close to 90 percent of the Department of Energy's business, for instance, is farmed out. But minus rigor and real competition for the contract every few years, private firms naturally tend to cut corners to enhance their bottom line. For many bureaucrats, however, playing the heavy isn't easy because often the people they're supposed to lean on work alongside them, become their friends, and could offer them a job someday. "You develop a cozy relationship because they're sitting right next to you," says Carolyn Ban, a former manager at the Department of Personnel and Management. "In a sense you want to have good working relations. But there can be great harm when that leads to a bias for the contractor for the wrong reasons, like wanting to feather your nest."

This problem is most acute where the money in the private sector is most abundant: the Department of Defense. Pentagon bureaucrats are tasked with ensuring that weapons systems get built on time, and, ideally, function as advertised. But for the military's overseers there is a temptation. The private companies that make weapons are constantly looking for a few good men - Pentagon officials who know "the Building" and can help business with the right contacts in the military. Defense contractors frequently can offer double the government's money, so it's not unusual for milicrats to marshal a program through the DoD and Congress and then join the staff of the program's defense contractor shortly thereafter.

"It's become an accepted career path in the Pentagon," says Jim Burton, a retired Air Force colonel and author of The Pentagon Wars. "If you have been supportive of a program, you can almost count on the nice man with the money bags showing up and asking you to join the company."

That's what happened in the case of the Maverick missile, an anti-tank weapon purchased by the Air Force in the early eighties. If there had been an honest evaluation of the Maverick, it would never have been built. But thanks to some helpful program managers in the Pentagon, several of the operational tests meant to determine whether the missile would work were rigged. (The missile failed real tests, mistaking, at one point, a franks and beans cookout in the desert for a tank.) Nonetheless, thousands of Mavericks were built at a cost of $123,000 per copy. Less than six months after the missile cleared its last production hurdle, three of the top Pentagon officials responsible for the program left to join Hughes Aircraft Company, the company that built it.

The town's nice ethos isn't well known to Beltway outsiders because the business of survival networking is almost always private; it happens on the phone, in lunches, at meetings, fundraisers, social gatherings on junkets, and at dinner parties. For a sense of how it dims the brightest of reforming spirits, let's follow one man's Washington-style transformation from progressive lawmaker to big-dollar rainmaker.