The reason of the clerks - federal bureaucrats

Reason, August-Sept, 1996 by Terry B. Kinney, Jr.

Believe it or not, federal bureaucrats can be the taxpayers' best friends.

Capitol Hill can sometimes seem like a corner of Wonderland that even Lewis Carroll shrank from describing. In 1983, for example, I appeared before an appropriations subcommittee in my role as administrator of the largest research organization of its kind in the world, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS). I had been called to defend that year's ARS budget request, and I sat at the witness table with my superior, an assistant secretary in the Department of Agriculture.

Looking down at me that day was freshman Rep. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who kept asking me the same questions. "Why," he wanted to know, "do you ask for several million dollars each year for tobacco research? Don't you know that thousands of people are dying right now from lung cancer?"

Durbin, one of the Hill's tobacco haters, was free to grill me on the matter because he was temporarily in charge of the hearing. The man who put him in charge was, ironically, a tobacco supporter, committee chairman Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.). Whitten had left a few minutes earlier for a floor vote, designating Durbin as interim chair.

I tried repeatedly to defend the funding. I even turned to my superior, the assistant secretary, and whispered, "Can you say something?"

"You keep on," he mumbled bravely without looking at me.

I did keep on, but with an increasing burden of frustration: The one thing I could not tell Durbin was that I actually agreed with him about tobacco. My staff experts and I had already tried - several times - to cancel tobacco research entirely. The political appointees in the department, weary of me, had even told me never to mention the subject again.

That, however, was in real life. On the Hill, I had a budget to defend in the face of political reality. So this is what I finally said: "As long as tobacco is classified by Congress as an agricultural crop there will be state and federal dollars to support research on it. Besides," I added, "If I don't ask for the funds, angry members of the committee will chastise me and put them in the ARS budget anyway."

Before Durbin could respond, Whitten returned. An assistant whispered to him, and Whitten announced a five-minute recess during which he listened to his staff. Suddenly he pounded the gavel.

"Pick up the record from the point where we left to vote," he told the official recorder. My interchange with Durbin, so far as the record was concerned, had not occurred.

What would appear in the record was a speech - a paean, really - that Whitten then delivered about the vital importance of tobacco research, tobacco's contribution to our economy, and how tobacco is a way of life on many farms. The hearing continued.

And so did the research, which, by the way, was concerned not only with increasing the tobacco farmer's yield but also with identifying the chemical constituents found in tobacco smoke, including, eventually, its carcinogenic components - findings for which the ARS was largely responsible, at the insistent behest of pro-tobacco forces.

I spent 14 years testifying in such hearings, and one theme that ran through them all is that science and politics are a pair of cultures that seldom mix well. Though combining them often results - thanks to the science - in an increase in knowledge beneficial to the general public, it often results as well - thanks to the politics - in a vast waste of the public's money.

In the 1980s, there were 2,800 scientists and engineers working in teams in ARS. As their administrator, I found it frustrating to bring their scientific recommendations before committees of politicians who often ignored them and instead allocated money based on a political agenda. Many politicians had come to their own conclusions about research programs well before such heatings even began.

For example, Sen. Lawton Chiles, now governor of Florida, used to appear at the budget hearing each year just long enough to ask, "Dr. Kinney, do you intend to make any changes in the ARS programs in Florida?" If I answered yes, Chiles would say he disagreed, that he believed there would be no changes. Later, the budget would contain language that confirmed his belief: no changes.

Year after year I heard one of the late Jamie Whitten's favorite maxims: "The executive proposes and the Congress disposes." That is, you career people in the cabinet departments can propose what you want, but we, the appropriating committee, give the final orders.

Who are the career people doing all this proposing? They are men and women who spent decades amassing expertise in disciplines of acknowledged importance to society. If they demonstrated the ability to lead and manage, they might be groomed for executive federal positions. You may know them as "lazy bureaucrats."

Of course, bureaucrats come in many shapes and sizes, and some are more knowledgeable, competent, and productive than others. But in the sizable world of federal research, they must maintain their credibility as scientists, engineers, and researchers within their respective fields while sometimes having to pursue wasteful political goals. These are inconsistent tasks that no scientist wants to try to balance. The perhaps surprising conclusion is that the community of research bureaucrats are often among the taxpayers' better friends in Washington: It is not in their professional interest to do either wasteful or pointless research.