Executive

 

The President in informational society would have much the same role as in the current government. With a constantly changing political economy, the President needs much greater power to reorganize  the bureaucracy according to changing conditions. Additionally, to achieve a more flexible government, the President needs authorization to replace much of the permanent civil service with the management situations market. However, giving the President more control over the administration, requires a reconsideration of the system of checks and balances. Executive action would be subject to a professional review and the court and Congress would have expanded oversight powers. The interaction of the proposed Congress and the President would create incentives for much greater efficiency in government.

The administration of government, like that of business and other institutions will change continually as knowledge and technology advance. In time, the flow of information between various agents in society and the administration will primarily take place through one machine communicating with another. In particular, much of the routine interaction between the private sector and government will be automated. For instance, a citizen requiring a license or needing to enact other routine business with a government agency will communicate with an interactive program. Automation in government administration, like automation in business will thereby displace routine jobs, leaving the work to be increasingly performed as a succession of one time jobs.

Given the environment of constant change, the administration, like corporations, requires frequent reorganizations to best fulfill its functions. In the current government design, reorganization is a very difficult undertaking which requires legislative approval. It is hampered by the fact that legislators in committees and subcommittees guard their turf and generally resist attempts to reorganize. Consequently, a fundamental problem with the current government bureaucracy is inflexibility. With changing needs and technology, the President needs much greater authority to reorganize the bureaucracy to meet these changing conditions. In the proposed design the President would be granted the power to reorganize the administration annually. The reorganization plan would be submitted simultaneously with the submission of the budget. If two thirds of Congress should veto the reorganization plan within a month, the plan could not be implemented.

The purpose of this executive power would be to enable the President to adjust the organization of the administration to accommodate changing conditions. Currently a variety of agencies are responsible for regulating financial institutions. However, because changing laws have now removed the legal differences among most aspects of financial institutions, it would now be wise for the President to move all the elements of regulation under one agency. With the power of reorganization the President would be the agent responsible for obtaining an effective organization. A flexible administration enables the President to create temporary organizations to handle critical current problems. With such power to reorganize government, for instance, President Reagan might have created a high-level organization to battle drugs. When some future President felt the drug problem had been overcome, he could then revise the organization.

Due to constant changes in government the concept of lifetime employment implicit in the civil service would be replaced with finite-time contracts obtained through a management situations market. These finite-time contracts would enable the President to address the changing succession of one-time governmental problems. Under such conditions the role of the civil service commission would be to ensure that competition for positions was based on merit and not politics. One approach to this promotion of merit might be to place the decision process for the administrative management situations market in the public domain. The political-appointment-decision process, however would be conducted in private, since these appointments would be reviewed by Congress.

The power of the President to reorganize the administration would give the President the power to search for effective organizations for changing conditions and technology. Because a bounded rational manager can only manage a small number of subordinates, the President would probably organize his cabinet with only five to seven cabinet officers. And each cabinet officer would have a small number of subordinates and so on. Besides appointments in the hierarchy, the President would make a small number of appointments to independent agencies. In reorganizations Presidents would shift responsibilities from one cabinet officer to another. For example, one President might wish all activities promoting science and technology under a single science official, while another President might wish these activities split up among various departments. If the President wished to place all civilian and military purchasing under an efficiency expert, he could do so. Also, legislation authorizing the President to perform some new governmental activity would simply authorize the activity then allow the President to organize the activity in his administration.

Granting the President new powers in addition to the powers acquired by the President in the second hundred years raises the question of appropriate checks and balances. As was pointed out, Congress, to ease its legislative burden, must delegate considerable policy details to the President in administrating legislation. Because this delegation of legislative details to the executive was not the practice in 1780s, the legislature was not provided any specific checks on how the executive implements legislation. In practice, Congress upholds a nebulous concept called legislative oversight. While Congress has a legitimate right to investigate the administration for the purpose of modifying the law, Congress impinges on the separation of powers doctrine when Congress investigates the administration in order to manipulate legitimate executive policy.

The current status of constitutional interpretation is that the legislature does not have the right of a legislative veto over individual executive actions unless the veto is submitted to the President as a piece of legislation. Congress must resort to political investigations to force resignations from officials who seriously deviate from legislative intent. Congress needs some mechanisms of legislative oversight which would check , but not incapacitate executive capacity to organize and act. Congress should have the right to specify the conditions under which the President can fire an administrative official in charge of an authorized government activity, the right to specify the information policy of the authorized activity, and the right to recall a political appointee in the executive branch.

These rights would give Congress some influence over how the President organizes and conducts his administration. In every piece of legislation authorizing executive activity the legislation would specify the conditions under which the President could fire the official in charge of the activity and the information policy the activity would have to follow. In executive activities traditionally controlled by Presidential policy, the President would have the right to fire political appointees at will and the information policy might have a time delay release for politically sensitive information, such as the conduct of foreign affairs. In executive activities which Congress felt should be independent, Congress might specify that the President could fire political appointees for cause and would have to operate with full public disclosure. In some government activities Congress might go so far as to require that all external communication, such as with other government agencies, the White House staff, and private concerns, be part of the public record. Congress might explicitly limit the concept of executive privilege to an inner circle on the White House staff. To be efficient in organizing the administration, the President would probably organize activities with similar firing and information policies together.

In addition, the proposed right to recall appointments simplifies the legislature's problem in obtaining compliance with legislative intent. The current procedure for obtaining compliance with legislative intent is to embarrass the President with legislative investigations until the President asks the official to resign. With the right to recall Congress could simply recall the political appointment, provided the official were a member of the executive branch. If two thirds of congress votes for a recall, recall is automatic and requires no justification, however Congress would undoubtedly hold a media oriented investigation to justify their action to the public. This provision means that a President for whom the legislative majority is from the opposing party must in his policies maintain the support of one-third of Congress. The effect of the recall, then, would be to force the executive to compromise with the legislature when the President's party was a minority in Congress. The resulting compromises should achieve greater consistency between legislative intent and policy implementation.

In the proposed design, in addition to legislative checks, all executive action would be subject to a  professional review by the courts. If a party were affected by executive action, he could, as was the case with legislation, file a professional review case based on professionally refereed analysis in federal court. Subjecting executive action to a professional review would nullify the concept of the Administrative Procedures Act which limits judicial review to legal issues such as due process. Besides desirable legal properties such as due process, executive action, that is all administrative actions, should have the properties of consistency, general benefits, and efficiency. The professional review of executive action would influence both the organization and the implementation of legislation. As a President would have to carefully consider his organizational plan, professional challenges would very likely be few. Professional challenges of executive action would be much more likely in government activities in which the legislature granted the executive broad powers in implementing the legislation.

Finally, the courts would have one new check  on executive action. Frequently private citizens sue the government to force administration officials to carry out the provisions of legislation. Such activities can occur in a change of administration where the new administration does not like the legislation of previous administrations and decides to change the law by a policy of benign neglect. If the plaintiff wins and the court decides the failure to follow the law was willful, the court as a deterrent should have the power to remove the responsible officials from office. The purpose of this power is to encourage administration officials who do not like particular laws to submit the desired change in the next presidential legislative program rather than change the law by policy implementation.

In response to greater judicial checks, the administration would take greater care to ensure that policy complied with legislation. Moreover, to greatly reduce the prospect of negative professional reviews, the executive would establish its own executive professional review. As both executive amplification of legislation and budget items are subject to a possible professional review by the courts, the executive would create administrative professional review procedures to guard against subsequent court challenges. Cautious bureaucrats would ensure that administrative action, proposed legislation, and new budget initiatives were carefully reviewed by professional proponents of all major theories. Most professional reviews would include a professional teleconference  which pitted the analysis of the various positions against each other with a panel to judge the proceedings.

The proposed modifications to Congress and the Presidency would also create incentives  for much greater efficiency in federal government operations. For example, greater efficiency would result from changes in the budget process. In order to regain some of the control it had lost to the President, Congress would insist on shifting the budget process from a line-item budget process to an output-oriented budget. Line item budgets define the budget in terms of inputs used by government. In a static administration, legislative committees, through experience, intuitively know the relationship between inputs and outputs. Through cozy relationships with the permanent bureaucracy, legislative committees can exercise oversight to provide services that constituents want, for example, a road in a national forest to harvest timber. To strengthen his control over the administration, a President, then, has incentives for reorganizing to break these ties. To regain some measure of this control Congress would have incentives to switch from a line-item budget process to a budget process such as zerobased budgeting which relates inputs to outputs. To the extent that the budget could be precisely defined in terms of the relationship between inputs and outputs, Congress could control the level of administrative outputs independent of Presidential reorganizations.

With more quantification made possible through more computerization, budgets relating inputs to outputs could be implemented; however, the development of such a form of budgeting would be a monumental task. For government services controlled by software the relationship between inputs and outputs is clearly defined in the operation of the software. The relationship between inputs and outputs in activities such as power generation is as well known in public generation as it is in private generation. Some government activities, such as the activities of the Attorney General, for which the output is at best fuzzily defined, would resist quantification for a long time. With a zero-based budget process, the focus of the budget process will be on the desired levels of output. Computer programs using the proposed output levels would then generate the input expenditures. For entitlement programs, then, the forecasted level of service would determine the budget.

Without greater incentives to promote efficiency, the move to a form of budgeting relating inputs to outputs alone is insufficient in itself to promote efficiency. The key which would create incentives for greater efficiency would be the proposal that each budget item would have to be sponsored by a nationally elected senator who would then have incentives to analyze the efficiency of budgeted items in order to avoid a professional review. This contrasts sharply with the current situation under geographic representation where constituents in each district primarily regard their representative as a procurer of government services for the district. As efficiency in providing these services would generally have a negligible impact on taxes, efficiency currently becomes an abstraction relating to government in general.

Nationally elected senators constrained by the professional review, however, would not be able seek voter approval by trying to provide specific services to narrow constituencies. They would have to seek national constituencies. Consider the problem of the senators on the committee for sponsoring the budget. With a small national elected budget committee, the incentives for efficiency would have been greatly modified. The budget committee focuses such national concerns as efficiency, the level of spending, and the deficit into a small group of nationally elected senators. The successful budget senator would want to increase government services to please constituents and at the same time reduce the level of spending in order to reduce taxes.

Such an approach would seem impossible until one considers the subject of government efficiency. With the advance of technology, government operations, like private operations, are capable of great increases in efficiency. The senate budget committee would create incentives for congressmen to concern themselves with efficiency of activities for which they had oversight responsibilities. In the bargaining process to obtain votes for the budget, the senators would trade improvements in efficiency for increases in activities of interest to constituents of congressmen, provided, of course that they were within the constraints imposed by a professional review. A successful budget senator could then campaign on the basis of how he increased services through efficiency and even achieved a slight decrease in taxes. A successful congressman would be able to claim an increase in the type of service desired by his constituents.

Furthermore, congressmen in the administration oversight committees would obtain increases in administrative efficiency through a variety of approaches. One of these would be to authorize research to define more clearly the relationship between inputs and outputs. For those government services where these relationships could be defined, incentives systems could be created to promote productivity increases. Inevitably, part of budget outlays would be hardware and software enhancements to achieve productivity advances. Where relationships between inputs and outputs could be defined, improved performance by government managers could be rewarded by financial incentives. Part of this improvement would occur through the replacement of the permanent static bureaucracy by privatization and management situations markets.

Evaluation