The 21st thing you need to know before your first day in office.

The First Hoover Commission and curent possibilites.

·        Give the president more power.

·        Give agency heads more power while holding them accountable for their performance.

·        Establish a General Services Agency to centralize housekeeping duties across the government.

·        Create what we now know as the Department of Defense.

·        Consolidate foreign affairs responsibilities and reorganize the State Department.

·        Realign functions between the Commerce Department and the Treasury Department.

·        Transfer the development and manufacturing of weapons systems from the government to the private sector to create a defense industry.

Congress created a second Hoover Commission in 1953 during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Former President Hoover headed this one as well; and his second commission sent its final report to Congress in June 1955.

The first Hoover Commission, and to a lesser extent the second one, created the government we have lived with more or less successfully, until today. Following the advice of the commissions, the government, years later, when creating new agencies such as the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and NASA, authorized only skeleton crews of government employees supplemented by large numbers of contract employees. By 2010, the Department of Homeland Security for example, had 200,000 contract employees compared to 180,000 career employees.

Another Hoover-like Commission is needed, but is unlikely

Our government struggles to work within an industrial age structure inadequate for the age of globalization, technology, and terrorism. The government looks and acts tired and as worn out as an uncared for 25-year old automobile, rusted, faded, cracked, and leaky because the government’s numerous vertical stovepipe agencies are unable to meet today’s challenges requiring cross-agency solutions.

We expect too much of today’s government, poorly organized to handle today’s issues. Leadership needs to take a “whole of government” view. We need a Government without Boundaries to work with issues not within silos where protection of the status quo is a major priority, but horizontally across agencies, a need so evident daily in cases such as in Hurricane Katrina, in the underwear bomber case in 2010, and in all cases involving the 16 intelligence organizations.

President Obama in his State of the Union speech to the nation on January 25, 2011 drew a laugh when he commented that the Department of the Interior regulates salmon in fresh water and the Department of Commerce regulates salmon in salt water, and it,  “… gets even more complicated once they are smoked,” he said.

While the government has made some progress by using collaboration software such as Microsoft’s SharePoint, unfortunately, substantial change is unlikely to occur for seven

·        The ever-increasing numbers of marginally qualified White House appointments, unable to visualize the big picture.

·        Contracts with the private sector which prohibit consolidation without financial penalty during the life of the contract.

·        Congress savors its power and committee chairs barring even modest cross-government consolidations. When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security combining 28 agencies into one Department, members were unwilling to give up any authority. Consequently, the Department gets its marching orders from more than 100 committees and subcommittees continuing to fragment the government’s efforts to integrate and respond to the threats of terrorism and other national emergencies. In addition, there are some 51 federal agencies monitoring the flow of money to terrorist organizations.

 See: Gideon Rachman, “Declare victory and end the ‘global war on terror,’ ” Financial Times, May 31, 2011, page 13.

·        The responsibility for egg safety is divided between the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration depending on whether an egg is inside the chicken, or has been laid, and whether the egg is whole or has been cracked open. After recent outbreaks of the salmonella virus, the Centers for Disease Control entered the picture involving a third federal agency. Congress, to maintain the number of its powerful committee chair positions, retains the divide between these agencies despite the health risks it poses to the public and the difficulties for the agencies attempting to solve a national health crisis.

 

The salmonella outbreak in 2010 in 17 states caused nausea, vomiting, and fever, and death in people with weakened immune systems. In this book, I emphasize the need for government agencies to collaborate and consolidate across their boundaries to address today’s problems. While the government remains fragmented, the salmonella case reveals that the egg industry has consolidated on a massive scale.

The Wright County Egg company with its five “farms” in Iowa produces hundreds of millions of eggs, which the company redistributes to 18 distributers in the nation under such heart-warming names as Farm Fresh, James Farms, Pacific Coast, Lucerne, Sunshine, Hillandale, and Dutch Farms. Therefore, if you think your fresh eggs are coming to you from one of these firms with a farm fresh name. Think again, they all come from the Wright County Farm in Iowa, a massive example of consolidation, and too big to fail among many examples in the major industries in the U.S.

·        Powerful special interests, including thousands of non-governmental organizations and the media, work every day to influence the affairs of government.

·        Interest groups employ large sums of money to influence the direction of government, often to keep things as they are.

·        Successive presidents of both parties are disenfranchising the career workforce and their knowledge of the big picture and collaborative possibilities.

Fernando, with this brief history, lets move on to the specific insights that will help you once you are on the job.