Who Will Rid Me of This Meddlesome Priest?

As I watch the gradual opening of the box of writhing vermin that is the US Attorney scandal (ably covered by the usual suspects), I want to write a little bit about one aspect that I think isn't really getting much coverage:  the lack of accountability created by "decision by consensus".  Freshman Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gets at this briefly in his National Law Journal Op-Ed this past weekend.  For more detail, one turns to a great (and underblogged) Legal Times interview in the middle of last month, in which  Daniel J. Metcalfe, former director of the Office of Information and Privacy at the DOJ, spoke about this at some length:

[T]he process of agency functioning, however, became dramatically different almost immediately after Gonzales arrived. No longer was emphasis placed on accomplishing something with the highest-quality product in a timely fashion; rather, it became a matter of making sure that a "consensus" was achieved, regardless of how long that might take and with little or no concern that quality would suffer in such a "lowest common denominator" environment. And heaven help anyone, career or noncareer employee, if that "consensus" did not include whatever someone in the White House might think about something, be it large, small or medium-sized.

In short, the culture markedly shifted to one in which avoiding any possibility of disagreement anywhere was the overriding concern, as if "consensus" were an end unto itself. Undergirding this, what's more, was the sad fact that so many political appointees in 2005 and 2006 were so obviously thinking not much further than their next (i.e., higher-level) position, in some place where they could "max out" by the end of Bush's second term.

[....]

Q: Are there any possible benefits to this "decision-making by consensus" approach?

A: Yes, but they accrue only to the participants in the process. Indeed, by operating in this way, they manage to avoid any singular responsibility for the result, or any part of it, which is another way of saying that they see themselves as running no risk of blame if anyone beyond the group has any problem with what they've done at any point.

After all, it was "the group" that did it (whatever that might be), and they achieved presumptively benign "consensus" (at all costs) before moving forward. You can imagine how important this is to someone whose primary interest in most any government action is to make sure that it doesn't somehow get in the way of securing that next (but not necessarily last) position before the end of a presidential administration. And remember that there's little downside to operating in this way if your basic view of government (in line with your inexperience) holds little respect for it in the first place. In other words, if it doesn't really matter so much to you how well or efficiently a government activity is handled, just so long as it eventually is handled, then the thinking is: Why not handle it in the way that most effectively minimizes personal risk? What this breeds, of course, is an utter lack of individual responsibility -- the very antithesis of good government.

Q: Do you see the department's decision-making weaknesses that you've just sketched out here as connected to its current problems with what it did on the U.S. Attorneys?

A: Certainly. You can clearly hear distinct echoes of this in the recent public statements of Kyle Sampson before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He described what to many listeners was an absolutely astonishing process by which he and a small group of others within the Justice Department handled the matter of U.S. Attorney replacement. By all accounts, no one person was in charge (Kyle described himself as merely the "aggregator"), it operated strictly by "consensus" (a word that he wielded as if it were an indisputably favorable one), and the end result was something that even he could not fully explain.

Yet it became the "groupthink" recommendation to the AG, an unprecedented "hit list" to be endorsed uncritically, as if it were something upon which Gonzales could rely without thinking. (And with nary a paper trail, by the way, which, I can tell you is no small consideration.) One might ask: Exactly whose dispositive decision was it to include the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico (let alone the threshold question of why) on that final list? Was there really a good case for including U.S. Attorney John McKay of the Western District of Washington, whom I personally knew to have made tremendous contributions in the area of law enforcement information-sharing programs?

Conversely, could it really be so that, as Kyle testified, one U.S. Attorney (I won't repeat from where) actually was "saved" from being on the list merely because Monica Goodling happened to know of, and think well of, her work in a particular area? [Editor's Note: According to Sampson's testimony, that U.S. Attorney was Anna Mills Wagoner of the Middle District of North Carolina.]

Yes, this decision-making "process," if it even deserves to be called that, was no different than what I saw played out time and again, albeit on a different scale, during my last two years at Justice. And as I see it, from the vantage point of someone who has considerable experience in government decision-making in general and at the Justice Department in particular, the greatest and most damning dereliction is on the part of the person who knowingly permits such a "process" to exist on a matter of such public importance within the realm of his ultimate responsibility. Sure, it might induce that official to think (and even defensively say), "I was no more involved than that." But that never used to be good enough (or even minimally defensible) at the Justice Department prior to 2005. And that, as much as anything, should be impossible to defend now.

The Bush Administration handpicked know-nothing Party apparatchiks to fill every possible political appointment they could find, and turned them loose on the executive branch with "guidance" from Karl Rove.  I expect that guidance generally took the form of "expressions of concern" regarding certain "districts" or "issues".  Policy and personnel decisions were made in the fuzzy apparatchik cloud and then the shaft bolt lashed out of the cloud and struck someone in the civil service.  No chain of command, no accountability, no procedure.  Everyone just sort of knew what had to be done -- they were all picked because they knew in advance what "had to be done" to serve the Party.

It's impossible to tell for whom this was intentional (KarlRove! Cough!) and for whom it was merely a convenient way to increase authority without responsibilty (Cough! Goodling! Cough!).  But it's certain that the party of bidness, the CEO preznit, run the gummint in ways that would be unacceptable in any but a doomed company.  It's also ironic that the Republicans, who pimp themselves as the party of iron-willed individualism, set up a completely opaque bureaucracy that eliminated individual responsibility.