March 03, 2007

Management

If you're like me, watching the President tour tornado-ravaged areas and promise "I'll do my very best to comfort them," that doesn't fill you with certainty that the disaster relief will be well-managed. Instead, it reminds me again how the administration took one of the most effective and well-managed government agencies, FEMA, and drove it into the ground, wasting taxpayer dollars and leaving the citizens of the Gulf Coast out in the cold.

Tim F. of Balloon-Juice is similarly reminded by the Walter Reed scandal, another institution that like FEMA was turned into a model of good management under the Clinton administration, only to be neglected and dismantled in the last few years. That the country would come to need both of these, and that they would fail so spectacularly, is evidence for solid management practices. Tim F. shows that their failures are not evidence against having them, but rather evidence for good governance.

The lesson here is fairly simple. People who use our present circumstances to argue that government can’t manage its way out of a paper bag are either fooling you or fooling themselves. Of course government breaks down when it's run by people who don't care to do the job right. Contrary to the bill of goods that ideological partisans want to sell you, that is far from an argument that government shouldn't take the lead in fixing problems. Rather it is a rock-solid case for putting people in charge who care about doing the job right and have a decent sense of how to go about it.

It's worth remembering that these are failures of bad governance, as those who have been trying to "starve the beast" will now come out to argue that these failures show a problem with "big government" in general.

Posted by binky at March 3, 2007 10:50 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics


Comments

Not just Walter Reed.

Posted by: binky at March 5, 2007 10:01 AM | PERMALINK
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