A think tank finally measures government failure in a way that might settle some arguments we’ve been having on the subject:
Light finds the following patterns and characteristics in the dataset of significant government failures:
Most of the failures involved errors of omission, not commission.
Some failures were obviously more visible than others.
Vision with execution is the clear driver of success, just as its absence is an equation for failure.
Some of the stories contained elements of both success and failure.
5. The number of government failures has increased over time 6. There are differences between the five presidents in office during the failures. Government had four failures during Reagan’s final two-and-a-half years (1.6 per year), five during George H. W. Bush’s four years (1.2 per year), 14 during Clinton’s eight years (1.8 per year), 25 during George W. Bush’s eight years (3.1 per year), and 16 during Obama’s first five-and-a-half years (2.9 per year).
The differences are just large enough to suggest that government may be somewhat more likely to fail during the last few years of a two-term presidency, perhaps because presidents start to lose focus, appointees begin to turn over, the other party becomes more assertive, and the media becomes more aggressive.
Government had just 10 failures during the Bush administration’s first term (2.5 per year), but 15 failures during the administration’s second (3.8 per year). In turn, government had just eight failures during the Obama administration’s first term (2.0 per year), but matched its entire first-term total in just eighteen months of the second (5.3 per year).
These failures involved both oversight and operations.
10. More of the post-2001 government failures occurred during steady demand (27) than during surging demand (14), perhaps confirming the unconventional notion that surges sharpen organizational acuity.
So there’s some numbers on government failures. But not all failures are equal. Now can we seem some numbers on the damage caused by these failures, in both dollars and lives lost?
If you’re trying to refer to the Iraq war, I don’t think that was part of the methodology. This study was measuring how frequently government agencies fail to do their jobs in a way big enough for the media to take notice and create a public scandal.
It doesn’t look like there was a partisan axe to grind. Bush is still ahead of Obama in the government failures department. But it does show that failures are increasing, probably due to the increased size of government, and that failures happen more often when the President becomes inattentive to his basic duties.
Which of course is confounded with the degree to which media jumps at a potential failure. It is not at all clear for example that Bengazi would have met the criteria of a failure under previous administrations. The paper may be useful in determining the types of failures that lead to a media scandal, but in calculating the frequency of failure the author implicitly makes the flawed assumption that the media climate has been constant over the last several decades.
I think his methodology is as sound as it can be because at some point government malpractice has to be a new story regardless of the climate. If you can point to the government being accused by the media of not working when you believe it was working just fine, or a story that was a case of pretty serious government failure(within the parameters of what was being looked for, failure of government’s basic tasks) that wasn’t reported, then it would call into question the methodology.
I just can’t think of anything. I didn’t check every government failure he cited, but they all looked legit to me and I didn’t see any that he missed. Plus I don’t think there’s any evidence that the media is more aggressive in seeking out government failure than it was in the past.
You didn’t see any he missed? How about May 12th in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia when al-Qaida terrorists stormed the diplomatic compound and killed 36 people including nine Americans? By the numbers more than twice as bad as Benghazi which did make the list.
Imagine how good Obama would be without the GOP making the government fail throughout his entire presidency! He truly is the FDR of our times and a historically great man
The GOP runs the executive branch? Who knew? There’s only one thing you can blame the GOP for: Obama’s lack of ability to pass legislation. As far as what happens in the executive branch, that is 100% under his purview.
Sorry, missed the year of the Saudi Arabian embassy attack, 2003. One of around a dozen embassy attacks that weren’t failures of government along with one that suddenly was. Fool me twelve times, shame on you, but that 13th really stings.
Was there a failure? 9/11 is counted as a failure because of the repeated warnings, as well as the failure of government to connect the dots and the failure of INS to notice that there were a bunch of illegals planning an attack. Benghazi probably is because there were demonstrable failures in seeing it coming and in responding to it. The other embassy attacks were sudden, unforseen events that were responded to to the best of the government’s ability.
But if you want to remove Benghazi, that’s fine. The one weakness in his methodology that i can agree on so far is that he shouldn’t have tried to analyze foreign events. Those aren’t bureaucratic failures.
I’m not following something with that article. It references Reagan, but doesn’t seem to say what his failures were. Is Iran Contra a failure? Was the shootdown of the Iraninan airliner in 1988 a failure?
The reason I ask is, that if someone points out that there are more failures today than there were 30 years ago, there is the possibility that someone is simply counting more recent things as failures that would not be considered a failure 30 years ago. Unfortunately, the article says that Benghazi is a failure, but is the Vincennes shoot-down also counted as a failure? If it isn’t, then the whole premise of the study is busted.
ETA: I shouldn’t say the whole premise of the paper is busted. The premise that failures are increasing is busted. The other points about looking at accountability and reasons for failures still seems valid.
One of the things that isn’t brought up is the timeline. Bernie Madoff was stealing back in the 1990’s, yet he was caught in 2008. When did the failure occur? Why was that a 2008 failure rather than a 1998?
I doubt that. I found the selected “failures” to appear to be cherry-picked events to support the author’s conclusions. The heavy emphasis on news reporting as a criterion means that those events that did not catch the eye of the media are relegated to a status of “less important,” without any other factor appearing to have weight. Similarly, several of the “failures” are dated to the time when the news media decided to make them and issue rather than to the dates when the actual failures began. (For example, there were multiple warnings regarding the failure of the VA hospital program going back at least to the time prior to the First Gulf War. The current brouhaha regarding the games played with schedules to reduce the recorded wait times was actually the (typically unintended) consequence of standards imposed on bureaucrats to clean up the previous problems. This is not to say that the Obama administration did not fail in cleaning up the mess, but the actual mess extends back through Bush, Clinton, Bush, and probably into Reagan’s era. (And I would not be surprised to find that it was going on before that.) The cabinet position of Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs was created in 1988, (implemented in early 1989), just because the VA was even then perceived to be failing its duties.
Similar criticisms of other “failures” (both those chosen and those ignored in the study) could certainly be made.
As a beginning effort to address the matter of government failure, the study might provide some benefit, but I would want to see a few counter studies produced before I decided that this study was much more than an example of navel gazing.
I doubt he would be “great”, but he could have certainly done much better without a morally treasonous* opposition willing to sacrifice the welfare of the nation to sabotage his every act.
*And yes, I know that they are not legally traitors - but that’s because the legal definition of treason in America is so narrow that someone could destroy the country without being guilty of it.
Hmm, I"m not seeing last year’s government shutdown on their list. Apparently the furlough of 800,000 people, 1,300,000 working without pay, and cessation of government services for 16 days doesn’t count as a failure.