The Front Door’s Locked. Use the Back Door.
Topic: Public servants & Politics, Council on Environmental Quality, Dept. of Transportation, Cabinet Level Agencies, Federal Agencies, The Forum, Environmental Protection Agency25. September 2007 |
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When I lived in Moscow in the late 1980s, the foundation where I worked as a program officer had an office with Swedish furniture and a small kitchen with a buffet window that slid up and down like an awning. For Moscow in those grey days, this place was positively chic.
The Swedish furniture we got through our Swedish executive director, and the kitchen — well, everybody likes a kitchen. One day the lock on the door to the kitchen broke. I came in on a Saturday and one of my coworkers and I wanted to fix some tea. To get in, he pushed the sliding awning up and climbed over. It wasn’t graceful. I asked him why he didn’t use the door and he said, with relaxed confidence, "It’s broken." In other words, why fix the door if you can climb in another way?
The Bush Administration displays a similarly willful ignorance when it comes to using the tools they have available to them. It’s as if the White House has forgotten that the executive branch is theirs — albeit temporarily — and has been for the last seven years. Juliet Eilperin reports in the Washington Post about the most recent example, the administration’s effort to stop California and other states from enacting more stringent emissions standards for cars and trucks (see Eilperins’s article here). The effort apparently has focused on members of Congress and state governors via the Department of Transportation. Yes, that’s right — the DOT, not the EPA. A top aide to secretary of transportation Mary Peters notes that DOT staff members should reach out to "governors and others" because "[the secretary] has heard that . . . objections could have an important effect on the way Congress looks at the issue."
If you really want to argue for your convictions, you come in through the front door — in this case, the agency responsible for the policy at hand. If you don’t have the guts to argue your case in public, better use the back door. And hinting that transportation funds allocated by the Department of Transportation could get tied up is a great way to make your argument without confronting the issue head on. When you’re chatting casually with your neighbor at the back door, you don’t want to overdo it.
Ned Hodgman
understandinggov.org
Interesting piece. Working neither in the public sector nor being a Washingtonian, I wasn’t aware that our government engaged in such sophisticated private-sector like tactics. That should teach me to underestimate the abilities of those in power.
comment at 26. September 2007
It’s a shame (and I mean shame) that they’re using these abilities to discourage a U.S. state from exercising its right under the law to apply for a waiver from a federal regulation. It’s a shame that they’re using their abilities to influence a “brother” agency on an issue that’s outside their own regulatory purview. And it’s a shame that the folks at DOT are spending taxpayer money on a question of air quality when they should be taking care of the bridges, roads, train tracks, and airports. Or — maybe — are all those things pretty much taken care of?
comment at 26. September 2007