I have frequently expressed concern that the White House has been as deficient as the media in its lack of curiosity about what’s going in the bureaucracies that it oversees. Further confirmation of my fear comes from a recent headline in the Washington Post: ...

Reprinted by permission from The Washington Monthly: Even liberals are now waking up to the danger of the United States becoming another Greece—a country where the public sector is consuming far too much of the nation’s economy. What worries me is that the awakening will encourage blind anti-governmentism that cuts all programs without regard to their merit. Some can be cut, but many functions of government are crucial, demanding improvement, not elimination.

Reprinted with permission from The Washington Monthly: “We’d be marked men” if we complained about safety problems, a miner at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine recently told a congressional committee. He describes a fear that haunts many miners: blowing the whistle could cost ...

(reprinted with permission of The Washington Monthly) A few issues ago I noted the tendency of White Houses to devote little or no attention to the vast bureaucracy underneath, crossing their fingers and hoping any disaster down below can be avoided on their watch. The fiasco with the Mineral Management Services is the latest example of the danger of inattention at the top.

Suspicions that most of us have had about the CIA under George W. Bush are confirmed by a recent study by the Brookings Institution.  It finds that analysts at the CIA were rewarded for having their reports included in the President's Daily Brief and that their findings were more likely ...

Understanding Government's founder and president, Charles Peters, one of the (and perhaps the) world's first blogger, is still going strong with his "Tilting at Windmills" column in The Washington Monthly. Charlie is direct. ...

Reprinted from the March/April issue of The Washington Monthly:

By Charles Peters

Obama’s stimulus promises to create or save three to four million jobs in the next two years. In the fall of 1933, a New Deal program created four million jobs in two months.

Timothy Noah and I described the miracle of the Civil Works Administration in a recent article in Slate. The CWA was the brainchild of Harry Hopkins, who received FDR’s blessing for the idea in mid-November. By mid-December, he had employed two million people, and by mid-January four million.

Hopkins had two secrets that seem not to be understood by the Obama team.

Not enough people know that Charles Peters, founder and president of Understanding Government, has been blogging for . . . oh, thirty years or so.   His monthly "Tilting at Windmills" column in The Washington Monthly has been read by thousands and shaped the outlook of hundreds of journalists.  In ...

As I've written recently in The Washington Monthly, the president needs to reach down the chain of command and outside it to learn what is really going on beneath him.  Toward that end, I have encountered no better advice than that given to Barack Obama by Senator Jack Reed during Obama's visit to Iraq in July.  According to the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib, Reed told Obama that "a good way to get unfiltered information about what is happening on the ground is to talk to junior officers and journalists on the scene."

Lieutenants and captains who are actually doing the fighting have firsthand knowledge of what is working and what is not.  There are analogous figures in every bureaucracy, close enough to the action but with enough command responsibility to give them an ability to generalize.  They're usually more candid about what doesn't work -- after all, they just saw one of their men die from lack of body armor -- than generals,

Barack Obama has no experience in the executive branch of government. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our most successful modern president, had worked for eight years as assistant secretary of the Navy—the place where policymakers, career military, and civilian bureaucrats intersect. So he learned how the system works, or ...