first president with MBA has proved inept as the federal government's CEO

dajoki

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Thu May-11-06 09:58 PM
Original message

first president with MBA has proved inept as the federal government's CEO

Edited on Thu May-11-06 10:01 PM by dajoki

Slate
http://www.slate.com//id/2141588/

The Hackocracy
Why our MBA president can't manage the government.

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, May 10, 2006, at 3:34 PM ET

Recent personnel changes under Joshua Bolten, the new White House chief of staff, have already begun to follow a pattern. An anonymous official speaking for the president indicates that the time has come for a senior head to roll—be it that of Scott McClellan (ushered out last month as White House press secretary), John Snow (still clinging to his job at the Treasury Department), or—in the drama that has been played out over the last several days—Porter Goss at the CIA. The unnamed senior administration official avers that we need someone competent and qualified in this important position, as if this novel idea had just occurred to the president and his advisers.

Perhaps Bush is to be commended, even at this late stage, for attempting to place more capable people in positions of authority in his administration. But for a presidency that has already entered its graveyard spiral, this human-resources initiative comes too late. Bolten's belated focus on better leadership merely points up what a travesty Bush's vaunted management style has been. Entirely aside from debates over his policy and spending choices, the first president with an MBA has proved inept as the federal government's CEO.

In Bush's sixth year, the executive branch resembles a smoldering landscape after battle. The staffs of various agencies and departments have been routed by a combination of political interference, neglect, and failed leadership. The CIA is a prime example of how Bush has botched it. Despite its failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency was populated with a corps of able spies and analysts, some of whom actually got the story about the absence of both Saddam's WMD and links to al-Qaida correct before the Iraq invasion. After silencing and ignoring these professionals, Bush sent a loyalist from Congress to purge the survivors. Porter Goss brought his own flunkies from Capitol Hill to help him squelch leaks and improve the agency's PR. In just a year and a half, the former congressman nearly completed the work of demoralizing the agency and driving out a generation of senior talent. Now the Bushies want to repair the damage without owning up to their role in causing it.

This is by no means an isolated failure. New agencies that Bush has launched, from the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to the Department of Homeland Security, have failed to find their footing, to put it charitably, primarily because Bush has not structured them properly, found competent leadership, or otherwise followed through on his plans. (In a 2005 survey, employees ranked the newly formed DHS second-to-last among the large federal agencies as a place to work.) While there is little in the way of longitudinal data that can prove a decline under Bush, anecdotal evidence in the Washington Post every day points to declining morale and an exodus of top people from various departments. At some agencies, performance has deteriorated to an extent that it will take decades to restore their capability.