Our Republic is Broken when it Takes a Czar to Make Policy Work
President Bush has not yet officially announced his selection of Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, currently head of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Iraq and Afghanistan “War Czar.” Instead, White House officials have leaked the information as Bush’s political team, we presume, scrambles to line up Senate endorsement for the appointment.
But whether Lute sails through Senate and—much more important—media scrutiny in the coming weeks is far less important than what he can actually do with the newly created office of Special Assistant to the President and deputy National Security Advisor. As David Isenberg has noted, we already have a war czar: Steve Hadley, the National Security Advisor. If Hadley’s job description does not include managing the single biggest foreign and security policy challenge the US faces, then he’s got the wrong title.
In all likelihood, Bush will not expand on what his Press Secretary, Tony Snow, has already offered as Lute’s job description:
[N]ow it is [Lute’s] job to work in a coordinating role to try to look at everything that’s going on under the auspices of the executive branch. Now, you mentioned State and Defense, when in fact, the portfolio is a lot broader. It includes Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, and others. You have people from many, many departments and agencies within the federal government that work on different aspects of this…
How many times have people been in the field where somebody says, here is a problem we have, I write notes and it never gets up to the top? Well, part of his job is to cut through that, and to make sure that people in the field are getting the kind of support and resources they need to get the job done.
So we have a coordination problem in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s refreshing to hear the White House admit that. But isn’t coordinating policy the National Security Advisor’s job? His role has traditionally been to do precisely what the White House seems to envision for Lute—to formulate and coordinate policy among the various federal agencies involved in the war effort, and to serve as a direct line between the President and key decision-makers on the ground.
Ah, but why does the chief coordinator for Iraq and Afghanistan have to be the National Security Advisor? Shouldn’t the President be able to delegate responsibility to whomever he chooses? Of course, but that person has to have the stature and the resources to get the job done. If Condoleezza Rice and Steve Hadley haven’t been able to set federal agencies on the right track in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is simply no reason to think a distinguished but almost entirely unknown career military officer can have the necessary impact on the problem. If the problem has been too much bureaucracy, adding more in the form of a new White House office cannot help.
Now let me come back to the title of this piece: There’s a much bigger issue here than just which new bureaucratic post ought to be tasked with managing which others, and whether one particular fine public servant is the man to take the job. When agencies and departments within an administration cannot perform their most fundamental tasks without constant monitoring and prodding, the government is not simply in need of more or better coordination—it’s fundamentally broken.
Imagine a major corporation that was so deadlocked by internal turf wars and bureaucratic shortsightedness that it failed to turn a profit year after year, yet it did nothing to extricate itself from losing markets, and continued to hire new employees, borrow money, and reward its top executives with medals and hefty salaries. If such a company could even continue to exist, its bond rating would be junk, its stock would be in the toilet, and the best and brightest workers would avoid it like the plague. Does that sound at all like the federal government?
Sure, past presidents have appointed special assistants, advisors, commissioners and committees in droves to study, formulate or coordinate policy matters of all kinds. But no one has ever expected those specialists to take the wheel when the very ship of state was so dreadfully off course. After all, many special presidential appointees have been outside critics honored with high office to shut them up as much as to solicit their help or input. When I consider that the new “war czar” is tasked to speak for a President with neither plan nor vision for victory, to officials exhausted by repeated failure, I almost feel sorry for General Lute. Does he realize he’s being asked to repair a broken government?
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