Getting in Gear

of the agency. A typical result is the announcement made by Gov. Edgar's first Children and Family Services director, who — she said — had inverted the agency's organization chart, putting the families and children at the top with administrators at the bottom. This is the sort of "reform" that leaves administrators rolling their eyes. As long as it is left at the level of public relations, such stunts do no real harm to the agency's work. Too often, however, such early initiatives will be expensive, needlessly disruptive or insufficiently thought out. And a really serious reformer can come up with ideas that are all these things at once.

Of course, the resistance of some career employees to a new administration is not always principled. Bureaucrats cover their rear ends when asked to take controversial action, just as governors do. But what a governor's staff sees as obstructionism is to veteran state administrators a skepticism born of experience. The careerist knows he has to be cautious when somebody new comes in and says, "What you're doing isn't important. Start doing this now." That guy may be gone in a few months, and the careerist will still be there.

That career administrators don't always see eye to eye with even well-meaning new directors should not surprise. A large agency in particular is a settled community, with its own history, its own traditions, its own mores. While each gubernatorial administration develops its own decision-making culture, that influence lasts only until that administration is replaced. The permanent culture of an agency is shaped not by governors and their appointees but by its resident middle managers, unions, interest groups, and — these days — professional accrediting organizations and watchdog groups.

In short, the names on the letterhead change after a transition but not much else, at least at first. A new administration begins its first term working from spending blueprints essentially drawn up by its predecessor. As the larger departments have staffs of several thousand, even a conscientious director can take months to meet, much less get to know, all the people in the department who affect the way things are run. Meanwhile she must rely on senior department staff to instruct her, people who tend to be Politburo types more likely to explain what can't be done than what might be done. Overwhelmed by meetings and budget deadlines, they don't pay much attention to the details of the day-to-day operations. They don't have time to be creative, look at fresh approaches or redefine an issue.

Typically, newly appointed administrators are suspicious of everything and everybody. In spite of the lip service given to the new boss' right to reshape program priorities within an agency, many agency staffs — including soon-to-be-replaced directors — try to make that as hard as possible. Projects to which the present regime is committed, and which may be chopped by their successors, are put on a fast track in the hope that too much will have been invested for the new administration to abandon them. This sort of preemptive decision-making is usually rooted in the belief — not unfounded — that the experienced insiders know more about what needs to be done in their field than the neophytes waiting in the lobby.

A new director may think of himself as the CEO of a large organization, in short, but in most cases he is more like a colonial administrator whom the natives are obliged to obey but not respect. Changing one part of this community is hard to do;changing it fast, especially by diktat, is impossible, and is as likely to stimulate insurrection as innovation.

A recent report on presidential transitions by the federal General Accounting Office fretted about what it called the "generally poor relationship between political appointees and career leaders and managers." It's hard to generalize about the state of relations between those two camps in Illinois agencies. Careerists accept that a new governor's policy choices are often politically driven. What rankles many a nonpartisan civil servant is the many other ways that politics complicates their work. Where relations are bad, political interference in day-to-day agency operations is often the cause.

In the old days, virtually the whole state establishment owed its employment to political appointment. New officers could fire as well as hire without showing cause. When Adlai Stevenson took office in 1948, for example, he had it in his power to put new people not only at the top desks of the code departments and assorted commissions, but to dismiss and replace some 30,000 regular employees. The first task facing any new agency head was to fire the other guy's guys. The aim was less to make the agencies work for you than to keep them from working against you.

A new administration, especially one that brought a new party as well as a new governor to power, thus hit Springfield like the Visigoths looting Rome. Whole staffs at some agencies were driven into exile. Bureaucracies may not have been delicate organisms, and not all the people let go in these quadrennial purges were paragons as public servants, but such wholesale changes in personnel would unsettle any organization.

In the past 50 years or so, a tougher state personnel code, antipatronage lawsuits and creeping professionalization have dramatically reduced the ability of a new governor to replace state employees. For example, as the Edgar Administration first took office, not quite 3,500 state jobs were designated as political appointments under terms of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the Rutan antipatronage case. That 1990 decision outlawed hiring or promoting rank-and-file government workers because of their political affiliations. (An earlier court decision banned firing rank-and-file workers for political reasons.) Even counting the 140 or so Cabinet

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members and department heads and their assistants that he is obliged to appoint by statute, a new governor can use political consideration in less than 5 percent of the nearly 67,000 state executive agency jobs he can appoint. The same trend affects the operations of other elected officers. The secretary of state's office, once one of the lushest trees in the patronage orchard, officially has only 121 patronage positions out of a staff of some 3,400 — not even 4 percent.

Thus, though state government has grown enormously in 50 years, any one governor is limited in the damage — or improvement — he can wreak on the state bureaucracy. A governor today must name directors for 30 code departments or equivalents compared to 13 in Stevenson's day, and is responsible eventually for appointments to nearly 300 committees, commissions, boards, councils and authorities — nearly three times the number in 1948. However, the proportion of all these posts that are or can be changed by a new administration today is much smaller than it was then. Agency directors report that early retirement is much more harmful to smooth operations than a change of administration.

This is good news to antipatronage reformers — who do not include all "good government" types — who see the job shuffle that attends a transition as at best inefficient and at worst a misappropriation of public resources. Indeed, talented and experienced upper-level managers are let go by the dozens, usually to be replaced by people who are exactly like them in every way, save experience. The view that prevails at the moment in the courts, however, holds that patronage hiring and firing of senior administrators is essential to what Justice Lewis F. Powell, in a dissent in a key 1976 U.S. Supreme Court case involving patronage in the Cook County sheriff's office, called the "practical functioning of our democratic system." If the public is going to hold a governor and other elected officials responsible for what their agencies do, then they must have a free hand to ensure that agencies do their bidding.

Jim Edgar, who made headlines in 1996 with his plea in favor of patronage, was not the first governor to learn that the assumption of the courts — that a government's interest in securing effective employees can be adequately served by choosing or dismissing high-level employees on the basis of their political views— is unfounded. A

The British have a move civil system Fewer toes might be stepped on if the boundaries between appointees and careerists were more clearly drawn. Resentments naturally build when each faction is forever intruding on what the other sees as its turf. In Great Britain's national government, each Cabinet department is headed by a permanent secretary who works under a minister appointed by successive governments in power. The permanent Cabinet secretary is the administrative director of the department, in effect, while the appointed Cabinet minister functions as its political and policy director. The lines are never so clear-cut in practice, but in theory the permanent secretary system accepts that politics and the bureaucracy are separate realms. The permanent secretary acts as an emissary of the bureaucracy to power, and the minister serves as the government's ambassador to the often very foreign-feeling domain of the bureaucrat. The Cabinet secretary system was set up in Britain because parliamentary governments — unlike Illinois'— are liable to change at any moment, creating a need for institutional stability to balance political instability. In Illinois, after a brief break-in period whose effects on the agency are akin to suffering a single cold in the course of a long winter, the alert director becomes her own permanent secretary. The problem is that crucial experience is lost to the next director when the incumbent flees to a safer job, or moves on to the sunnier pastures of the private sector. Still, it is not hard to imagine that transitions would be easier if every agency had a permanent secretary to guide a new administration into place — an institutional mentor, in effect. The official relation between appointees and careerists is, after all, the same in Illinois. What is lacking is a formal system of prerogatives and protocols to manage it. Such a system was astutely observed in the BBC TV comedy series, "Yes, Minister"— videotapes of which ought to be required viewing by Springfield's newest batch of directors-designate, who might find that they could use a few laughs. James Krohe Jr.

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director cannot drive even a small agency all by himself. State offices are crammed with patronage hires who have a hundred ways to frustrate a program that falls short of dismissable nonperformance.

An agency director is widely assumed to be the bureaucrat's bureaucrat, but management skill is not what the job usually requires, or rather is not all that the job requires. The director's job is one of the most complex in state government. He is at once manager, politician and policy innovator. He is the governor's man in the agency and the agency's man in the Statehouse — and his own man in neither place. National surveys of senior state administrators have found that they spend only about a third of their time on actual management; the rest of their week is spent on the stump or playing policy adviser to superiors, among other chores. Relatively few new directors are management specialists when they take over — a notable difference from the way things are done in, say, big business. Most new directors come from policy or political backgrounds. A few — Edgar transportation Director Kirk Brown, several past Public Health directors, among others — are professionals turned managers; others accept the job to get their ticket punched before seeking private-sector careers. This is not to say that good management does not matter to an agency. The rank and file crave a new director who sees to it that the copying machines work and the print shop runs smoothly. A new governor expects an agency to be run well enough not to embarrass the administration with expensive inefficiencies or scandals, a la the MSI contract case. And wonks know that a poor policy well-administered is, unfortunately, more effective than a good policy poorly administered.

The question is, does an agency need to depend on its director to provide good management? Most already have managers, and if they do poorly it usually is because they lack leadership. (The same is true of governors and states.) Sure, a director needs to know the nuts and bolts of agency operations well enough to sound plausible when she explains to interest groups why the agency has done less than they expected, or to the press how her team is doing more than anyone previously thought possible. But in general, what is true of car salesmen is true of agency directors:
You don't need to know how to fix one to sell one.

Might transitions be improved? The GAO lamely recommended something that sounds a lot like family therapy. ("Career and political executives should attend orientation and other programs together whenever possible to open dialogue between these two groups.") A protocol for information requests by transition teams would seem more useful. More time might help, but as the new Ryan Administration showed, transition deliberations tend to expand to fill the time (and attention span) available to them. A formal phase-in period, during which members of the old regime linger a while to mentor the newcomers, is another plausible reform.

Other factors shape the work of state agencies more than do the people a new governor puts in the directors' chairs, or the policies that she puts in their heads. Shifts in federal priorities and funding and court decisions are two of them. Another is experience. Proposals for real innovations from state government's chief executives, such as Edgar's proposed tax swap for schools, tend not to come at the beginning of an administration, because it takes a year or two at least to learn what needs to be done.

The forces weighed against fundamental change are formidable, from the size and complexity of the state establishment to the bureaucratic culture. Politics hampers change too;any candidate advocating change radical enough to unsettle the establishment is unlikely to get elected in the first place. So things change with each new administration but seldom improve. This agency is a little better run, that one a little worse, this program gets a little more attention, that one doesn't, but the checks still go out, the forms still get processed — and the problems never quite get solved. New people doing the same old things is no transition at all.

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