From frequent commenter Jonathon:
You can't just slash the number of enforcers/ regulators without slashing the number of regulations - if you do, the delays to determine compliance will grow.
It is not my intention to "dog" Jonathon. His comments have always been thoughtful and on-topic. I chose his comment because it is a good point-of-departure for this post.
All bureaucracies expand until they exceed the resources allocated to them (a corollary of Pournelle's Law)
Back-in-the-day I was involved in lean-manufacturing in a small metal-stamping plant. One of the metrics was the dollar-value of the "maintenance materials" stored under the plant roof divided by the annual production. The auditors had a very simple formula for calculating the dollar-value of the "maintenance materials".
They calculated the square-footage of the maintenance parts cribs and multiplied by $250 per square-foot. There was no way to game the metric. The only way to get ahead was to sell more product (difficult) or to shrink the square-footage of the parts cribs (including that room in the basement).
I asked the auditors to defend their stupid-simple method...and to my surprise they were overjoyed to have a teachable-moment.
"Every time there is a break-down and the maintenance supervisor cannot find a part in five minutes, they order new parts from the warehouse. Not just one new part but one-to-use and two to put into storage for "next time". Except the parts crib is so crammed with junk that there is no place to put the two extra parts and so they are stuffed anyplace they can find room. That makes them unfindable the NEXT time that part breaks."
"The stuffed-to-the-gills parts cribs becomes a self-perpetuating disaster. The only way to unwind it is to shrink the cribs and to shrink the size of the shelves so parts so there is room for one, and only one, critical, high-frequency part."
The "cheat" was to take the cheapest, high frequency parts and to zip-tie them to the steel-mesh of the hard-guards of the robotic cells. If you lost an air-cooled welding jumper or "kickless-cable" you had one hanging right there and it didn't get counted against you as inventory.
Some skilled tradesmen had tool boxes filled with "parts". That was a serious no-no. Unlike the replacement parts that were in plain sight (if you were inside the robotic cell), the parts that were in a tool box were not available to other shifts and it counted on the skilled tradesman remembering that he had that exact part during the heat-of-battle.
To everybody's surprise, the plant ran better on a day-to-day basis when the cribs were shrunk to the point where the parts that were required to repair break-downs were exactly where the parts data-base said they would be (Stack, bay, level).
Back to the Federal Workforce
It is my perception that a log of all Federal laws and the regulations documented by the Executive Branch would run to hundreds-of-thousands of pages of single-spaced, 10pt font.
Only a very, very small percentage of those "laws" get "administered and enforced" on a regular basis. Saying that delays will occur because there will be longer waits to ensure compliance...what about the 99.8% of the rules that are assumed to be in compliance or assumed to not be critical?
What will happen is that the regulators will auto-calibrate and will focus on the (100%-99.9%) that are most critical and delays will remain almost unchanged (after the malcontents get smacked upside the head) for the most critical regulations...but the less critical regulations will get the three monkeys and things will move faster.
My most recent interactions with public-sector employees (state level) have been that they petrified when they have to make a decision because they know that they will be second-guessed and criticized. What that tells me is that all of the other employees who are second-guessing and talking-shit don't have enough of their own work to do...not if they have time to rehash everybody elses' work stream.
Don't forget that while there are thousands of regulations, there are also thousands of different situations where they apply, so in any given situation there are fewer applicable regulations than you may expect.
ReplyDeleteBut for the situation where regulations are currently unenforced, it only takes a complaint, a change in management, or a change in mood to start enforcing them. To me, this encourages arbitraryness and opens the door to corruption, especially with fewer employees - if one employee is determining approval or compliance with a big project, who is to know whether he is being reasonable or not? (this situation already happens, and will happen more as employee numbers drop).
This is why I don't like planning, permitting, and zoning regulations, especially in rural areas. First because they make little difference but second, and just as much, because they can't be enforced widely so they enforced on an arbitrary and uneven basis.
But I wasn't talking about number of regulations - I had in mind the primary agency mission and having enough staff to take care of customers in a reasonable time frame while insuring basic compliance. In the environmental work I do, we already don't have enough staff to do our core job of getting new projects through while also making sure that existing projects are following the basics. In the last 2 years I could point to multiple situations that arose locally that I am surprised didn't make national news; if we had more people we could have addressed the situation before it got to that level. We also need the right people, so the ability to reward good work and punish bad work needs to be enhanced. Currently, federal supervisors are almost universally unwilling to punish those who do poor work or who don't work at all for their paycheck.
Have you seen the news about the 'Fork in the Road" email? Look it up, it'll be interesting to see what happens...
Jonathan
I was at a talk in DC given by J.D. Hayworth when he was a congressman. According to him, every one page of legislation generates ten pages of regulation. At no time does congress check to see the regulations interpret what was the intent of the law. When he proposed a law that made a mandatory review after one year of passing , he could find no co-sponsors.
ReplyDeleteThe shear volume of paperwork need to comply with a contract can be staggering. We received a bid proposal that went 265 pages for something that could have been covered in less than a dozen and had been on several occasions. I'll assume someone has to check compliance. If not what was the point?
Lastly .gov budgets and programs work against efficiency. If you come in under budget or on time you are penalized. Contractors want things stretched out to milk as much money as possible. Government program managers want the funding to increase every year guaranteeing employment and increased staffing.
It will drive you to drink and I am happy to be retired.
Fixing those issues will take legislation, unfortunately I'd be surprised to see it happen.
DeleteJonathan
Old saying goes "Those who can't do, teach" should be followed by "The leftovers regulate". I was lead on a mine permitting action that involved submitting drawings showing various stages of the work. The department examining the drawings would misread such things such as scale, angles and notation. Whether by ignorance or obfuscation the project was delayed by more than a year. When people know they won't be terminated short of misgendering, they have no incentive to produce anything other than cashing their paycheck.
ReplyDelete30 years ago I worked at a manufacturing plant that had a huge inventory of parts for maintenance. It was what could be called "an organized mess". Only a couple of people could navigate it, and I suspect they liked the power this gave them.
ReplyDeleteWord came down from corporate that every single item, down to gaskets, screws and light bulbs had to be given a unique inventory number and assigned shelf/drawer place. This took over a year to accomplish and probably pushed the head of maintenance to consider suicide. But the bean counters got what they were truly after: to be able to look at a screen and see what was needed and what wasn't.
Then the Big Edict came: "Any parts inventory that hasn't been used in six months, and costs less than $5,000, is to be discarded". Holy Fucking Shit! Everyone, from the engineers to the janitors, thought this was insane.
Long story short: the six months edict got changed to 24 months, but the rest got carried out. The plant was the better for it. Fucking bean counters were right.
15 years ago the Wall Street Journal had an article examining census data from a new perspective
ReplyDeleteOne of many census programs asked tens of thousands of Americans to document what they did at work today. The genus of the WSJ article was the way the looked at the data. They separated private sector from State, County and Municipal employees. The government folks worked 4 weeks a year less. A little late today, a little long on lunch, a nice chat at the water cooler and some online shopping, it all adds up.
Don't worry, the federal employees were different . . . they worked 5 weeks less!