Willful Ignorance
A short history of the US government knowing stuff.
The civilian mitigation teams – cut by 90% by Hegseth – work with military commanders on target planning, and making sure that targets are actually military sites. The teams help come up with “no strike” lists, including religious and cultural sites and schools.
U.S. officials called London insurers and brokers, trying to figure out how the market operates, industry insiders said.
Item (Headline and subhead, read the entire article, as well as the ones above):
How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War
In the lead-up to the U.S.-Israeli attack, President Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission to decapitate the Iranian regime.
And look: Those are only three examples that fell into my bluesky timeline while I was flying home Wednesday night. There are plenty more where they came from – and not just from the war against Iran.
As Elizabeth Saunders put it in a conversation with Greg Sargent I highly recommend: “It’s just the latest incredibly painful and costly and deadly reminder of what it means to purge government and decision-making of all the experts.”
Which is only what Saunders and many of us have been trying to explain since approximately January 20 last year. So instead of adding to that now (and really – read or listen to Saunders and Sargent), I figured I’d give some historical perspective.
In the first hundred years or so of the republic, the US government didn’t do much – and didn’t really know much, either. Of course, individuals within the government, presidents or members of Congress or cabinet secretaries, might have any type of expertise. But it was mostly personal, and most of them didn’t stick around all that long anyway.1
That starts changing, especially after the Civil War. Civil service reform doesn’t just replace or supplement political people with “neutral” ones; it sets up long-term career paths within a growing civil service, which starts growing more, especially during the Progressive era before and after the turn of the century.
That just increases and increases over New Deal and Great Society expansions. Not only do more and more highly educated experts find careers within executive branch departments and agencies, but regular, bureaucratic procedures mean that the agencies themselves store knowledge, rather than depending on specific individuals.
There’s also plenty of redundancy, sometimes because of agency rivalry – think Army and Navy and the other service branches all wanting to have their own expertise rather than relying on each other. But also because Congress developed the habit of creating new structures to solve new and newly acknowledged problems, rather than just telling older agencies to add them to their menu. Think of expertise about crop rotation and land use practices that might be found in the Agriculture Department…and, with different goals in mind, the Environmental Protection Agency.
One of the reasons that Congress did that was suspicion that old agencies, for all their neutral expertise, would be reluctant to adjust to new policy priorities. And quite rightly so: Bureaucracies have weaknesses, including that what they know may fail to adjust to new circumstances. At any rate, it means that as the government grew to know an incredible array of things, one of the challenges became finding ways to squeeze that knowledge from those who had it to those who needed it.
That gets us to the reactions from elected officials.
Presidents were slow to adapt. When Franklin Roosevelt took office, presidents still had only a handful of assistants. That made coordination an impossible job, and also made them dependent on the information that the bureaucracy volunteered. Which might or might not be everything that the agencies actually knew.
So beginning really with Harry Truman, an entire new branch of government in the Executive Office of the President – a Presidential Branch – evolved, complete with specialized agencies (such as the Council of Economic Advisors and the National Security Council) to give presidents their own source of information, and to help coordinate all those executive branch agencies, including the redundancies. Including squeezing out useful information, not only for the president but for other relevant parts of the executive branch.
This has plenty of its own risks, but if handled correctly it can make the presidency an enormously successful machine for distilling all sorts of helpful things to know.
All of that was fully formed by the 1970s and 1980s.
Congress had a different path. Late in the 19th century, congressional careers and committee structures “institutionalized,” with committees ruled by a seniority system that produced experienced, reasonably well-informed leaders. It wasn’t very systematic; a third-rate hack who hung around long enough would eventually come to chair a committee and there was no way to assure quality. But it was something.
Congress was satisfied with that for decades; after all, they had more institutional expertise than the president.2 However, when the presidency expanded from Truman on, Congress was eager to keep up, and wound up not only hiring plenty of expert staff for committees and subcommittees, but also creating new Congressional agencies to make sure they could compete with presidents and even the bureaucracy when it came to knowledge.
Congress was the first to in large part reverse all this. Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995 cut back on member and committee staff, and closed the Office of Technology Assessment. Later Democratic Congresses have failed to restore OTA or many of the Republican cuts. Meanwhile, individual members of Congress, especially Republicans, have over time moved away from spending their staff allowance on legislative expertise, preferring communications staff. And both parties, from the mid-1990s on, have concentrated influence on party leadership rather than on committees. House Republicans in particular have institutionalized ignorance by installing term limits for committee chairs.
There have always been plenty of members of both chambers who had little interest in policy and legislation, but the incentives for knowing stuff are lower now than at any point in the last fifty years, especially on the GOP side. People complain about Republicans who constantly defer to whatever Trump wants, but the sad truth is that in many cases they probably literally don’t know better.
Yes, all of that meant a ton of redundancy. But it also gave elected officials in the White House and the Capitol real means for controlling and harnessing the strength of the bureaucracy.
All of this is the backdrop for Trump’s current presidency, which has attacked the idea of expertise in both the presidential branch and in executive branch departments and agencies. The White House has never been all that institutionalized, with each president almost starting from scratch (although George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden emphasized partisan continuity to a great extent). It was pretty easy for Trump last year to wipe away what little expertise rolled over from the Biden administration, such as NSC staffers who traditionally would remain in place across presidencies.
It’s harder to wipe out executive branch knowledge, but making it a presidential priority helps. So there have been a number of purges of the bureaucracy. Compared to most democracies the US has always had an unusually large number of political appointees on top of the civil service, so making it a priority to have those political people ignore what the bureaucracy was saying turns out to be…pretty successful.
Put it all together, and the US government probably knows less now, and has less access to what it theoretically does know, than at any point in decades.
Which is why I’ve been regularly saying that things are going to go wrong. Not because Trump and the Republicans have bad policy ideas – they might, but they’re entitled to that. But because they’ve hollowed out what the US government knows.
And that’s what we’re seeing in the Persian Gulf, and really everywhere else, from public health to economic management to who knows what’s happening that hasn’t been noticed yet.
So many things going wrong.
I still haven’t read it, but I understand that William Adler’s Engineering Expansion: The U.S. Army and Economic Development, 1787-1860 details one of the big exceptions to this. More broadly: I’m hardly an expert in the nineteenth (or eighteenth!) century republic, and I’m sure I’m oversimplifying.
It was also a structure that went well with a Democratic partisan majority in the House from 1930 on that was usually paired with a conservative ideological majority until 1958; the seniority system avoided having to choose between those two very different majorities.