Tag Archives: government

A Letter of Resignation

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…by HHS’ ex-Office of Research Integrity Director, David Wright.  I’ve…written negatively…about the HHS a number of times, but this isn’t one of them.  Here, the HHS is just the immediate face of the problem Wright describes.  The dysfunction illustrated here, this utter failure of government bureaucracy, is typical of the Federal government and of too many State and local governments.

2/25

Dr Howard Koh, MD

Assistant Secretary for Health

Dear Howard:

I am writing to resign my position as Director, Office of Research Integrity, ORI/OASH/DHHS.

This has been at once the best and worst job I’ve ever had.  The best part of it has been the opportunity to lead ORI intellectually and professionally in helping research institutions better handle allegations of research misconduct, provide in-service training for institutional Research Integrity Officers (RIOs), and develop programming to promote the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR).  Working with members of the research community, particularly RIOs, and the brilliant scientist-investigators in ORI has been one of the great pleasures of my long career.  Unfortunately, and to my great surprise, it turned out to be only about 35% of the job.

The rest of my role as ORI Director has been the very worst job I have ever had and it occupies up to 65% of my time.  That part of the job is spent navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy to secure resources and, yes, get permission for ORI to serve the research community.  I knew coming into this job about the bureaucratic limitations of the federal government, but I had no idea how stifling it would be. What I was able to do in a day or two as an academic administrator takes weeks or months in the federal government, our precinct of which is OASH.

I believe there are a number of reasons for this.  First, whereas in most organizations the front-line agencies that do the actual work, in our case protecting the integrity of millions of dollars of PHS-funded research, command the administrative support services to get the job done.  In OASH it’s the exact opposite.  The Op-Divs, as the front-line offices are called, get our budgets and then have to go hat-in-hand to the administrative support people in the “immediate office” of OASH to spend it, almost item by item.  These people who are generally poorly informed about what ORI is and does decide whether our requests are “mission critical.”

On one occasion, I was invited to give a talk on research integrity and misconduct to a large group of AAAS fellows.  I needed to spend $35 to convert some old cassette tapes to CDs for use in the presentation.  The immediate office denied my request after a couple of days of noodling.  A university did the conversion for me in twenty minutes, and refused payment when I told them it was for an educational purpose.

Second, the organizational culture of OASH’s immediate office is seriously flawed, in my opinion.  The academic literature over the last twenty-five years on successful organizations highlights several characteristics: transparency, power-sharing or shared decision-making and accountability.   If you invert these principles, you have an organization (OASH in this instance), which is secretive, autocratic and unaccountable.

In one instance, by way of illustration, I urgently needed to fill a vacancy for an ORI division director.  I asked the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health (your deputy) when I could proceed.  She said there was a priority list.  I asked where ORI’s request was on that list.  She said the list was secret and that we weren’t on the top, but we weren’t on the bottom either. Sixteen months later we still don’t have a division director on board.

On another occasion I asked your deputy why you didn’t conduct an evaluation by the Op-Divs of the immediate office administrative services to try to improve them.  She responded that that had been tried a few years ago and the results were so negative that no further evaluations have been conducted.

Third, there is the nature of the federal bureaucracy itself.  The sociologist Max Weber observed in the early 20th century that while bureaucracy is in some instances an optimal organizational mode for a rationalized, industrial society, it has drawbacks.  One is that public bureaucracies quit being about serving the public and focus instead on perpetuating themselves.  This is exactly my experience with OASH. We spend exorbitant amounts of time in meetings and in generating repetitive and often meaningless data and reports to make our precinct of the bureaucracy look productive.  None of this renders the slightest bit of assistance to ORI in handling allegations of misconduct or in promoting the responsible conduct of research.  Instead, it sucks away time and resources that we might better use to meet our mission.  Since I’ve been here I’ve been advised by my superiors that I had “to make my bosses look good.”  I’ve been admonished: “Dave, you are a visionary leader but what we need here are team players.”   Recently, I was advised that if I wanted to be happy in government service, I had to “lower my expectations.”  The one thing no one in OASH leadership has said to me in two years is ‘how can we help ORI better serve the research community?’  Not once.

Finally, there is another important organizational question that deserves mention:  Is OASH the proper home for a regulatory agency such as ORI?  OASH is a collection of important public health offices that have agendas significantly different from the regulatory roles of ORI and OHRP. You’ve observed that OASH operates in an “intensely political environment.”  I agree and have observed that in this environment decisions are often made on the basis of political expediency and to obtain favorable “optics.” There is often a lack of procedural rigor in this environment.  I discovered recently, for example, that OASH operates a grievance procedure for employees that has no due process protections of any kind for respondents to those grievances.  Indeed, there are no written rules or procedures for the OASH grievance process regarding the rights and responsibilities of respondents. By contrast, agencies such as ORI are bound by regulation to make principled decisions on the basis of clearly articulated procedures that protect the rights of all involved.  Our decisions must be supported by the weight of factual evidence. ORI’s decisions may be and frequently are tested in court.   There are members of the press and the research community who don’t believe ORI belongs in an agency such as OASH and I, reluctantly, have come to agree.

In closing, these twenty-six months of service as the Director of ORI have been a remarkable experience.  As I wrote earlier in this letter, working with the research community and the remarkable scientist-investigators at ORI has been the best job I’ve ever had.  As for the rest, I’m offended as an American taxpayer that the federal bureaucracy—at least the part I’ve labored in—is so profoundly dysfunctional.  I’m hardly the first person to have made that discovery, but I’m saddened by the fact that there is so little discussion, much less outrage, regarding the problem.  To promote healthy and productive discussion, I intend to publish a version of the daily log I’ve kept as ORI Director in order to share my experience and observations with my colleagues in government and with members of the regulated research community.

I plan to work through Tuesday March 4, 2014 and then use vacation or sick days until Thursday March 27 (by which time I will have re-established health care through my university) and then end my federal government service.

Sincerely,

Even in the Federal government there’s no excuse for this kind of dysfunction (or for any other kind of dysfunction…).  It’s too bad that good people are so thoroughly stifled by Federal employ.

The American people deserve better than that.

More Governance by Diktat

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Rule by law, not rule of law.  Here‘s the latest Obama installment.

The president plans to make the announcement [ordering Labor to expand overtime pay requirements to include millions more workers] on Thursday at the White House, a senior administration official confirmed to Fox News. Though the administration has claimed previous executive actions had bipartisan support, officials are acknowledging that this particular move [does not.]

These aren’t blue-collar jobs covered by “collective bargaining” agreements—union contracts—either.  Now, managers and executive officers of companies will be…covered: fast-food restaurant managers, loan officers, computer technicians, and more.

There’s not even a pretense of union-management mutually agreed compensation structure in this latest government move—the Federal government is dictating to businesses how they must conduct their businesses, the Federal government is dictating to businesses how they must structure their internal costs.

No market forces allowed.  And if the law doesn’t let the Federal government do what it wants to do to us, the Feds (not us) will change the law, and the Feds will change it with, or without, our permission.

What’s next?  It’s a truism, that if something becomes—or is made—more expensive to have, buyers will buy less of it.  If labor—blue- or white-collar—is made more expensive, businesses will retain/hire less of it.  Look for slowed hiring and outright management staff reductions, either in people retained or in salaries paid to make room for the mandated overtime increases.

Then, look for this administration to change/write its own law to mandate that salaries and wages can never be reduced, and that once hired, an employee can never be terminated.  Businesses, after all, are jobs welfare programs in the Progressive mind.

Speaking of Out of Touch

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Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) demonstrated the depth of his condition of out of touchness in a Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.  Although Sanders’ out of touchness is amply demonstrated by his full-throated defense of the dinosaur that is the United States Postal Service, I want to look at a couple of other things he said in his piece.

First, there’s this:

There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service.  They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services….

He says this in all seriousness, as if shrinking government and returning the bulk of its functions to the private sector where they belong is somehow a bad thing.  And that there would be profit in that private sector (and not only for “Wall Street and corporate America,” but also for medium-sized and small businesses and the Americans these would employ) is something only an avowed Democratic Socialist like Sanders would decry.  Moreover, it’s not only the powerful and special interests who want this shrinking of government and a divestment of its present array of “functions.”  Apparently he’s missed the Tea Party revolution that’s been going on these last five years.

He also had this (with some overlap with the quote above):

They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services, and couldn’t care less how privatization or a degradation of services affects ordinary Americans.

This is a false dichotomy.  Privatization doesn’t at all degrade services—it improves those extant and leads to vast expansion of new services, and at lower prices than before.  This is the example of the breakup of Ma Bell, effective at the start of 1984.  Under Ma Bell, we had a very good land line telephone system.  After the breakup, we got an even better land line system of competing companies (until their effective remerger); a cell phone system of competing companies; a cable system of more-or-less competing companies, which also compete for telephone business; and all of them competing for Internet business—including telephony communications.

A further example is the USPS, which prior to the divestment of package delivery and mail service other than first class, did a very good job of delivery.  Now we have competing package and special delivery service companies that are cheaper, faster, and even more reliable, and they have a broader range of special delivery services that the USPS is scrambling to match.  Additionally, all those communications services above are functionally competing for first class mail delivery, too, even though only the USPS can handle formal first class.  That’s what email, texting, Skype, AIM Chat, Twitter, and on and on—even that other dinosaur, faxing—are doing.

Apparently, Rip van Sanders has been sleeping through the end of the 20th century and this beginning of the 21st.

The People are not Sovereign

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…government is.  Or so says Czar of all the Russias President Vladimir Putin.

Of course people wanted change.  But [people] cannot impose illegal change…you need to use only constitutional means.

Never mind that the will of the people is what gives “constitutional means” legitimacy, since those means are the will of the people given concrete effect.  But not in Putin’s world.  In his world view, “constitutional means” are what government says they are, and government is constituted the way the men populating the organs of government say it is.  No people, no citizens, are involved.

Putin also insisted that [Interim President] Oleksandr Turchynov was

not legitimate.  From the legal perspective it is Mr. Yanukovych who is president.

No.  Plainly no.  From the legal perspective, Yanukovich had lost all legitimacy the moment he lost the consent of the Ukrainian people to be their President.  That he had lost that consent is amply demonstrated by all those months in the streets—and not only in Kiev—by the people protesting, at first his actions, and ultimately his political status.  The firmness of their will is corroborated by the violence against and the murders of the protestors sanctioned by that government, and the people’s continued protests despite those atrocities.

Putin also has announced that he has no obligation to respect the wishes of the Ukrainian people as expressed in the upcoming May governmental elections, if he doesn’t get the results he wants.

Never mind that exactly those elections are what will express the will of the people, if the elections are allowed to go forward freely and fairly.  The only interference there will be “such terror as we see now” in the form of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The only “terror as [Putin] see[s] now” is his own terror of the will of the people—perhaps of the will of the Russian people, as well.

Finally, this:

Putin said Tuesday that Moscow reserved the right to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine by any means necessary….

This was Hitler’s excuse for Sudetenland.  However, the “ethnic Russians” are Ukrainian citizens, not Russian citizens, and it is the responsibility of the Ukrainian government to protect its citizens.  If Putin is claiming a right (oddly, not a duty) to protect the badly abused citizens of another sovereign nation, than we have to ask: where is his duty in Syria, in northern Korea?  Oh, wait….

For Progressives, Some Lives are More Important than Others

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King Cove sits 11 miles southeast of Cold Bay in Alaska, a distance that often takes a lifetime, under current conditions, to travel.  That’s because there is no road between the two towns, only an over-water boat path, and a small airport in King Cove that’s weather-closed a third of the year.  Cold Bay has an all-weather airport, though.

The residents of King Cove want—need—a road connecting the two towns, and they’ve been fighting the Federal government for one for 30 years.  The Feds get the veto authority because the land route for the gravel road (all that the locals are asking) runs through Federal land.

Whence the need?

Cove residents say a road is necessary so they can reach an all-weather airport in Cold Bay that will transport them to Anchorage, about 625 miles away, for medical treatment.  They say that in emergency situations, it’s a matter of life and death.

According to local Aleutian elders, 19 people have died since 1980 as a result of the impossible-to-navigate weather conditions during emergency evacuations.

That’s the lifetime it takes to get from King Cove to Cold Bay under current conditions.

Never mind that; the Federal government has its own priorities.

[T]he Department of Interior announced it was rejecting plans for a proposed land swap that would allow the road to be built.  The Dec 23 decision cited the negative environmental impact on grizzly bears, caribou, and water fowl like the Pacific black brant.

“(Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s) decision on King Cove was heartless and wrong, and her message to me ever since has been that I need to ‘just get over it and move on,'” Senator Lisa Murkowski(R, AK)….

And

During an August visit to Alaska, Jewell was told that building a road that connects King Cove and Cold Bay was vital.  But in December, Jewell rejected the road saying it would jeopardize waterfowl in the refuge.

“She stood up in the gymnasium and told those kids, ‘I’ve listened to your stories, now I have to listen to the animals,'” State Representative Bob Herron (D)….

That land swap?  Alaska had offered over 43,000 acres for the 1,800, or so, needed for the short road.

But animal welfare is more important to these Feds than human lives.