How a President Can Find Out

Continued from last time – how does a president find out what’s going on in the executive branch of the United States Government? Before we figure out how he gains control, he has to know what is going on. This is not an easy trick.
One time, when I was working in the Surgeon General’s Office, I got curious as to how many grant making mechanisms, individual programs, existed in just the Public Health Service. I thought that should be easy to find out. How wrong I was.
There may be a census for the American people, but there is no census for the American government. No one could tell me how many programs that made grants there were in the Service. Certainly no one had a figure for the entire cabinet level department – Health, Education and Welfare as it was then called. I began to suspect no one wanted to know.
Just to be sure, I began calling other departments. Nobody at Agriculture or Labor or Commerce could give me a figure. There was certainly NO figure for the federal government as a whole. I realized that Congress didn’t know either. They were working out budgets for each department and agency, and they really, really didn’t know what these bodies did.
A couple of years later, when I was working in New York as a fund raiser, I made another attempt—this one from the outside—to find out. No luck whatsoever. The executive branch is a vast organization full of mid-level managers who know they will never get another promotion unless they create more programs and hire more people to run them and be managed. They constantly find ways. I did.
So what would I do if someone took me at gunpoint and stuck me in the Oval Office? First I would demand duplicate copies of the phone books for every single government department and agency in Washington.
Then I would call in all the cabinet members and agency heads under presidential control in the executive branch and hand them the phone book for their respective organization. Then I would tell them that what I was going to ask of them would be a top priority—and that they would report to me each week on their success carrying out this directive.
Once a week, I would be picking up a phone book at random and picking a program at random. I would then call the director of that program, his second and third in command, and demanding their presence in my office within one hour. Each cabinet officer and agency head would do the same thing with his or her own agency.
The program head would be directed to bring their budgets, their list of personnel, a list of all program activities and actual expenses to that meeting. Then I (or the agency head) and a good accountant would go through the figures, the charts and personnel records and ask a lot of questions. We might even send them home for more answers.
If things seemed too fuzzy, a White House audit team might be sent to visit program HQ and other offices throughout the country to get answers. In the end, we would know what that program did. The government grape vine would go into high gear and acts would be cleaned up all over Washington.
At the end of two or three years—having shared notes with the other agency heads—the administration would have a decent idea of what actually went on in the various departments and agencies. That’s time consuming, but if you want to get a handle on an organization as big and ungoverned as the federal executive branch, I cannot think of better way of doing it.
So many unauthorized programs would die unborn in the fear of a White House or cabinet level audit. You would find a line item for every activity that did occur. The bureaucracy would be compelled to realize that they really, really answered to the person with the title Chief Executive.
Because you see, Hatch Act or no, if these interviews actually turned up malfeasance (and misappropriation of funds qualifies), a bureaucrat can actually be fired. Or demoted. Or reassigned to a penguin counting mission in Antarctica for a couple of years.
I remember how much fear just the thought of a Congressional or White House inquiry could inspire among my fellow bureaucrats. Fear can have salutatory consequences when wisely wielded. It’s one tool a president can use. So I say to Senator Obama, Use it!