Heroic Bureaucrats

Matthew 25:23: 

     "His lord said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.'”

The USA faced the potential for a Constitutional crisis in the 2020 election and aftermath.  

We avoided the worst of it. People did their jobs.

A president who was persuasive, persistent, and extraordinarily popular with approximately 45% of the American public attempted to push the levers of power to overthrow an election and retain office. He contacted governors, secretaries of state, county election officials, and appointed and career officials in his own Justice Department urging they "find" votes or fraud--something that would provide a colorable argument for voiding the election. People in key places resisted their own partisan desires, and enormous partisan pressure. They reviewed ballots, they counted the votes, and they were faithful to their jobs.

They weren't acting like politicians. They were acting like bureaucrats. 

Sandford Borins

College classmate Sandford Borins is an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto. He studied political science and public administration, with a focus on the narrative stories that people tell themselves and others to understand the world. He has a blog of his own, https://sandfordborins.com and multiple books and articles.

This Guest Post is an excerpt from his commentary on Tony Downs, an economist who influenced his thinking and career, particularly in Downs' book, Inside Bureaucracy. That book came to Borins' mind when he read Downs' recent obituary. His full post is at Borins' website.

Guest Post by Sandford Borins

Tony Downs postulated nine possible motives of public servants. Five are pure manifestations of self-interest: power, money income, prestige, convenience, and security. But the other four are altruistic: loyalty beyond the self to a group of people or institution, pride in performance, desire to serve the public interest, and commitment to a specific program or policy.

Downs’s five types of officials combine these motives in different ways. Two types of purely self-interested officials are:

• Climbers, who are ambitious and strive for more power, income, and prestige.
• Conservers, who consider convenience and security all-important, and attempt to retain the power, income, and prestige that they already have.

Three types of officials combine self-interest and altruism:

• Zealots, who are committed to a narrow range of policies or concepts.
• Advocates, who are loyal to a broader set of policies than zealots and who seek power to advance the interests of their organization.
• Statesmen [sic], who are loyal to society as a whole and seek power to influence national policies. Downs condescendingly refers to statesmen as most closely resembling “the theoretical bureaucrats of public administration textbooks.”

Why This Matters

I’m not particularly interested in this as intellectual history, namely that a scholar who postulated that voters and politicians were primarily self-interested a decade later had second thoughts when he studied bureaucrats. It is of interest to me that a considerable body of public opinion, particularly in the U.S. and on the political right, sees career public servants as ambitious climbers attempting to enlarge their organizations’ power and budget or risk-averse conservers attempting protect their turf and cover their asses. This is comparable to disdain and scorn for career politicians.

The Trump Presidency

The Trump presidency put public servants to a severe test, as I predicted it would, before he took office. Over the course of his presidency, it became clear that Trump was a kleptocrat who surrounded himself with kleptocrats; a demagogue who lied repeatedly, starting with minor matters like the size of the crowd at his inauguration and eventually on critical matters such as the pandemic; and an aspiring dictator, who attempted to steal an election.

What was crucial was how American public servants responded to this assault on the truth, on their organizations, and on democracy. Some climbers enthusiastically supported the Trump Administration’s political appointees to advance their careers. Conservers undoubtedly kept their heads down, hoping “this, too, will pass.” But there were public servants who spoke truth to power, like Anthony Fauci and his colleagues in the FDA. There were public servants who became whistle-blowers – for example, Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill, and Marie Yovanovitch in the Trump-Ukraine scandal – an act of patriotism for which they were fired. And there were many state-level public servants who, despite political and public pressure including death threats, counted the vote honestly and accurately.

In the last years of his life, I wonder if Downs was thinking about his theoretical bureaucrats as the conflict between Trump and real public servants played out. I searched online but could find no recent publications by Downs on that issue. Certainly, this would be a fruitful topic for public administration researchers.

My conclusion – the armchair empiricism of an emeritus professor of public administration – is that, when facing an existential threat to democratic governance, many American public servants acted altruistically in the public interest, sometimes at considerable personal risk. There is a library of profiles in courage waiting to be written.