For my day job this week, I’ll be lecturing about the bureaucratic politics that occasionally affects the crafting of American foreign policy. In my experience, the theory of bureaucratic politics is one of the few that actual policymakers take seriously, for two reasons. First, at some point, they were forced to read this as undergraduates and found some useful insights from it. Second, they have lived, breathed and eaten bureaucratic processes for more of their days as policymakers.
One of the problems with talking about bureaucratic politics in foreign policy is that, very often, this kind of thinking leads to outcomes that are constants. The thing is, constants are a little bit boring to social scientists. Most academic researchers are interested in explaining variation and change. Why did the United States change its policy here? Why did Congress vote yes on this but no on that? Perennial constants can seem dull by comparison.
That does not mean that they are unimportant, however. For example, here are three stories that reveal certain bureaucratic constants in the land of American foreign policy and national security over the past generation or so. They’re not necessarily good constants, and they might actually change at some point in the next generation. For now, however, they are facts of life:
1) The Defense Department wins a lot of bureaucratic battles because it has all of the foreign policy money. Bureaucratic Politics 101 says that organizations with more staff and resources have more power. Life can be more complicated than that, but this principle still holds quite often.
For a recent example, consider Bryan Bender’s recent article in Politico about the battles between the State and Defense departments on control over foreign aid. Guess who’s winning those battles?
Washington’s newest arms race pits the State Department against the Pentagon, which are feuding over who should make the decisions on supplying military aid to foreign nations.
And to the consternation of the diplomats, the generals are on a winning streak.
The Pentagon is steering a growing pot of money, equipment and training to help countries fight terrorism, stem the drug trade and deter a rising China and resurgent Russia. Congress is poised to further expand the military’s ability to ship arms overseas — causing the State Department and its supporters on Capitol Hill to warn that some of the aid may contradict broader U.S. interests, such as promoting human rights.
Read the whole thing. This won’t change until Congress decides that it’s worth it to properly fund civilian agencies that can dispense and oversee foreign aid. Shockingly, members of Congress aren’t keen to take those votes. So the slow militarization of foreign policy — which is something that even former defense secretaries acknowledge is a bad thing — will continue apace.
2) The National Security Council staff will command more influence and no other bureaucratic actor will like it. A few days ago, Gordon Lubold reported in the Wall Street Journal that Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense and possible future defense secretary is not happy with the size of the NSC staff:
Ms. Flournoy believes the National Security Council, or NSC, should be shrunk, refined and streamlined to curb its power and clarify its responsibilities among the departments and agencies it oversees.
The NSC has grown twenty times in size since the 1960s, and now has about 400 employees. During the same time, the total civilian federal workforce grew from about 2.5 million to 2.7 million, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Ms. Flournoy believes that there is a direct correlation between the size of the NSC and its power; as the number of staffers grows, a penchant for micromanaging policy becomes inevitable.
I don’t think that Ms. Flournoy is necessarily wrong, but there are two things that are worth remembering when talking about a bloated NSC. The first is that, shockingly, most of the complaints about an imperious NSC staff come from … people who are not on the NSC staff. So maybe, just maybe, those actors are using the media because they are not winning the bureaucratic battles they are waging.
Second, there is a reason that this White House expanded the NSC’s role, and why the next president is likely to expand it even more. As Karen DeYoung reported here at The Washington Post last summer, even something as mundane as embassy security policy now has an NSC process. That doesn’t make much policy sense — but it does make political sense:
“Benghazi is a good example,” the former official said, “and . . . Ebola. That can’t just be left to CDC and State and others to manage. No. You have to have a czar and a whole team of people. And why is that? Because the politics on this issue have become so much more corrosive and challenging that it’s a natural instinct for the White House to say, ‘We’ve got to have an eye on this. On everything.’ ”
The Center for New American Security’s Julianne Smith made a similar point in her recent essay in Democracy:
In the age of Twitter and YouTube, which grants the public a front-row seat to any crisis around the world as it is unfolding, NSC staff face unprecedented demands to respond, even in cases where the issue at hand is not a top priority. The short “Kony 2012” video that called for the capture of the Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony by the end of 2012 is but one example. While the Administration had been working with regional partners to locate him (admittedly without success), Kony’s capture had simply not been a regular topic of high-level meetings in the Situation Room. After the video went viral, however, the White House was compelled to convene senior officials to take a look at existing efforts to capture Kony. Was this an appropriate use of those officials’ time? Did Kony’s capture outrank any number of other brewing crises that senior officials were tackling at that time? Probably not. But a White House failure to respond to a video about an indicted war criminal, which was viewed by more than 70 million people, would have raised questions about U.S. relevance, power, and influence.
To be fair, national security adviser Susan Rice has recently trimmed the NSC staff. But I bet that staff number will go up in the next presidency after the first foreign policy foul-up.
3) No bureaucratic actor has both the time and the influence for proper strategic planning. In that same Democracy essay, Smith bemoans the inability of State, Defense, the NSC and any other unit to think strategically — and by strategically, she means “a time horizon of longer than two weeks.” She does note a recent trend, which is the growth of planning and strategy units in the different foreign policy bureaucracies:
In an effort to help an aging national security system be less reactive and more deliberative, some U.S. government agencies have launched programs and created new offices focused on innovation and strategy. The goal of such efforts is simply to give the U.S. government and national security professionals some room to breathe, look out on the horizon, and think strategically in an environment that often leaves them feeling overwhelmed. From the State Department’s relatively new Strategy Lab to the Policy Design & Innovation Practice of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the government is beginning to test some of the methods commonly used in the private sector to foster innovation, conduct forecasting, and develop long-term strategies. Initiatives like these strive to incorporate the views of a broader network of experts across multiple sectors and foster creativity inside structures that usually stifle it. They also aim to create spaces inside government that are free of the daily operational demands and pressures associated with work in large bureaucratic agencies like the State Department.
I wish these new initiatives luck, but I will point out a fundamental tension in their functioning. Bureaucrats tend to get promoted because they demonstrate competence handling the “daily operational demands and pressures” as opposed to the strategic planning functions. Unless and until there is a direct link between doing well at policy planning and doing well in one’s career, all of the strategy units in the world will not alter the U.S. government’s ability to incorporate long-range thinking about foreign policy terribly well.
