G.S.A.: Evaluation for Greater Efficiency

The G.S.A. (General Services Administration) facilitated President-elect Biden's transition team in building a new government.

Recently, the GSA began investigating the approval process for the new FBI headquarters to Greenbelt, Maryland, a proposed location unpopular with some elected officials in Virginia and residents of Greenbelt. With another presidential administration, the current president -elect and eventually a new FBI director may produce its own opposition to this new location.

Speaking more broadly, as of this writing, a new "Department of Government Efficiency," a name which seems ideological and skeptical of governance, has been proposed by the president-elect and his private sector advisors. It would possibly replace or supplement the federal processes remembered and described here in which each agency knowledgeably evaluated its own programs, in processes overseen by inspectors general. Creating and administering such a new department might be inherently costly and ineffective, hence inefficient. Its goals seem relatively uninterested in agency mission effectiveness or "utility". Still, the present episode might be placed among the many, changing, forms of federal evaluation.

This published piece offers an historical look at evaluation in the GSA. My article, and others in the themed journal, might have been enhanced by the inclusion of cited sources and a bibliography. For my research I mainly interviewed relevant government managers, who were, understandably, perhaps reluctant to confide about office history or offer illustrative anecdotes to a reporter taking notes for publication. And the study does not supply data or results of GSA evaluation. Managers at the time may have considered their own projects or programs in the short term, and not saved data for comparison by future evaluators seeking trends. This article makes apparent that, however valuable or necessary federal government functions prove, the bureaucracy may be confusing or appear disorganized to some readers -- though the intended audience for the article is mainly government employees. The published article lacks an organizational chart to convey information in graphic form; but check my flow chart depicting the 1990's interdepartmental relations and evaluation in GSA as reported in the article. The underlined units may be considered of equivalent authority, having some oversight over the bulleted sub-sections; bold font indicates the most important elements in GSA evaluation. In technical writing, a flow chart is often useful (lines and arrows indicating the organizational tree would be better): hope one of these flow charts helps.

GSA EVALUATION (as operational circa 1991)

President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency:

· GSA Inspector General

General Accounting Office:

· GSA Administration > Management Controls and Evaluation, Personnel Office, Quality Management and Training (feedback to Personnel Office)

Congress -- Chief Financial Officer’s Act:

· GSA Chief Financial Officer

Management Control and Oversight Council:

· GSA Ethics and Civil Rights (feedback to Personnel Office)

· GSA Policy Analysis (feedback to Management Control and Oversight Council, Management Controls and Evaluation)

How should we evaluate evaluation? This article is mainly descriptive. Two political scientists, publishing a text book five years after this article -- Kenneth Shepsle and Mark Bonchek in their Analyzing Politics: Rationality, Behavior, and Institutions -- observe: "the political science that a college student at the end of World War II might have encountered was primarily descriptive and judgmental. It was much less oriented toward explanation and analysis." Likewise, reporting government evaluation these days, in a climate of cynicism and partisan mockery, perhaps has needed to become more explanatory or analytical.

Trying to find comparable information about evaluation in GSA today, I recalled how challenging it was to obtain such information. And now, in the post - 9/11 world, it is even more difficult to access government employees to obtain detailed, nuanced description of internal evaluation beyond what is made public. (The sense of being outside the government, and government processes seeming insufficiently transparent, reminds me of complaints and warnings about a so-called "deep state".) Given the topic, this type of article, limited as it is, might be more difficult to write, these days.

As of this writing, a business mogul, among the richest in the world, with little or no experience within government and no accountability to anyone he proposes to impact, is charged with evaluating how to improve the federal government by cutting its spending and services (and workforce). Many presidential supporters seem to allow the fallacious claim that "government should be run like a business". (It's unclear whether there is anything in an international business analogous to a government setting tariffs against another government's imports, a practice that can harm financially the government's own citizens.) Sustaining such a simplistic analogy would assume that customers elect the CEO's or owners of companies where they shop, that governments can or should be able legally to fire or dismiss the country's citizens, and most importantly, that the purpose of governments is to make money for the president and his staff. (Indeed, some in the administration might benefit financially from government policies they create; see my blog post on teaching ethics.) It is also unclear whether the private sector critics, claiming to enhance government "efficiency," would get to know in sufficient detail each agency they would try to change. Interestingly, as these businessmen aim to manage -- or sabotage or sack -- government, my article begins defining GSA as one of the federal government's "business managers".

This blog post lists organizations and offices; another blog post of mine, on the Declaration of Independence and argumentation, lists definitions. Might one blog post benefit from the structure, or reading, of the other? In what ways, in your evaluation, might this article (or its introduction) have been improved?

In the published journal, I was honored to have my article on federal government evaluation alongside one by former attorney general Elliott L. Richardson.