When Regulators Soil Themselves
In 1991, when I visited the Soviet Union (Yes, that Soviet Union – the bad guys) I ended up in a long discussion with water quality officials in what was then known as Leningrad, now St. Peterburg, on over-regulation. They talked of how they were so heavily regulated that compliance was, in some cases, mutually exclusive as agencies did not speak to each other and issued contradictory orders. I commented that if we were not careful in the United States we were headed to the same place. Sadly, I was not nay-saying, I was prophetic.
It’s an old story now that the devasting Palisades fire in Los Angeles now 16 months ago was a reignition of a small fire improperly extinguished because of misguided efforts to protect and endangered plant. Homes and businesses lost, people displaced and some of the most beautiful real estate in the nation forever changed – all for the sake of some scrub brush. Sounds like some mixed priorities to me.
January of this year saw a massive, one of the largest ever, raw sewage spill in the Washington D.C. area. Turns out the roots of it are similar. Repairs to the damaged pipeline that eventually catastrophically broke were delayed for year – years – while the National Park Service conducted an environmental impact study. The thing that is most amazing about this story is this is not some cutting edge environmental contaminant – no, this is sewage, the oldest known pollutant to all of mankind. We’ve been fighting sewage pollution for centuries (It’s in the Bible for crying out loud), but only in this modern times could the fight be interrupted in such an odious fashion.
Both of these stories are stupid on steroids. Both stories represent forgetting the basics, the very basics. The very idea of environmental regulation is to “protect human health and the environment,” and in both cases environmental regulation caused, directly, excessive damage to human health and the environment. That’s Twilight Zone stuff.
Worst of all is how the various agencies involved end up in some sort of circular firing squad, each pointing a finger at some other and the blame never actually ending anywhere. How do we fix such a situation? The Marines have a phrase, “Kill ’em all and let God sort it out.” It’s tempting in situations like this, very tempting. But, thinking less sarcastically, there is something to learn from the military.
It is an absolute fact of life that no rule or regulation can cover all contingencies. Therefore there will always be those situations where the rule has to be interpreted and bent and sometimes ignored. But it is also an undeniable fact of bureaucracy that no one wants to make a decision – ever. Bureaucracy is almost definitionally the avoidance of responsibility – at least in its current form. Simply put, if you want to make decisions, you go into business, if you really want to make them you go into business for yourself. You risk. But if you want job security, you go into a bureaucratic job and try not to be noticed – you avoid risk. In the end. that is how messes like this happen.
The military, huge and bureaucratic as it is, purposefully seeks and trains its leaders to be decision makers – risk takers when it is actually on the line. I think we would be well served if our various regulatory bureaucracies had similar programs. Leadership training these days is all about “building consensus.” Guess what people – when the house is burning or the sewage is spilling, there is no time for a staff meeting. There are decisions to be made, rapidly and with all available information and consideration.
The days of the broad, horizontal org chart need to end in these agencies. Command and control matters.
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