Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 110

Obama's Bureaucratic
Generals
Inside the lives of the agency heads who
actually run the federal government.
By John D. Donahue

What Government Does:
How Political Executives Manage
by Paul R. Lawrence and
Mark A. Abramson
Rowman & Littlefield, 196 pp.

110

September/October 2014

eputy Secretary David Hayes walked into the Interior Department building on
April 21, 2010, believing that the day would be noteworthy mostly for that evening's celebration of his daughter's eighteenth birthday. Instead, his Wednesdaymorning routine was shattered by the news that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig
had exploded, killing eleven workers and imperiling the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.
Hayes and a staffer dashed to the airport without so much as a toothbrush or a ticket, somehow persuading the airline crew to open the door of a Gulf-bound flight. It
would be September before Hayes would have a day that was not dominated by the
disaster. The damage from the Deepwater spill was grave enough as it was-but it
would have been worse without Hayes's obsessive efforts to cap the spill and accelerate the cleanup.
Hayes's story is one of many tales of bureaucratic derring-do told in What Government Does: How Political Executives Manage, by management consultants Paul R.
Lawrence and Mark A. Abramson. Alas, this important and admirably well-crafted
volume is likely destined for meager sales (conceivably even lower than those of my
books). Every American has a stake in what government does and how political executives manage; few Americans, however, have enough of an interest to read through
a granular-level, interview-based book on the subject. But more of us should, and I
would be delighted as well as surprised to see this fine book top the best-seller lists.
What Government Does starts with a concise overview of "the job of the political
executive"-that distinctive set of imperatives faced by leaders who must wrangle
with the operational challenges of getting things done, and the political challenges
of determining what should be done and left undone when (as is almost always the
case) capacity falls drastically short of requirements. Lawrence and Abramson postulate a set of generic tasks this work involves: assessing the organization; strengthening the organization; obtaining mission alignment; developing strong processes;
mastering metrics and measuring progress; building relationships; enhancing credibility and visibility; and fostering innovation. Stated in the abstract, of course, this
to-do list seems pretty obvious, but that doesn't mean any element of it is unimportant or anything but fiendishly hard to pull off.
The cross-cutting components of the political executive's work established, the
authors turn to the book's main and most novel contribution-developing and illustrating a taxonomy of the six types of federal government executives. Producers, they write, are responsible for organizations providing concrete deliverables-
airport security, student loans, trademark protection, border security-to the public. Regulators lead organizations that monitor and seek to reduce the risks associated with consuming food or drugs, using consumer products, producing energy,
working in mines, and so on. Infrastructors (my least favorite of the book's neologisms) in agencies directly or indirectly attend to the construction or maintenance
of the nation's key physical assets. Scientists are responsible for developing, vetting,

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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