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The federal government's "quiet crisis" of the 1980s has become the "deafening crisis" of the early twenty-first century. Virtually every measure of the state of the public service as envisioned by Alexander Hamilton has worsened over the past two decades. This lecture outlines Hamilton's seven characteristics of an energetic federal service and examines recent trends in its decline. Although the federal service still executes an enormous agenda of important missions, it is increasingly frustrated in its work.
During this period of campaign promises to cut government, it is always useful to recall Alexander Hamilton's warning about the dangers of a government ill executed. As he argued in Federalist No. 70, "A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government" (Wright 1961, 451).
More than 200 years later, however, the federal government seems plagued by bad execution. The failures are all too familiar: the tragic fire at Waco, taxpayer abuse by the Internal Revenue Service, security breaches at the nation's nuclear laboratories, missing laptops at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Challenger and Columbia space shutde disasters, breakdowns in policing everything from toys to cattle, the sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina, miscalculations about the war in Iraq, a cascade of Fraudulent defense contracts, continued struggles to unite the nation's intelligence services, backlogs at dozens of agencies, shortages of air traffic controllers and food inspectors, mistakes on passenger screening lines, and negligent veterans care.
This is not to suggest that the federal government is a wasteland of failure. To the contrary, the federal government accomplishes the impossible every day. Yet if the federal government is still far from being ill executed, it is not uniformly well executed either. Hamilton's warning reflected more than his own experience with a government ill executed during the Revolutionary War.1 He also recognized that the new government would fail unless it could execute the laws. After all, the U.S. Constitution said almost nothing about the administrative state beyond giving the president a role, checked and balanced, in appointing and overseeing the officers of government. Otherwise, it was up to the president to decide how to "take care" that the laws would...