From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Twin Titanics
The FBI and CIA are first of all bureaucracies.
Why does anyone anywhere think that the FBI or CIA could have prevented September 11? George Bush, the members of Congress and the Beltway press would do the nation a large favor if they agreed to make clear to the American people that above all else these two agencies are bureaucracies. Worse, they are very large political bureaucracies. Worse still, if such a thing can be imagined, these big public bureaucracies have existed for decades; the FBI since 1908 and the CIA since 1947. They are the redwoods of the Beltway, immovable and indestructible.
Congress this week held hearings on the September 11 "failure." The president supports this effort. That means both Congress and the White House will try to fix the local pyramids rather than take this once in a lifetime chance to think in a new way about the old job of protecting the nation.
Want to know why the CIA director can't focus 24/7 on catching al Qaeda? Look at the organization chart below (a fraction of the whole thing). Notice on the right which divisions report directly to the director--congressional affairs, public affairs, the lawyers and, incredibly, "diversity" programs. In a phrase, public relations. Intelligence and operations fall four levels below this and report to the deputy executive director. (Note: If the chart and text don't display properly on your screen, click here to view this column in print-friendly format.)
It is nothing new to accuse the FBI and CIA of bureaucratic sloth. That said, the belief that these agencies, as they exist now, can achieve productivity standards recognizable everywhere else in the modern workplace is probably held at all levels of American life, from the nation's living-rooms to Congress. This mythology persists because for better or worse a lot of generally held opinion of how law enforcement works is likely learned from watching television. People know that an "NYPD Blue" or "Homicide: Life on the Street" isn't real, but they have the look and feel of real police work. Tom Clancy's novels are widely hailed for their technical "realism." What perhaps isn't noticed is that every week all the world's problems are being solved by the same three or four people.
Yes, this is a caricature, but it is surely the case that most people have no clue how unimaginably far this caricature is from the numbing, incentive-killing, rule-laden reality of life in the hallways for thousands of agents. Congress should know better, but it doesn't. Or it doesn't care. Books have been written and Nobel Prizes won explaining why public officials don't respond to bureaucratic decline. Members of Congress need bureaucracies to define their power; whatever else, this week's Senate hearings will allow the FBI to reconfirm that Senators Leahy and Grassley have clout, that they matter. The dysfunction is secondary.
How are the manifest problems of the FBI any different than the well-known problems of the welfare system? Yet welfare bureaucracies were allowed to run and ruin the lives of poor people for decades. Why would anyone think that the FBI and CIA are any different in their long accretion of perverse procedures, maladjusted incentives and political obeisances than the IRS, the FAA, HCFA, the United Nations, the Vatican, the local hospital or the INS? The problems of the national security agencies are made to sound dramatic just now. They are banal. They didn't share information, because holding information no one else has is the way bureaucracies measure their authority.
These problems have been evident since the moment Max Weber concluded, reluctantly, that German bureaucracies were needed to run a modern nation. The idea didn't catch on here in a way that mattered until the Depression, when liberals found a way to match moral intent to public power. Public power trumped moral intent for 60 years, but now that's changing. Even in Europe fed-up citizens in such bureaucratopias as Italy and France have voted in right-wing governments.
What Washington needs is a mental upgrade. Way back in 1973, Daniel Bell coined the phrase "Post-Industrial Society," which everyone outside public life now knows as the information age or the knowledge industry. It's time for Washington to find its way to a "Post-Bureaucratic Society." Up to now, when our national bureaucracies have laid ruin to the tax code, immigrants or the health-care system, suffering humanity has simply endured. But with September 11 we learned that official Washington is so far behind the curve that it now endangers our lives.
It is impossible to believe that George Bush doesn't know this already. Of course he is a busy man. We all are. But simply shoring up two bureaucratic Titanics won't save the ship of state. Building new models just might.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
