A tale of two reorganizations: USDA and Treasury

A new year, and a roadmap for 2025.

New Year at the White House, undated. Source

State Capacitance launched two months ago. Since then, I’ve written some articles and gained some readers. You are, presumably, one of them – thank you! For my part, what have I written so far? And what comes next?

2024 in review

The first pieces were deep dives into the history of government reorganization. In particular, I told a tale of two reorganizations: the midcentury reorganizations of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and of the Treasury Department.

Each reorganization began with an idea – reformers had some theory about how bureaucracies should be organized, which they then applied to reorganize an executive department. Accordingly, the story of each reorganization is told in two parts: the idea behind the reforms, and then the reorganization itself. What were these pairs of articles?

• First, a bad idea – functional reorganization. This principle held that agencies ought to correspond to functions (like research and regulation), rather than to subjects (like entomology, or forests). The USDA reorganizations of the 30s-50s applied this idea dogmatically, with minimal planning or feedback, and indeed with a poor conception of what problem they were trying to solve.
  
  The reorganization cleaned up the department’s org charts, but at the cost of the department’s independence and competence. After the rationalistic reorganization, the farm lobby had wrested control over agricultural policymaking from the previously quite independent department.

• Second, a good idea – work simplification. This method was developed in WWII, and held that managers ought to be trained to simplify department procedure and cut red tape. The Treasury Department reorganizations of the 1940s applied work simplification in a series of steps: they began with small teams that made minor improvements, and built up to major departmental reorganization.
  
  Through applying work simplification, the IRS brought its work up-to-date, cracked down on corruption, and modernized its archaic IT. Eventually, Treasury used these successes to build up support for abolishing Congressional patronage in the department.

These case studies are more than interesting history – effective approaches like work simplification can still be adopted today. Further, case studies of both successful and failed reorganizations help us to evaluate contemporary proposals for reforming the government.

The publication also featured a historical article on how cities and states spent money before they adopted budgeting.

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What next?

The publication will continue featuring case studies: deep dives into how agencies were founded, or reformed, or made worse. There will also be case studies on specific processes – for example, what did agencies do to control paperwork before the Paperwork Reduction Act?

The publication will feature more historical articles. In particular, this year will feature an extended series of posts on the Progressives and the Progressive-era reforms. Their ideas were foundational to the modern American bureaucracy, but the discussion of their specific reforms is often superficial and inaccurate. And it’s worth knowing some of their failed proposals, too – many were unique ideas for dealing with issues we still face.

There will also be a new type of content: notes on public administration. For example, there are many proposals for (say) changing the budget process. How can we classify different approaches to budgeting in order to make sense of the many proposed reforms? The notes on public administration will provide the necessary concepts for making sense of all these proposals.

And a final type of content for the new year: whatever you’re interested in. If you could know anything about the history of government administration, what would you want to know?