Module 7 paper

LeadingThroughFraught1.pdf

Home >Applied Sciences homework help >Module 7 paper

GUEST EDITORIAL

Leading During Fraught Transitions: Protect the Core

J. Patrick Dobel

University of Washington

In the United States, election transitions pose unique ethical and legal challenges for senior public service leaders, who walk a fine line between two obligations. They have a duty as nonpartisan public servants to support a professional transition by providing the updates and knowledge needed by incoming elected and appointed officials to take over government and inaugurate new policy preferences. The second, professional and legal obligation resides in protecting the core professional expertise and competencies of legally authorized agencies.

Newly elected executives in the United States often come from outside government or from the legislature. This poses immense challenges in conveying the complex information about existing agencies, laws, mandates, and resources to the incoming executive. Most incoming executives and their senior teams at all levels of government need to acquire a strong sense of the range of mandated functions, agency size, budgets, skill sets, and ongoing policy- implementation schemes. This usually leads to significant requests for inventories of assets, policies, and budgets from the incoming administration.

There is a clear ethical and legal line between accommodating legitimate requests for an inventory of assets and policy directions versus seeking to identify and act against specific indi- viduals and their connection to policies. Incoming administrations are often pledged to change policy agendas and expenditures, and they need aggregate data to implement these changes. The moral and legal boundaries are further challenged if incoming elected and appointed officials seek to prevent legitimate ongoing authorized functions.

The ongoing turmoil in the Trump administration highlights this basic obligation of senior civil servants to defend their institution’s capacity, mission, and people. The administration has been assailed with allegations about Russian government attempts both to influence the election of President Trump and secretly to affect American policy by relationships with every- one from Attorney General Sessions to ex–National Security Advisor Flynn. At the same time, many initial executive orders possessed serious and unvetted implementation and constitutional issues that slowed their implementation in courts and the agencies.

none defined

Correspondence should be sent to J. Patrick Dobel, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington, Box 353055, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. E-mail: pdobel@uw.edu

President Trump’s summary firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey etch these tensions in stark relief. They also highlight the moral costs and courage of defending agency functions and integrity. Sally Yates and James Comey represented fifty years of cumulative senior service in high-level government agencies. Yates was fired when the Trump administration contested and ignored her warnings about the lying, Russian state connections, and blackmail vulnerability of its national security advisor, Michael Flynn. This, coupled with her refusal, for constitutional reasons, to implement a travel ban applied to Muslim states, led to her summary firing. As she saw it, “I had an obligation to also protect the integrity of the Department of Justice” (Lizza, 2017).

FBI Director James Comey was summarily fired when he refused repeated informal efforts by President Trump to persuade him not to investigate Flynn’s dealings with the Russian government and not to pursue the ongoing FBI investigations into Russian governmental influ- ence in the election. In one of his responses to senators about why he started to keep records on conversations with President Trump, Director Comey responded in almost identical words about his responsibilities to his office. He feared that “he [Trump] might lie about the nature of our meeting.” And the matters involved “the FBI’s core responsibility” (Mandell, 2017).

The firings are the more public side of ongoing efforts and requests of new political appointees, not to change policy, but to ferret out any individuals they think might be associated with government policies they oppose. In the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security as well as NASA and NOAA, career officials have battled to protect individual names from being handed over while striving to respond to requests to rethink or change policy. The requests to identify individuals by name set a dangerous precedent for political nonpartisanship. They are designed to intimidate officials in the future from following a policy initiated to assist future elected administrations. These decisions to accommodate requests for organizational positions and assets while refusing to hand over individual names of public servants illustrate the ethics and courage that senior public officials need to demonstrate in managing professional regime transitions at any level of government. Senior career officials must protect the core competencies and capacity of officials to pursue authorized policies without fear of future retribution when those policies are superseded.

This is a universal tension at all levels of government. Newly elected mayors, county execu- tives, and governors enter office with fresh promises, policy agendas, and voter “mandates.” Their new agendas inevitably challenge existing regulations or agency positions. They will engage the senior public service and its leaders to discover what agencies are really doing, in comparison to campaign rhetoric, and will also begin the process of learning, nudging, and pushing agencies to respond to new policies. If newly elected officials broach the names of particular persons in agencies based upon symbolic issues or supporter information, this is the moment when city, country, and state senior public servants must draw the line. Changing policy is one thing, but allowing individual public servants to be targeted cuts at the core of a neutral public service in two ways.

First, the American civil service has always possessed a high percentage of credentialed professionals and experts. This high level of expertise flows from missions that range from high-impact security functions to complex service delivery, to collecting information, and to regulating a wide array of complicated activities from airplane safety to public health. These professional activities are enabled and augmented by the reliable and scientific collection of information that both government and the private sector rely upon for decision-making. In many

112 DOBEL

cases, such as weather, ocean forecasting, or economic growth and employment data, the entire private sector and large areas of international markets depend upon high-quality U.S. data.

Second, the existing professional public service has been engaged in implementing the legal and policy initiatives of an outgoing administration. The core principle of nonpartisan govern- ance depends upon respecting the independence and capacity of professional public servants to change from one set of priorities to a different set of democratically authorized priorities. Past efforts to implement a policy that the new administration will supersede should never be penalized. This is the key ethical stance of professional civil service in a democracy. To permit individuals to be targeted strikes at the heart of nonpartisan public service.

The point here is that senior civil service leaders need to demonstrate quick and immediate courage, as well as political savvy, to prevent personal attacks against individuals in the civil service. Protecting the core competence and integrity of individual civil servants flows from four interrelated legal and moral obligations of agency leaders.

.� First, career civil servants have the obligation to “protect the core.” Protecting the core competencies of an agency is one of the primary legal and moral stewardship obliga- tions of the professional public service. Having updated expertise in relevant areas of law, science, human resources, social science, or compliance and risk assessment is critical to the effectiveness and legitimacy of government. Maintaining high-level expertise and updated skill sets is an obligation to future generations, but also to future elected and appointed officials, so that they can enter office assuming competent and independent actors. Stewardship of this core competence in skill and knowledge permits future executives from either party to depend upon strong, knowledgeable, informed, or effective public performance.

.� Second, protecting these boundaries also presumes that senior public service leaders protect the independent judgment of professionals who are informed by best practices and intellectual advances in their respective fields, such as engineering, science, or social sciences. The entire point of professional government is to create and protect independent voices of expertise whose loyalty is to the law rather than to an individ- ual, to ensure that the common good and professional expertise are not subverted by short-term market interests or private or political ends.

.� Third, career public servants have the obligation to preserve the ability of officials to respond to the legal and ethical directives of newly appointed officials to change pol- icy. This means officials should be able to move beyond past mandates without fear of future retaliation, and to presume that good-faith implementation of legally authorized policy changes will be respected by elected officials and appointees.

. Fourth, career public servants have an obligation to establish and preserve stable rela- tionships with their authorizers in the legislature. In the United States, accountability is plural to legislatures, courts, and executives; oversight is a complicated business. It often involves policy differences between branches, and senior public officials need to find common ground for agreement and build relationships of trust and respect that can endure beyond a policy or budgetary dispute. These enduring legislative relations are critical for any agency’s long-term well-being and nuanced oversight.

These obligations flow from a stewardship of sustained governmental capacity to act based upon the best knowledge and professional expertise. They require creating long-term insulation

GUEST EDITORIAL 113

from the self-interests of individuals or groups. The ongoing battles in Washington heighten what remains a fundamental tension and ethical challenge for all senior public servants at any level of government. Actions to ensure that accountability is consistent with professional autonomy and core professional knowledge are a vital and expected tension that shapes the legitimacy to change policy and action in light of due process and professional standards, and minimize the possibility for vendettas or punishment.

REFERENCES

Lizza, R. (2017). Why Sally Yates stood up to Trump. The New Yorker, May 29. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2017/05/29/why-sally-yates-stood-up-to-trump

Mandell, M. (2017). Comey: “Honestly concerned” Trump might “lie” about interactions. NBC News. Retrieved from http://www.nbcnews.com/card/why-james-comey-left-paper-trail-n769736

114 DOBEL

Copyright of Public Integrity is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.