For government officials, is anything more important than making the boss(es) look good?

by Ken

This story is left over from late last week, but I don't think that, in the time it has taken me to get around to it, it has lost its topicality. It got a certain amount of attention, but it needs more.

It's one of those periodic stark reminders of how the world so often doesn't run quite the way we naively think it does, or at least should. And it puts me in mind of a plot line last season on Blue Bloods involving Police Commissioner Reagan's daughter, Erin (Bridget Moynahan), who's an ADA in the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

Erin, coming from a police-saturated family (including not just a father but a grandfather who was the commissioner), is naturally a criminal-justice straight arrow, who sees her job as a prosecutor as serving the ends of justice and integrity and all those good things, until she finds herself suddenly being fast-tracked for Big Things in the office by a new superior, which is great until she's faced with compromising a case because, as the boss explains to her, nothing in her job is more important than making the boss look good.

It had a really uncomfortable ring of reality to it, and probably all of us who pay any attention at all to the workings of government have caught glimmerings of this mentality: that making superiors look good is not only a part of the job of many (most?) government officials, but sometimes almost seems as if it is the job. And it seems to me well to remember that, given the hierarchical nature of government structures, while most people have subordinates they can look to to make them look good, they also have superiors whom they have to make look good.

I think this item from the Washington Post's "In the Loop" column speaks quite well for itself. Since it was the lead item of the column, I'm guessing it was written by Loop-master Al Kamen, but the column was bylined "Al Kamen and Colby Itkowitz."

HHS official pens a caustic resignation letter

Frustrated by a federal government bureaucracy that was "profoundly dysfunctional" and that left him "offended as an American taxpayer," the director of a Department of Health and Human Services agency detailed his grievances in a pointed resignation letter.

For two years, David Wright ran the Office of Research Integrity, responsible for reviewing any misconduct in research projects. But Wright, in a letter obtained and published by ScienceInsider, said the role was "the very worst job I have ever had" the majority of the time.

Wright describes his inability to obtain approval to spend $35 to convert old cassette tapes to CDs. He tried to fill a vacancy in his office, but an HHS deputy secretary said there was a secret priority list and couldn't tell him where his open job fell.

Wright asserts in the letter, addressed to Assistant Secretary for Health Howard Koh, that government officials care more about their own advancement than the public good:

"Since I've been here I've been advised by my superiors that I had 'to make my bosses look good.' I've been admonished: 'Dave, you are a visionary leader but what we need here are team players.' Recently, I was advised that if I wanted to be happy in government service, I had to 'lower my expectations.' The one thing no one in OASH [Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health] leadership has said to me in two years is 'how can we help ORI better serve the research community?' Not once."

Wright alleges in the letter that Koh himself described his office as operating in an "intensely political environment."

No comment so far from OASH, HHS or the White House on Wright's takedown.

In an admittedly quick search, I found a number of outlets that had picked up the story, but I still didn't find any comment from OASH, HHS, or the White House.

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