“Do you enjoy what you do?” my teenage daughter asked me the other day. Seeing the confused look on my face, she explained, “The only reason I ask is because you never hear of anyone wanting to be a government worker.”
That made me laugh. I could just imagine going to my daughter’s Kindergarten class ten years ago to tell the kids what I do every day. “Um, well, I go to meetings. I research, I consult... I develop policy! That’s right kids, I help create government P-O-L-I-C-Y.”
I can see little Johnny scratching his head. “But what do you really do?”
And in a moment of frank honesty, I might say: “Johnny, I'm actually part of an elaborate sausage-making factory. It’s messy. Even the end product is not always pretty.”
Poor little Johnny would think I grind meat for a living.
But as bureaucrats, we do grind something and at times it’s hard to predict what will come out. Without getting into too many details, let’s just say there is a give and take in government. What we as government workers might think is appropriate, our political masters may not.
There are some projects I’ve worked on for months that don’t see the light of day. This is inevitable when something that seems like a great idea at the time is no longer deemed viable. Maybe circumstances change... or a politician’s gut feeling. Sometimes we will never know. We don’t make the final decisions and we don’t create the budget. We simply divvy up the spoils (i.e. taxes) that fund your health care, education and highways.
We also exist in a hierarchical structure that doesn’t allow things to move very quickly. The general public likes to point out that government is slow and unresponsive. Why does it take so long for the government to do stuff? Well, there’s a reason.
Let me try to explain this metaphorically. Government is a big ship with many moving parts. It’s steered by a few elected people who rarely change course drastically because there be icebergs in these waters. Every political leader is all too aware that even the Titanic can sink, and when it does, they go down with the ship. It’s called an election.
An astute politician will understand when a change in direction is warranted. Even then, it carries risk. For example, one would have thought most Americans would have supported Obamacare for uninsured Americans, yet Barrack Obama paid a political price initially for implementing this new program.
Good politicians tend to know what the public “feels” about a certain issue. They tend to know what’s worth fighting for. Sometimes they favour one group over another – namely that portion of the population that got them elected – but that’s to be expected if they hope to be elected again.
The main thing is they’re transparent in their decision-making. Fortunately, in our modern democracy, we have independent agencies, the press, and political opposition to hold governments to account.
And we have government workers. Yes, believe it or not, government workers do make a difference! The bureaucracy itself is an institution of stability that ensures our elected leaders cannot simply do whatever they please.
When a decision is made that goes against current policy, we may be forced to speak truth to power. That’s when things get interesting. For some reason, those at the top don’t like to be told they’re not following the rules.
And even though politicians have the final say, government workers still have influence. We like to joke about the options we sometimes present to our leaders, forcing them to pick the lesser of extremes. One might, just as a hypothetical, provide three options to decision makers, knowing they will likely pick the one in the middle.
Most importantly, bureaucrats are the ones with an understanding of the costs, the benefits and the risks of a new policy. Ideally, we should present policies that provide the greatest benefit to the most people at the lowest cost. If our elected should choose the policy with the least benefit to the least amount of people, that’s their business. We might call that decision “political.”
It’s all part of the fun when you work in a sausage-making factory.
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