Politics
Chaos Amidst the COVID-19 Crisis
When Politics Topples Public Management
Written by Sarah L. Young, Kimberly K. Wiley, & Elizabeth A.M. Searing
What happens to public services in the United States when government breaks down? In today’s society we often see politics impede public services. Recent state and national crises have magnified how our public service delivery systems break down when politics interferes.
For example, the State of Illinois’ politically polarized state legislature and governor held the budget hostage from 2015 to 2017 (Young, Wiley, & Searing, 2019). During that time, 69% of social services agencies received almost no payments for the services they provided under their executed contracts with the state: agencies like emergency youth shelters, drug and alcohol abuse treatment centers, domestic violence shelters, and prisoner reentry programs. The result? A 46% reduction in life-saving social services provided during that time period (United Way of Illinois, 2017).
Even more recently, the current COVID-19 Pandemic not only ravaged our health systems, it exposed gaping holes in our federal public delivery system. Hospitals found themselves short of the critical personal protective equipment they needed to reduce contamination and protect their staff. Our president invoked a little-known component of the Defense Production Act of 1950, which required private sector firms to produce such equipment (U.S. Congress, 1970; Memorandum on Order Under the Defense Production Act Regarding General Motors Company, 2020). Beleaguered manufacturers switched from making automobiles to ventilators (among other things), which was an intricate mechanical equipment that they had little to no production knowledge of. Supplies reached critically low levels.
Theory tells scholars and practitioners what to expect to happen. Theory is kind of like a navigational chart, it tells us roughly how to get from point A to point B. Public management has relied on two main theories, New Public Management (NPM) and New Public Governance (NPG), which were developed sequentially over the course of the last few decades by public administration scholars. NPM was developed from private sector management ideas. NPM views citizens as customers and employs ideas seminal to markets to deliver public goods in the most efficient way.
One of the biggest critiques of NPM’s is that citizens are not simply customers, they are the critical components to the “publicness” (Metcalfe & Richards, 1991) in public agencies. NPG followed and tried to establish a bigger role for citizens in the process. NPG focuses less on the outcome and more on the process, ensuring that citizens have a front and center role in the delivery of public goods and services. Under NPG, citizens are stakeholders who work together in voluntary groups to ensure public goods and services are delivered. However, the focus on process can potentially impede the effective delivery of services.
The thing that both NPM and NPG have missed is that public goods and services are not immune from politics.
Yet, both theories rely on political neutrality in order for them to chart a path forward. NPM requires a structure to exist that separates policy making from service delivery to ensure accountability. NPG, on the other hand, fixes that structural issue by recognizing policymaking and policy implementation is often intertwined. NPG moves public servants from being managers of goods and services to managers of people.
The problem with that transition is three-fold: A) it assumes public servants have the emotional intelligence needed to manage complex arrangements of volunteer stakeholders; B) it assumes public servants are able to put aside their own morals and values while they help a group of people develop theirs (which may include incompatible views); and C) these networks of people are the critical component, but they may not be equipped to deliver services. NPG tries to correct for these challenges by relying on a group’s collectiveness and good intentions to ultimately win out. Unless politics are entirely separate and neutral, that is a fatally flawed assumption.
Public organizations are subject to three different types of political influences.
1. Our government was originally set up by our founding fathers to ensure a representative democracy. That means that citizens elect politicians who hold similar beliefs and values to them. Those elected politicians hold positions that are responsible for appointing leadership over public agency. For example, citizens within a state elect a Governor, who appoints executive leadership over agencies like the state’s department of health, education.
2. Regardless of how well-intended public servants are, they are not devoid of their own thoughts, beliefs and morals. We cannot fairly expect them to be. Their own personal influences mixed with their formative positions within public agencies may result in them unintentionally impacting the agency outputs.
3. Many years ago public administration scholars developed this false notion that politics and public agencies are separate, and this was the best way to combat government corruption and justify government consolidation. We have continued to rely on that false notion as a socially constructed reality that we use to create a sense of legitimacy within public administration, hamstringing us from developing and teaching more nuanced and realistic options for handling the roles of politics in public administration.
Our recent state and national crises have shown us just how intertwined politics and the work of government is.
For example, in the case of Illinois, the state had done everything right under the NPM model. They bid out their social service contracts, thereby ensuring that pecuniary market efficiency occurred, and named their citizens as the customers who would receive the benefits provided by those contracts. But what wasn’t accounted for was that the contracts were written and signed based on the policy goals of past legislatures, yet they still needed a funding mechanism. The state’s funding mechanism is their annual budget, which also needed to be passed by the legislature. In the case of Illinois, the budget impasse caused by three legislative sessions of political play led to a breakdown between policymaking and policy implementation for social service provisions, ultimately illustrating a fatal flaw within NPM (Young, Wiley, & Searing, 2020).
In the case of the COVID-19 Pandemic and aligned with NPG, there was a network of engaged citizens originally assembled as the coronavirus task force but the federal government did little to engage them (Lovelace, 2020).
Instead, resources were allocated based on political exploitation. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and advisor said the federal stockpile was controlled by the Office of the President, “…(it) was supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use” (Forgey, 2020). The exploitation component became terrifyingly obvious when considered within the context of the president’s own statement that the governors “have to treat us well” in order to get federal support (Fox News, 2020).
No centralized actor appeared to help coordinate a response.
States engaged in eBay-style bidding wars for medical supplies. In Spring 2020, school districts received minimal guidance in many states, and directly conflicting policy directive from the federal government (who has little standing to issue such directives given that education is a state right under the powers shared between the federal and state governments).
In Fall 2020, district-by-district patchwork response plans emerged that left parents frustrated and teachers seeking union approval to walk out in strikes (Booker, 2020). NPG could have been a useful tool to chart our way through the COVID-19 crisis, but what we learned was that during times of crisis the value placed on good governance and citizen engagement comes in second to political survival.
Going forward, all levels of government will likely face unprecedented hardship as tax bases disappear (Larson & McDonald, 2020; McDonald & Larson, 2020) and the federal government tries to figure out the financial consequences of the only national emergency ever declared in all 50 states at one time (Coleman, 2020). The trust relationship between many citizens and government is broken. Our system is shattered, and we need a map that tells us how to put it back together again. If NPM and NPG can’t chart a course for us, how do we find our way?
The answer is in buried in our history. We have largely ignored the effects of politics on public management in our theories. But at the outset of our country, the founding fathers actually accounted for it. The basis of the United States government allowed for a tension to occur between politics and administration. It’s why the Executive branch of government, which is responsible for policy implementation, is headed by a popularly elected leader. We must take a constitutional approach and move back to our roots. We need to preserve “the nation’s constitutional heritage and support the rule of law” (Newbold, 2014, p.14).
In order to move forward, we must first start to go backwards.
Author Biographies
Sarah L. Young is an assistant professor of political science and assistant director of Academic Engagement at University of North Georgia. She is a nonprofit management, public management, and community engagement scholar.
Kimberly K. Wiley is an assistant professor of nonprofit leadership and community development in the Department of Family, Youth, and Community Sciences at the University of Florida. She is a pub- lic policy, nonprofit management, and qualitative methodology scholar.
Elizabeth A. M. Searing is an assistant professor of public and nonprofit management at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her primary research focus is the financial management of nonprofit and social enterprise organizations, but she also conducts work on comparative social economy and applied ethics for the social sciences.
References
Booker, B. (July 28, 2020). Teachers Union OKs Strikes If Schools Reopen Without Safety Measures In Place. NPR.com. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/28/896265783/teachers-union-oks-strikes-if-schools-reopen-without-safety-measures-in-place
Coleman, J. (2020, April 23). All 50 states under disaster declaration for first time in US history. The Hill. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/492433-all-50-states-under-disaster-declaration-for-first
Forgey, Q. (2020, April 3). Strategic National Stockpile description altered online after Kushner’s remarks. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/strategic-national-stockpile-description-altered-after-kushners-remarks-163181
Fox News. (2020, March 24). LIVE BLOG: Fox News hosts virtual coronavirus town hall with President Trump. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/live-blog-fox-news-coronavirus-town-hall-president-trump
Larson, Sarah and McDonald, Bruce, When the Beaches Close: Impact of COVID-19 upon County Fiscal Health in Florida (May 6, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3594898 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3594898
Lovelace, B. (2020, June 18). Trump’s coronavirus task force is absent as states struggle with worsening outbreaks. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/trump-coronavirus-task-force-absent-as-states-struggle-with-new-cases.html
Metcalfe, L. and Richards, S. (1991) Improving Public Management, London: Sage.
McDonald, Bruce and Larson, Sarah, Implications of the Coronavirus on Sales Tax Revenue and Local Government Fiscal Health (July 22, 2020). Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3571827 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3571827
United Way of Illinois. (2017). United Way of Illinois Post-Stop Gap Funding Survey: High Level Findings. Chicago, IL. Retrieved from: https://www.uwayhelps.org/sites/uwayhelps.org/files/United%20Way%20Illinois%20Budget%20Survey.pdf
U.S. Congress. (1970) United States Code: Defense Production Act of , 50a U.S.C. §§ 2158 to 2166 Suppl.
Young, S., Wiley, K., & Searing, E. (2019). When Politics and Public Administration Collide: The Impact on Human Service Delivery. Illinois Municipal Policy Journal, 4(1), 103–120.
Young, Wiley, and Searing. (2020) “Squandered in Real Time”: How Public Management Theory Underestimated the Public Administration-Politics Dichotomy. American Review of Public Administration. 0(0), 0–00.
