Friend of the blog Eric Biber has posted “Too Many Things to Do: How to Deal with the Dysfunctions of Multiple-Goal Agencies” on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
All federal agencies must cope with the challenges of trying to achieve success on the multiple goals laid out for them by Congress, the President, or the public-at-large, with varying degrees of success. Recent economics and political science literature has laid out a theoretical framework that helps us understand why agencies might succeed in achieving some goals and fail in achieving other goals: Agencies will systematically underperform on goals that are hard to measure and that conflict with the achievement of other more measurable goals. The lack of information about these hard-to-measure goals means that there will be fewer rewards to agencies for any success on those goals. While agencies in theory might be able to overcome this lack of information problem through technological and organizational innovation (where feasible), in many cases agency missions, historical inertia, and the professional orientation of agency staff will interfere with innovation, as shown by a case study of the U.S. Forest Service. Having diagnosed the source of the problem, the paper then examines various options that principals (such as Congress) might have to address it.
Turtle Talk 