Trump Primer One: Governments operate on both laws and agreements

If it comes right down to it, I have some compassion for our newest president. It's not only because he has no experience in how to work with a government bureaucracy but more that he has not surrounded himself by people willing to teach him (assuming of course that he would listen).  His current efforts are rather like someone wearing a captain's cap boarding an aircraft carrier and telling the crew to set sails.  It  leaves the people at the radar and computer controls of a massive war ship sort of at a loss.

I don't pretend to know everything there is to know about how government bureaucracy works, but I have an idea from working with the layers of bureaucracy and political intrigue endemic to the president's office of a large state university system. Admittedly, our budget was probably four or five zeros short of the national federal budget, but--trust me--when it came to politics and entrenched interests, we could compete internationally. One of the vice presidents even wrote a book about the experience. He called it "Who Runs the University?" That was up to debate.

My boss, the president, employed me as his trouble shooter and since my primary experience had been as a faculty member and then as an assistant dean on one of the smaller campuses, there was quite a learning curve.  It was during this time that I learned what was to be the most important lesson of all--and the one I would like to teach our president.

Basically, this lesson is that governments and bureaucracies function within the framework of the laws that establish them but operate daily on the basis of common understandings and a hand shake.

Most bureaucracies, and my university system was no exception, have two different types of administrators and support staff. In a university, this takes the form of a distinction made between  the offices of so-called academic (instruction and research) and so-called support (finances, management, personnel). The relations between the two are generally cordial, but not always, especially if a current president values one over the other.

When I first joined the president's staff and realized that I had responsibility for budget, I went down to the fiscal affairs office, found the person who would be reviewing the budget and my purchase orders, and said basically that I wanted her to keep me out of prison and out of the clutches of the state auditor.  Because I respected her,  our working relationship was smooth and she went out of her way to help me--legally--fulfill the president's mandates.

When another president came in later, he didn't like the ways things were done. He refused to listen to her and completely undervalued her expertise. The result was a series of highly embarrassing investigative articles in the local newspaper about fiscal misadventures that he tried to blame on her and the eventual search for his successor.

So administrators--particularly those with little knowledge of how things are done--are wise to cultivate the various cabinet offices and respect their expertise. The opening days of a new presidency are not the time for wholesale change in policies that affect the day to day operations of a complex organization. This doesn't mean that change isn't possible, just that it is wise to get the cooperation of those support offices before launching out into situations where outcomes are not understood let alone considered. It's also unwise to antagonize the people charged with covering your butt.

I must admit to chortling when our president said that nobody knew how complex changing the health law was going to be. Hopefully, he (and those who voted for him) is learning about the law of unintended consequences. Nobody can anticipate all the possible outcomes (desirable and un-) but not to know that changing any law is complex and needs lots of buy-in simply tells me that our president has not been listening to his support staff. It's also not very good policy to undercut this staff, particularly not when they are in the public relations office--but that's another issue.  The policies that keep these offices operating smoothly are based on working agreements made when things blew up in the past.

I can't help feeling that the people who expect the president to address all their grievances all at once have been very unfair to him. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he became something of a tragic figure as he tries to fulfill their demands. But I see no way to get around that unless he and his supporters finally learn that great ships of state operate as they do for a reason and when they change direction they need a lot of sea space to do it.