Bush Management Style and Katrina

The Bush administration has had a well deserved reputation for extremely tight message control. Almost nothing comes out of the Administration if not approved by the folks at the very top. I came across a striking example of this in an editorial by Dana Milbank via Kevin Drum. Note the final paragraph Drum pulls out

Hughes replied that ambassadors are free to talk -- if they use the talking points she sends them. "If they make statements based on something I sent them," she said, "they're not going to be called on the carpet."

Ambassadors are only supposed to speak based on statements given by the White House. There is no room for independent action by the Ambassador. Given this there is no way for an Ambassador to act in the face of some novel situation, a sudden emergency, until the Administration focuses on it and develops its talking points and strategy.
That's the situation Ambassadors face.

Given that this message discipline has been the hallmark of everything this Administration does, it seems very likely that federal emergency management would be under the same sort of restrictions. No independent action until the White House becomes involved. If that is the case, is there any wonder at the performance of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, given that Bush did not become involved until several days after the Hurricane struck?

[Update - Sun Sep 11, 2005, 1:37 PM] This Newsweek article covers much the same issues in greater depth.

The Challenger disaster and modern management

Richard Fynman served on the review board which studied the causes of the Challenger disaster in 1986. One of his chief observations was that there existed a huge disconnect between Engineers who worked closely with the spacecraft and Management. While the Engineers were aware and knowledgeable of the many risks with the spacecraft, Management was generally much more ignorant. Management had a very rosy view of the status of the craft and it's ability to be launched safely. The Engineers were a great deal more skeptical. And detailed investigation demonstrated that, not surprisingly really, the Engineers view was much closer to reality. So something about the management of the program prevented accurate communication of the status of the spacecraft from the ground up to Management.

The same problems still existed for the Columbia disaster in 2003. It seems to me that much the same problem could be found at the FBI and CIA prior to 9/11. There was a great deal of information available to front line members of those organizations which simply did not get up the chain of command.

The point here is that there seems to be a fairly widespread problem with a failure to communicate from the ground up a chain of command. Furthermore, the problem seems to be that management is resistant to hearing about problems. Management is isolating itself. Unfortunately, this isolation frequently results in disaster.

This leads to one of the reasons for the strong dislike of President Bush. Far from trying to solve this problem, he intends to exacerbate it. This is especially evident with the recent cabinet shakeup. The attitude of this administration is not that we need to improve communication from the front line to the top, that the folks at the top need to do a better job of listening to those on the front line. Rather this administration apparently feels that the only problem is that front line folks talk at all. This administration acts as if it will decide what is going on in the world and the role of front line folks is only to support them and take the fall if disaster occurs. This is an awful system of management.