This piece originally appeared at State Capacitance.
Some few government agencies have a bias towards doing things – what Caleb Watney calls the operational mindset. The Census Bureau, for instance, exists to take a census. Most agencies do not, which is often a consequence of the way they are organized.
In Agency Missions, I discuss two ways to organize agencies and the typical mindset that results from each. One way to organize agencies is by subject matter – for example, the Forest Service does everything related to the subject of forests (including functions such as research and administration). Another is by function – for example, the National Science Foundation undertakes the abstract function of research (and researches many subjects). A subject matter agency has a concrete mission, and therefore tends to have an operational mindset. A functional agency tends to find this mindset unnatural.
In The High Tide of Reform I use the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a case study of these two types of agencies. Its 1942 reorganization turned its subject-matter agencies into functional agencies, which was almost immediately followed by the department losing its political entrepreneurialism and being captured by the agricultural interest groups. The reorganization demonstrates the harm of removing an operational mission.
But the history supports an even stronger claim: the decline of USDA’s operational mindset was not only a consequence of functional reorganization – it was an intended consequence. The farm lobby had strongly endorsed functional reorganization in order to make the USDA bureaus more blindly responsive to the farmers lobby, and therefore less mission-oriented.
So does an operational mindset lead to greater state capacity? Almost certainly. Even the opponents of state capacity agreed – namely the farm lobby. The farm lobby debated USDA organization using these concepts, and eventually won control over the previously-independent bureaucracy.
The lobby’s ultimate success in capturing the bureaucracy didn’t happen overnight. Their victory in the 1940s was laid much earlier, through their planning in the 1920s.
