Governing

Bureaucratic blight

官僚体制的枯萎

WASHINGTON, DC

The federal government’s ability to operate effectively was already in question. Then Donald Trump became its master

联邦政府有效运作的能力已经受到质疑。如今，唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)成了他的主人

When donald trump took office in January 2017, Joel Clement was entering his seventh year running the Interior Department’s Office of Policy Analysis. Mr Clement worked on climate-change preparedness, particularly for Alaskan Natives in low-lying coastal villages. He knew that Mr Trump was a climate-change sceptic, but, he explains, “I didn’t think there would be a problem. These were actual people at risk. It’s not a question of what caused climate change; it’s what was already happening. I was naive. They came out swinging.” In June 2017 Mr Clement— who has experience in neither accounting nor the fossil-fuel industry—was reassigned to an office that collects royalty checks from oil, gas and mining firms.

2017年1月，唐纳德·特朗普(donald trump)上任时，乔尔·克莱门特(Joel Clement)正进入执掌内政部政策分析办公室的第七年。克莱门特致力于应对气候变化，特别是为沿海低洼村庄的阿拉斯加原住民服务。他知道特朗普对气候变化持怀疑态度，但他解释说，“我不认为气候变化是有什么值得怀疑的。事实已经表明有人处在气候变化下的危险环境之中。问题不在于是什么致使了气候变化，而是要面对这已经发生了。我曾经对此还是很天真，但现在气候变化已经带来巨大影响。克莱门特既没有会计经验，也没有化石燃料行业的经验。2017年6月，他被调任到一个从石油、天然气和矿业公司收取特许权使用费的办公室。

 

Mr Clement was one of 27 senior officials reassigned; he resigned soon afterwards. Perhaps he should not have been surprised. Different administrations do things differently. Mr Trump ran as a climate-change sceptic and made Jeff Sessions his first attorney-general; of course his environmental and civil-rights policies would be different from Barack Obama’s. Yet even those who wish the federal government were much smaller have an interest in making sure that its bureacracies can perform the tasks that most Americans agree are vital, from air-traffic control to co-ordinating the response to natural disasters. The federal government’s ability to do these things was in question long before 2016. Then Mr Trump happened.

克莱门特是被调任的27名高级官员之一;不久他就辞职了。也许他不应该感到惊讶。不同的政府采取不同的措施。特朗普以气候变化怀疑论者的身份参选，并任命杰夫•塞申斯(Jeff Sessions)为首任司法部长;当然，他的环境和民权政策将与巴拉克•奥巴马不同。然而，即使是那些希望联邦政府规模小得多的人，也有兴趣确保联邦政府各部门能够履行大多数美国人认为至关重要的任务，从空中交通管制到协调应对自然灾害。早在2016年之前，联邦政府做这些事情的能力就受到了质疑。如今这一切在特朗普身上应验了。

词汇

attorney-general/  司法部长；总检察长

 

Criticising the federal government— which employs around 2.1m civilians, making it America’s single biggest employer—is the hardiest perennial of American politics. To many outside Washington, DC, it is an abstraction and hence easy to caricature, mock or blame. Its most visible bits (namely, Congress) tend to be unpopular, while its essential functions often go unseen. Americans seldom encounter the scientists ensuring their water stays clean or that nuclear waste is properly disposed of. Most people do not think of the men and women they salute at football games as employees of the federal government.

批评雇佣了210万平民的联邦政府，使其成为美国最大的雇主，这是美国政治中最难对付的常年问题。对于华盛顿特区以外的许多人来说，这是一个抽象概念，因此很容易被讽刺、嘲笑或指责。其最明显的部分(即国会)往往不受欢迎，而其基本职能往往不为人知。美国人很少能求得能确保水保持清洁或核废料得到妥善处理的科学家。大多数人并不认为他们在足球比赛中敬礼的男男女女是联邦政府的雇员。

词汇

Perennial/多年生的；常年的

Caricature/  把……画成漫画；滑稽地描述，使滑稽化

Salute/  致敬，欢迎；敬礼

Despite many Republican presidents running on government-shrinking platforms, and many Democrats doing the opposite, the size of the federal workforce has remained relatively constant since the 1960s. Since 1965 the federal government has added five departments and multiple agencies that collectively employ hundreds of thousands of people. It has also endured long hiring freezes. The total number of workers matters less to effective governance than what those workers do, and here alarm bells have been ringing for some time. Max Stier, who heads the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that advocates for an effective civil service, says that the “legacy government has not kept up with the world around it…[and] has not been updated to address the problems of tomorrow.”

尽管许多共和党总统都是在政府收缩的平台上竞选，而许多民主党总统则相反，但自上世纪60年代以来，联邦政府的劳动力规模一直相对稳定。自1965年以来，联邦政府增加了五个部门和多个机构，总共雇用了数十万人。他还经历了长期的招聘冰河期。对于有效治理而言，工人总数的重要性不如工人的工作，而这方面的警钟已经敲响了一段时间。公共服务伙伴关系(Partnership for Public Service)是一个倡导有效公务员制度的无党派组织，其负责人马克斯•斯蒂尔(Max Stier)表示，“传统政府没有跟上周围世界的步伐……(而且)也没有更新换代，以应对未来的问题。”

词汇

Nonpartisan/无党派的；超党派的

 

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which audits the federal government, has long warned of problems in recruiting and retaining public-spirited workers. The compensation system was designed in 1949 and has barely since been altered. This can make it hard to offer competitive salaries to, say, cyber-security experts. Civil-service rules have not been updated since the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. The government frequently recruits for positions whose descriptions were written 40 years ago and do not reflect the actual work being done. According to Mr Stier, the federal IT workforce has five times as many people over the age of 60 as under 30, and most of the $95bn spent on federal IT goes to patching and maintaining ancient systems. And while low and mid-level government workers earn salaries comparable to or better than what they could make in the private sector, senior officials earn far less. Government workers must also endure hiring freezes, furloughs and government shutdowns.

负责审计联邦政府的美国审计总署(GAO)长期以来一直警告说，在招聘和留住具有公益精神的员工方面存在问题。薪酬体系是1949年设计的，自那以来几乎没有改变过。这使得向网络安全专家等提供具有竞争力的薪酬变得困难。自1978年的《公务员制度改革法案》以来，公务员制度规则一直没有更新。政府经常招聘的职位描述是40年前写的，不能反映实际工作。斯蒂尔表示，联邦政府IT部门60岁以上员工的数量是30岁以下员工的5倍，在联邦政府用于IT部门的950亿美元中，大部分用于修补和维护古老的操作系统。尽管中低级别政府工作人员的工资水平与私营部门相当，甚至更高，但高级官员的工资要低得多。政府工作人员还必须忍受停止招聘、休假和政府关门。

Until fairly recently federal workers did at least receive non-monetary compensation, such as reputational boosts, or the satisfaction of contributing to the common good. Teresa Gerton, who heads the National Academy of Public Administration, says this bargain has started to fray. “We saw it during the shutdown last year. The impact that had on the morale of the current and future public workforce was devastating.” Nor does serving for the most divisive president in modern history provide the same social compensation as serving a Reagan or a Clinton.

直到最近，联邦政府的工作人员至少还能得到非金钱形式的补偿，比如声誉提升，或者为公共利益做出贡献的满足感。美国国家公共行政学院(National Academy of Public Administration)院长特蕾莎•格顿(Teresa Gerton)表示，这一协议已开始出现分歧。“我们在去年政府关门期间看到了这一点。对当前和未来公共劳动力士气的影响是毁灭性的。”为现代史上分歧最大的总统服务，提供的社会补偿也比不上为里根或克林顿服务。

 

Morale in the intelligence community and State Department—both frequent targets of Mr Trump’s ire—is lower than the Badwater Basin. Intelligence officers usually battle to get their work included in the president’s daily brief. Today, says a source familiar with American intelligence, they fight to stay off it, lest their analysis set the president off because it clashes with his fixed beliefs. Former foreign-service officers (FSOS) complain about a lack of direction and months of painstaking work being nullified by a presidential tweet. In recent weeks two ex-FSOS have written op-eds in newspapers explaining why they could no longer serve this White House. That is rarely done: FSOS understand they will serve administrations whose policies they may dislike, but they represent something greater than themselves, and few slam the door on the way out. Often the people leaving have good offers in the private sector and are the sort of people that a government should want to retain.

情报部门和国务院的士气——这两个都是特朗普频频发泄愤怒的目标——低于恶水盆地。情报官员通常会努力让他们的工作被纳入总统的每日简报。今天，据一位熟悉美国情报的消息人士称，他们竭力避免参与其中，以免他们的分析因为与他的固定信念相冲突而触发总统。前外交官员(FSOS)抱怨说，总统的一条推文取消了他们几个月来的辛勤工作并使得丢失方向。最近几周，两名前外交官员成员在报纸上发表专栏文章，解释他们为何不能再为白宫服务。这种情况很少发生:外交官员明白，他们将为那些他们可能不喜欢其政策的政府服务，但他们代表着比自己更伟大的东西，很少有人会在退出时砰地一声关上大门。通常离开的人在私营部门有很好的工作机会，是政府应该留住的那种人。

词汇

Ire/愤怒

nullified/取消的

 

Nor is the problem limited to departing personnel. Mr Trump’s penchant for installing people on an acting basis rather than formally nominating them, the unusually high number of unfilled positions, the headspinning rate of turnover among senior staff and the number of nominees he has had to withdraw—65, compared with 34 for Mr Obama at this point in his presidency—render government unstable. Agencies’ attention turns toward senior-staff turnover rather than their missions; recruits do not know who they will work for in six months.

这个问题不仅限于离职人员。特朗普倾向于通过行动让人就任而不是正式提名,异常高数额的空缺职位,令人头晕目眩的年长员工的人员流动以及他撤回的已经被提名的员工数目——65，相比较奥巴马在位时的34人——这致使了政府的不稳定。国际机关的注意力转向高级职员的更替，而不是他们的使命;新员工不知道他们将在6个月内为谁工作。

词汇

Penchant/嗜好；倾向

Install/安装；使就任

Nominee/被任命者；被提名的人

Presidency/总统的职位（任期）；管辖；支配

Render/致使

 

Of course, not everyone in government is running for the exits. Mr Trump has plenty of fans among immigration police, whose former acting head praised the president for “taking the handcuffs off”. Morale, measured in annual surveys, is also comparatively high at the departments of Transportation and Health and Human Services, agencies that Mr Trump has either boosted or ignored.

当然，并不是所有的政府官员都在寻求退路。特朗普在移民警察中有很多粉丝，他们的前代理局长称赞总统“脱下了手铐”。以年度调查衡量，交通、卫生和公共服务部的士气也相对较高，而特朗普要么支持要么忽视了这些部门。

词汇

handcuff/手铐

 

If the Trump administration is upset about the hollowing out of American government, it does not show. The Agriculture Department is losing researchers after Sonny Perdue, the secretary, announced that two research agencies would move to Kansas City, not an unreasonable request in itself, but one which some see as a way to sideline inconvenient personnel. Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, celebrated their departure at a Republican fundraiser, calling it “a wonderful way to streamline government”. But there is a difference between streamlining government and just not governing, which is what seems to be happening in swathes of America’s single-largest organisation.

如果说特朗普政府对美国政府的空心化感到不安，那是没有表现出来的。在农业部长桑尼·珀杜(Sonny Perdue)宣布两家研究机构将迁往堪萨斯城(Kansas City)之后，农业部正在失去研究人员，这本身并不是一个不合理的要求，但一些人认为这是一种将不方便的人员边缘化的方式。总统的代理幕僚长米克•马尔瓦尼(Mick Mulvaney)在一场共和党筹款活动上庆祝了他们的离开，称这是“精简政府的一种绝妙方式”。但是精简政府机构和不进行管理是有区别的，这似乎是美国最大的单一组织中正在发生的事情。

词汇

Sideline/迫使退出