Stifling the Civil Service

By Steve Kelman

Thursday, July 31, 2003; Page A19

The uproar in Congress and elsewhere this week over a "terrorism futures market" is a fine example of how to make bureaucracies even more timid and unimaginative than they already are. Even if the aborted Pentagon plan wasn't such a great idea, senators have no business demanding that the civil servants who dared produce it should be fired or pilloried.

First off: The idea of a "terrorism futures market" isn't as outlandish as it's been made to sound. It is an outgrowth of a number of years of cutting-edge academic research and of practice growing out of that research. Financial markets for stocks and bonds generally work well because prices in those markets represent the bets about a company's prospects among large numbers of people who have a strong interest in them (because they have their own money at stake) and thus are likely to make the best guesses about what will happen in the future. The idea is that the average result of those many bets by many strongly motivated people will provide better information than the informed bet of any one decision-maker, no matter how smart that decision-maker is.

This idea has in recent years been applied to presidential elections, where a number of academics have organized an interesting futures market, and to other public events. Some people at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) thought that maybe this could be used to provide our country's decision-makers with a good source of information to assist in combating terrorism.

For a number of reasons that don't need to be repeated here, this was probably a bad idea. But that's not the point. Coming up with offbeat and unusual ideas is what we pay DARPA to do. They're not called "advanced research projects" for nothing. DARPA exists to explore notions that may turn out to have value but that traditional military organizations are likely to find too unproven or wacky. In the past, DARPA's wild and crazy ideas have produced such minor innovations as the Internet.

Most new ideas in life turn out to be bad ones, but imaginative thinking is also the engine of progress. Surely there is no better way to discourage imagination than to fire people whose ideas are hastily judged as unacceptable.

The congressional calls for rolling heads are not just bad for DARPA. They are a recipe for bad government. Congress is fresh from excoriating the FBI for not listening to the field agents who wanted to pursue leads involving suspicious people taking flight instruction. Why do you think that happened? Because the FBI had established a ponderous review process that had to be followed before such suggestions from people on the front lines could be approved. The purpose, of course, was to avoid the danger that some front-line civil servant would make a mistake that would lead to congressional calls to punish the FBI.

We have too much bureaucracy in government, and not enough incentives for our civil servants to be creative and innovative. This atmosphere also makes the government a less attractive place for young people who want to be creative in their work.

If the DARPA witch hunt leads to the discipline or dismissal of employees whom we have asked to show creativity, it will send a chill through the civil service that will be devastating to anybody who believes in effective government.

The writer is a professor of public management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He will answer questions about this column during a Live Online discussion at 4 p.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com.