The events on and after September 11, 2001 have brought new attention to the role of public administration in American Government. On November 9, 2001, OU Regents' Professor Ron Peters discussed with 2001 Julian J. Rothbaum Lecturer Matthew Holden, Jr. the implications for public administration of 9/11 and its aftermath.

RP: What do you think we have learned, if anything, about public administration since September 11, 2001?

MH: What September 11 accentuates more than any one thing for me about public administration is the importance of an intense public opinion and intense public reaction. A lot of things are happening for the moment that are drastic responses to the attacks so that there are now very, very high approval ratings for the president, a direct function of our collective response. This means that many other things come into the administrative process or stay out of it in different ways. Specifically, people have been very reluctant, and understandably probably validly reluctant, to come to grips with some reorganization questions, such as how to set up a structure to deal with the situation. As you know, Senator Lieberman has a very different concept from that which the president adopted and I won't say which is the right one or the wrong one. I personally tend to think the one the president adopted is the right one - that's Holden's personal view - but this was not a moment for the kind of severe debate that a senator who chaired a committee would usually expect. If the president set up an office and the senator says, "No, you should set up that office by statute and give us jurisdiction in the way that we normally have," you know that would be a normal 6-month, 8-month, 1-year, or 2-year fight. Instead, the ball has been put in the president's court initially.

We are now seeing situations that were dealt with in political science fifty years ago by Herman Summers. He was a professor of politics at Princeton who later became a big specialist in health care politics, but he wrote a book about his experience at the Office of War Mobilization and during World War II. Summers's concept was that the director of the Office of War Mobilization could only function effectively if he were in effect an assistant president. Now you know how much change has taken place in the executive office over those fifty years, but the same issues are now being formulated and reimplemented. The question is still how much direction and control will the director of this office have over the rest of the executive branch? At this moment the situation does not allow him to be an assistant president. He cannot take over OMB for example, and yet you and I both know that the ability to allocate funds is one of the powers you have to be effective. All those classical issues come back to us when we really had not expected to deal with them, and I must say that I did some recent quick checks a few days ago and these are issues that have been almost untouched. There is no book like Red Summers's book since 1951 and you go over to the last chapter and extract the lesson that Red Summers tried to extract and we are back to where Red was. That is one impact that September 11 has had. There are others.

RP: Let me just follow up on those issues that you mentioned regarding the creation of the office of Homeland Security, with respect to the debate over airport security and the specific question of whether the people who work at the airports and do that work should be federalized or not. It appears that there is basically a Republican and a Democratic perspective with the Democrats favoring the notion that if you are going to have effective government that you have to create an office that has budgetary authority, it has to have structure, and in the case of airport security you need a federalized agency to do it. Whereas, on the Republican side, it seems that there is a reticence to create new bureaucratic structures whether it be on the aspect of privatizing the airport security or on President Bush's reluctance to go all the way to give Governor Ridge the kind of budgetary control and authority that some are saying he needs. So I am wondering whether you think that, at least at one level, there is a continuation of normal politics in the sense that the two parties are expressing the philosophies that define them.

MH: I think you are right. We do see those. I also emphasize a little more strongly differences in the underlying interest group structure so that the Democratic and Republican support line up in different ways on these matters. The people who have some serious interest in privatization will likely be part of the interest group structure of the Republican party; but people who are likely to want the other result are likely part of the interest group structure of the Democratic party. I would particularly make the point that here is a matter that should be decided based on the need to produce a desirable social result, as opposed to the partisan interest on each side. We need a serious discussion of what it would take in fact to get the highest degree of security you can get for air travel, and it's not clear to me that having the system fully federalized would produce a higher level of competence and performance on the part of persons standing there at the gate who have to examine me and my baggage this morning as I head back to St. Louis, or whether you have those persons as employees of corporations or employees of government agencies. The questions are: Do they know what to look for? What are the signals they should follow? How do they handle the risk problem - they can't have thousands of people coming through, they can't have lines running way out into the street or the system will not move at all, but what do they do to expedite? What is called for and what sort of physical technology is applicable here? It is a very serious judgment and I am not sure that normal politics coming into it here is going to produce all that much of an improved result one way or the other. I do not hear people discussing, the way serious people in the Senate sometimes can discuss, what will produce the end result we are looking for.

RP: Harold Seidman wrote a book Politics, Position, and Power. He would not be surprised by what you say. It was the essence of his argument that the struggle over what he called politics, position, and power, which was basically a struggle over structure, was always inherently political, and that interest groups often win their battles over structure before they fight their battles over policy.

MH: And having fought their battles over structural policy, we need to ask how do we appraise the end result in the real world? Because the end result in the real world is whether or not people purposely carrying dangerous weapons are allowed to board the aircraft, and we have a couple of melodramatic examples in the last few days of people going aboard aircraft with dangerous weapons when they have gone through the clearance procedure and that's what we are talking about.

RP: You have made reference to the climate of public opinion as having had an effect on the current balance of power. You mentioned Senator Lieberman, for example, as having his differences with President Bush, but in the current climate President Bush being able to get his way with respect to the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security. In your second lecture, one of your primary themes was the effect of public opinion on the way in which the administrative state functions. I think that often we tend to associate public opinion more with electoral politics than we do with administration, and yet your point is that it is very relevant to the administrative state as well. One of the consequences of the September 11 events has been a very substantial, even a dramatic, increase in what the public opinion polls indicate as support for government and approval of government. Understanding that we cannot know certainly how long that tendency in public opinion will last, I am wondering if you can speculate on some of the factors that will contribute to a sustained public support of government as opposed to, at some point, a waning of that support and a return toward a more cynical level of support by the public.

MH: This is speculation on my part, but my guess at what's happening here is that the dramatic responses of public support for government goes to something that is very deep and has never been in doubt in my mind: public acceptance of the validity of the country. Declining public support for government in recent years has probably been a public disenchanted with various governmental policies, programs, debates, and the belief that needs were not being met or could be met better in some other way. What September 11 challenges is the viability of the very system itself, and the enthusiasm is really support for government as organized to manage and conduct an effective response to this problem. I will bet you that if you were to go six months and get a bunch of messy situations related to this problem you would find that the expression of dissatisfaction with the president is no longer the failure to support the president. Also, when the agenda moves to questions about internal distribution and redistribution, I think that public support for government will start to diminish. We are not dealing with those now.

RP: You have written about the concept of field administration, by which I take you to mean activities of what some have called street-level bureaucrats, people on the ground delivering public services out in the field. One of the immediate consequences of the September 11 events was tremendous rallying of public support, for example, in New York with the fire department and the police department, public health workers, medical personnel, and everyone that was involved in responding to these disasters. In reading some of your writing, I was struck by an example that you offered of failure of field administration. That example was the response of the New York City Police Department to the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn in 1991, in which the police department was criticized for having failed to respond to those circumstances as some people thought they ought to have. And yet just ten years later, everyone in New York is wearing NYPD baseball caps and Mayor Guliani and all the Yankees wore them at the World Series. I am wondering, in comparing these two incidences - the 1991 Crown Heights affair and then the September 11, 2001 attacks - and the way in which the public, in New York in particular, responded to their police department, are these simply differing circumstances that elicited a different public attitude, or do you think that something happened in field administration itself during the intervening time to transform the police department or the way in which it responds to crises?

MH: Probably more the former than the latter, but some of the latter. The latter meaning that there was a well-defined situation and police have a high level of training and a high level of motivation to deal with it. The difference between Ground Zero and Crown Heights is that Ground Zero is something that is of a different scale. Also, Ground Zero is something that severely injured everybody in the same way. There is unanimity as to injury and unanimity as to need and the police themselves are not disengaged from it. They went into it with determination and will, both the police and the fire department. They remind me of some work by William J. Gore, who was a political scientist of some activity just ahead of your generation and mine. Gore did studies of some fire departments and of how firemen responded to the challenge and their willingness, even their eagerness, to expose themselves to danger. Firemen went into the World Trade Center and took on this terrible situation, whereas in Crown Heights you had this severe dispute that split the neighborhood and the lines, the official lines, ran all the way up to the Mayor's office. They ran all the way into the community of New York City so that well-connected people were refusing to look at what was happening.

RP: So there is a lesson for field administration in this comparison because, if I hear you correctly, the context for effective field administration is one where the public is generally unified around some goal that it wants, and the role of the field administrator then is to respond to that generally accepted public need; and if the public is divided and conflicted, then public administrators in the field are going to be caught in that conflict in ways that cause them, as you suggested the New York City Police Department did back in 1991, to stand back and say, "Well, let's just wait until some consensus builds around the need for our intervention and then we will do it."

MH: Well it's a little more complex than that because a part of my view is that field administrators themselves are also engaged in the disputes; they are not neutrals. I had a discussion of this in which I tried to examine the factors that might cause field-level administrators actively to go forth in support of instructions they are given from central headquarters, for example, and when field administrators might choose not to commit themselves fully to implementing instructions that, in principle and purely administrative theory, they are supposed to implement. A part of the explanation is their own commitment to one side or the other. I will indulge myself with one other field administration subject. James W. Fesler was writing on this subject before World War II, and after Jim Fesler there is a little bit from Herb Kaufman, and then somehow or other the subject got shoved off of the intellectual agenda, so careful work going forward, giving both data and proved conceptions, was not there until a few years ago. Now this September 11 incident brings up all kinds of field administration problems. One of the interesting ones is the connection from the federal center through states all the way to local health units as to how to cope with the variety of biological threats, and local health departments don't really know what to do; they don't really know anything about Anthrax. We're discovering the top-level experts don't know much about it and are learning by doing. The administrative problem poses a real threat. How do you communicate rapidly and distribute supplies rapidly and so on, when in fact people don't know very much about it? And then you have to hook up procedures since federal, state, and local procedures will be different. It's one problem which we could have a couple of good students working hard for practical matter for a little while.

RP: I heard on the radio this morning that there is a report, I assume it is a survey or poll of some sort, but there is evidence that the public has less confidence in the pronouncements of Governor Ridge on Anthrax than they might if he were perceived as a nonpartisan professional. What the public wants is a voice from someone in whose professional judgment they would have confidence. Analogously, you would want a military general speaking to the conduct of a war. There is some lesser degree of confidence in Governor Ridge, not having anything to do with him personally but simply the fact that he is a political appointee serving at the behest of the president. When I heard that report it led me to think about the fact that there are circumstances in which the competence of field administration and the competence of the leadership of field administration is a tremendously important asset for the government, especially in times of crisis when people feel insecure. To go back to our earlier discussion of the Ground Zero in New York City, it was the competence of the police department and the fire department, their bravery as well, that must have contributed to this enhanced public approval of government. There is the perception that these people can get the job done or that they are getting the job done. I suppose conversely to the extent that the public, in the case of the Anthrax dimension of this problem, feels as though no one really knows what the answers are, this might lead them at some point to have less confidence in the government. I guess that is what you were saying earlier when you said that it depends upon what happens.

MH: Yes, on this one it is even narrower. Confidence depends on whether you are dealing with something where you think that there is or should be someone who can know. On questions of biology and chemistry, no one having governmental responsibilities is believable, unless he himself has expertise. I could not explain to you how these things work so I must call on someone else. Now you saw a little different version of this a few days ago when Senator Frist had taken on the role somehow of managing some public discussions and Senator Frist's unique quality is that he himself is not only trained as an M.D., but continues to a certain degree to practice as an M.D. and at least can stand up in front of a public camera and explain in rather straightforward terms how the human body works and so forth. In Frist's hearings and public reports, he was quick to align himself with some other people who are also professionals in the area, whose layer and level of confidence is way above his, and there was no insecurity and it did not look bad for him to say, "Okay, for that question so-and-so knows far more about that and would you come up here and answer that?" This is not unlike what happens when you see people going to hearings who are asked a question and they say, "Mr. Chairman, wait a minute. I need a staff person to answer the question."

RP: I have watched a number of the press briefings that Secretary Rumsfeld has conducted and one yesterday that I happened to watch involved him and General Franks who is in charge of this operation. It seemed to me that the Pentagon and the military are now paying a price for the public's perception of their efficiency in some of the conflicts of the last decade or so, thinking back especially to the Persian Gulf War in 1990, and that the public somehow expects the military to be able to deliver the results with great dispatch and precision, and yet they have clearly now involved themselves in a conflict which is likely to be protracted with no certain results, and the reporters seem to be quite impatient with the conduct.

MH: The reporters seem to rely in their ignorance on these retired military officers who are the talking heads that appear on all these cable TV network discussions and who are themselves, you know, critical or speculative at least about why the course of this thing has gone as it has. So to me it was an interesting thing to compare, on the one hand, the Anthrax aspect of it and, on the other hand, the military aspect of it and to see that, in the case of the Anthrax, people just don't know the answers, they don't know where this is coming from, and they don't know how it got distributed. Even it is clear now that they have not known how it might spread. Most, perhaps all, dimensions of this have not been known and are being learned as they go along and yet one looks at the military and one expects them to have had contingency plans, one assumes that they have war-gamed Afghanistan, one assumes that they are fully prepared to be able to execute a military plan, and yet they encounter uncertainties as well. The point of comparison that I drew in thinking about these two situations is to remind myself that public administration often works under conditions of great uncertainty and when it does, this can then be reflected in the attitudes of a public that may want certainty even when certainty is not to be had.

RP: I wanted to ask you about something that is not directly related, but could play a role. We are talking about public administration, the future it faces in the years immediately ahead in the aftermath of September 11. One of the factors that seems likely to have an impact is the demographics of the federal work force itself, where recent reports indicate that within the next three years over half of all federal employees will reach the age of eligibility for retirement. That does not mean that they all will retire, but that they could and that this is disproportionate in the upper echelons of the federal government. It is indicated that seven out of ten in the upper levels of the bureaucracy will have served long enough to be able to consider retirement. So it would appear that, in the decade ahead, we are likely to see a very substantial turnover in the federal work force. I am wondering whether you see that as being simply a natural process of regeneration, or do you think it portends a damaging loss of competence and experience? Is this something that the system is going to absorb easily, or do you think that it poses a real concern, especially as we go forward in this new national security climate?

MH: I don't know. My first reaction is that I don't think it's nearly as serious as do many other well-informed people who talk about it. The numbers I have to accept, but the consequences do not trouble me as much, looking forward, as they trouble other people who might be regarded as well-informed and thoughtful about this. The reason is that first, while there will be large retirements, behind those people are other people who are in line to come up. When deans and full professors retire, there are, in well-equipped universities, associate professors and younger full professors and so forth so that it is not as if all these people we knew are gone and we must fill the void with people who know nothing. That is the first thing. Secondly, I think there is a rather grim negative aspect. Many of these people will not retire because the slowdown in the economy will make it less attractive for them to go out into retirement. Now that may be a bad thing from their point of view. It may also be a bad thing in that it may retain people who are not fully ready to learn or adapt to new things or just don't know new things. For example, I would imagine that, in the new situation, those administrative people who have a higher level of comfort with technical issues of information technology, no matter what their assignments, will be more effective. The persons who have been recruited in the last ten years are more likely to carry that with them more naturally than the persons who were recruited thirty years ago. There are many persons recruited thirty years ago who say, " I don't have to learn that stuff. I've got an assistant over there who can do it, and I'm going to retire pretty soon." Now this is not a trivial matter because I understand one of the big issues that the Director of the Office of Homeland Security will face in the next few months has to do with the information technology with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If there are issues like that through the system, then it is not obvious that keeping all of us who are of one generation is a net gain, and it is not obvious that we would not have the inflow from others, so I'm not as concerned. I may well be wrong, and I have a bunch of colleagues on the public service panel of the National Cabinet of Public Administration who may disagree with me, and I will see whether they say, "Matthew, you are just ignorant. Here is why it is really bad and here is why it is really disastrous." I don't think so.

RP: So we have the problem and I look forward, Matthew, to the day when you come up with the solution.

MH: Well, I'll have to say whatever I have to say.

RP: Thank you very much for visiting with me this morning.

MH: Thank you for the opportunity. I've enjoyed it.