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The frustrations people blame on lazy or corrupt officials are inherent in bureaucratic management itself, not personal failings. Because the tasks differ fundamentally from profit-seeking enterprise, no reform of personnel or policy can eliminate the dysfunction.
Agencies can be sorted by whether their operators' outputs (daily activities) and outcomes (results in the world) can be observed. Production agencies like tax collection can see both, procedural agencies like peacetime armies see outputs but not outcomes, craft agencies like field detectives see outcomes but not outputs, and coping agencies like schools and police patrol see neither. Which quadrant an agency sits in determines how it can be managed, what culture it develops, and what performance measures are possible or merely theatrical.
Contrary to the view that bureaucrats maximize their budgets, agency executives prize autonomy and turf, meaning a clear, uncontested jurisdiction and freedom from rival agencies and meddling overseers. They will often decline new tasks or extra money when these would bring competitors, conflicting constituencies, or a muddied mission.
German doctrine pushed authority down to junior officers and sergeants, who were given objectives and trusted to improvise. The French relied on centralized, methodical control from headquarters. This shows that how an organization distributes discretion to its operators can matter more than its resources.
Government managers cannot keep surplus revenue, freely allocate labor and capital, or set their own goals, because legislatures and courts impose these constraints. As a result, managers focus on avoiding procedural violations rather than producing results.
An agency has three layers with different incentives. Operators do the actual work and respond to situational imperatives and peer expectations. Managers are chiefly preoccupied with constraints such as rules, budgets and procedures. Executives face outward, toward legislators, courts, interest groups and the press, and are mainly concerned with protecting the agency's position. Because each layer answers to different pressures, what the top wants and what the front line does can drift far apart without anyone being disobedient.
Front-line workers do not derive their daily tasks mainly from the agency's formal goals, which are usually vague. They define their work from the immediate demands of the situation, their prior experience and professional norms, and what their peers reward and ridicule. Formal mission statements therefore change behavior far less than changes in the concrete problems operators face, or in whom they must satisfy.