The End of “Neutral Competence”: CDC and Censorship during COVID-19

• In Event: COVID in the United States

Abstract

Professionally staffed federal agencies in the United States, designed in the Progressive Era to deliver so called “neutral competence,” today are subject to an impressive array of democratic controls. Whether one characterizes the resulting adversarial legalism as a blessing or a curse (Kagan 1991), US bureaucratic agencies are designed to be responsive to citizens, interest groups, the courts, Congress, and the President. Where Weber (Gerth and Mills 1946), Heclo (1977) and principal-agent theory, more generally, predict that bureaucrats can avoid political control, Golden’s empirical work finds, rather, that political principals are afforded a great deal of legitimacy by civil servants even when agency and appointee goals are in conflict (2000). One of the criticisms leveled at the CDC during Covid-19 is that the agency buckled under pressure from the Trump Administration. This reflects an assumption that agencies are able to operate independently from their political oversight and, also, a normative orientation that they should. This paper analyzes agency-Administration conflicts both during and before Covid-19. It focuses particularly on conflicts that involve efforts on the part of elected officials to censor civil servants and examines the strategies available to civil servants under these circumstances. The paper argues that political science lacks adequate theory that would guide agency behavior given hyperpartisanship where significant pluralities in the public want incompatible things from an agency. Examining political outcomes in the wake of Covid-19, several state legislatures, though they do not have direct control over the CDC, have passed legislation limiting the power of state-level public health officials. The potential that stakeholders prefer an agency that was unable to communicate the true state of the pandemic raises the question of whether federal agencies, as conceived during the Progressive Era--neutrally competent and able to serve any administration, can operate under growing hyperpartisanship. The paper addresses the downsides of creating truly autonomous agencies and examines private sector options for providing public health information during crises if state agencies are constrained by those holding legitimate political power to exercise such constraints.

Gerth, H and C. Wright Mills (Eds. and Trans.). 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Golden, M.M., 2000. What motivates bureaucrats? Politics and administration during the Reagan years. New York: Columbia University Press.

Heclo, H., 2011. A government of strangers: Executive politics in Washington. Brookings Institution Press.

Kagan, R.A., 1991. Adversarial legalism and American government. Journal of policy analysis and management, 10(3), pp.369-406.

Author

• Ann C. Keller, University of California-Berkeley