The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [142]
“I do not rule Russia,” Czar Nicholas I moaned; “ten thousand clerks do.” After just six weeks in office, Mayor Koch learned the same lesson. On February 7, 1978, the Mayor issued his sixth executive order, which abolished the Office of Service Coordination, terminating 186 workers, saving $2.2 million. Koch had good reason to pick on the agency. It was supposed to coordinate neighborhood services; instead, during the Lindsay and Beame years, it protected out-of-work basketball players and between-campaign advancemen. Still shaking his head, James Capalino, the young man Koch chose to command and dismantle the agency, says, “There were forty-five supervisory and assistant Youth Service specialists who were paid to play basketball games.”
A month after the Mayor issued his executive order, they were no longer playing basketball on city time—but that’s about all that changed. The 186 workers were still being paid. Owing to strict civil service regulations, 125 of them bumped non–civil service provisionals in other agencies, leaving 61 of the original 186 to be fired. But because of the fail-safe duplicative protections of the collective bargaining system, even this number was uncertain. Under state law, the union had two weeks to invent new job titles. If these titles matched other titles of workers with less seniority, the surplus basketball players get to bump other employees with less seniority.
All a mayor elected by the people could do was issue an executive order. All Capalino could do was send 186 individual notes warning people that they would be off the payroll as of March 8. All hard-working junior clerks could do was pray that their number wouldn’t be called. “The provisional could be a top guy and yet get bumped by some banana,” snorted Commissioner Russo. The system takes over. “After six weeks in office, I’ve come to the conclusion that Boss Plunkett wasn’t all wrong when he talked about the civil service,” said Koch of the boss who preferred the spoils system. “One shudders to think what it would be like to take on a big agency,” said Capalino.
A leader committed to change must first calculate the political price he has to pay to achieve that change. In a pluralistic trading system of government, Koch might win legislative approval to amend civil service laws—but lose his battle to gain control of the Board of Education.
Political leaders make choices and trade-offs. The system bogs down as the problems spread more quickly than government’s ability to cope with them. Entrenched interests or “factions” check the ability of a mayor to represent what the Founding Fathers referred to as the “common good.”
The problem is universal. Conrail claims one reason it loses money is because members of Congress—who control the purse strings—insist that trains stop in their little out-of-the-way hamlets. The President determines that thirty-two water projects around the country are wasteful of taxpayers’ money, but the outcry from the affected states reaches such a roar that he can cut only nine. One Senator, Russell Long of Louisiana, Chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, can bottle up tax reform or energy legislation. The American Medical Association succeeds in killing a hospital cost containment bill. Wasteful military bases remain open because powerful constituents protect them, including representatives of unhealthy local economies (like New York’s) who protest the loss of needed jobs. HEW Secretary Joseph Califano announces plans to discourage unhealthful cigarette smoking, and tobacco-growing states smoke that their economies will be razed. Local governments pay fees to tie into computers which tell them not what programs they need, but what they can get from the federal government.
“It may just be a sign of old, or at least upper-middle, age,” declared Otis G. Pike of New York’s Suffolk County after announcing his retirement from Congress, “but people bug me more than they used to. They are asking their government to do more for them and