Well, this week I learned that not all bureaucrats work for the government. They can be found in any organization anywhere, in the public sector and the private sector. They are there anytime rules need to be enforced. And in today’s column, I'll ponder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Here’s the story. This year, my wife and I will be reaching our 50th wedding anniversary. And, of course, I want to do something special to mark the occasion. Actually, I want to do a whole bunch of special things throughout the year. One of those is a trip I was planning to a resort destination. (It’s not too important to divulge where that trip would be taking us.)
Anyway, as part of the planning, I found a perfect place to stay. (It was perfect, in part, because it’s the same place we went on our 25th wedding anniversary.) It’s a popular place to stay in a popular tourist mecca. And they had a hole in their vacancy calendar that fit perfectly within my other plans for this trip.
But here was the problem. It was a six-day hole, and this place has a seven-day minimum stay requirement. So the reservations agent turned down my request. (That was bureaucrat number one.) I appealed to the reservations manager and was turned down again. (That was bureaucrat number two.) But she told me I could take my case to the resort manager.
I did. And I made these points. One: Our planned stay would be just one day shy of their minimum stay rules. Two: The unit we would be staying in would sit vacant for those six days. Wouldn’t they rather have a paying customer using the place? And finally, three: Hey, it’s our 50th anniversary! How many of those do you get in a lifetime?
But guess what? Bureaucrat number three, the resort manager, turned down my request. He said, “Rules are rules. And we have a very strict seven-day minimum stay requirement.”
At first, I was upset. But I soon got over it. After all, there are lots of beautiful places to stay in this country and around the world. And I’m sure I'll find someplace nice to celebrate a half-century of wedded bliss with my wife.
But this incident got me pondering the whole idea of rules and why we have them and why we need people to carry out those rules. I'll use what I know best—the Social Security Administration and the people who work for it—as an example.
I recall many years ago, when I still worked for the SSA, taking a claim from a woman who was filing for benefits as a divorced wife on her ex-husband’s account. The law says to get such benefits, you must have been married for at least 10 years. What the law actually says is that your marriage must have reached its 10th anniversary before the divorce became final.
Well, in this woman’s case, her divorce decree was signed just two days before their 10th anniversary. So I had to tell her that her claim was going to be turned down. She appealed to me (as I’m sure I would have done if I was in her shoes) that she was just two days, a measly 48 hours, shy of the 10-year rule.
My heart sided with her. After all, there really was no difference between a 10-year marriage and a nine-year-and-363-day marriage. But as a government agent, a bureaucrat if you will, I had to carry out the law. And that law said you must be married for 10 years. The law didn’t say “about 10 years” or “sort of close to 10 years.” It said 10 years.
Lots of times, bureaucrats get lambasted for being too rigid and too narrowly focused on carrying out the rules and regulations of the organization they work for. But what a chaotic country we'd have if this wasn’t so.
Suppose I had the power to tell the lady with the nine-year-and-363-day marriage that we'd let it slide and allow her to get divorced wife’s benefits. What about the next woman who comes in and is just one week shy of the 10-year rule? Do we let her get benefits, too? How about somebody who is a month shy? Do you see my point? The law draws a line somewhere. And a government employee’s job is to carry out that law precisely as it’s written. It’s not the employee’s job to interpret the law the way that he or she thinks it should be interpreted.
If you want examples of the chaotic mess this can create, let me take you back to the early 1970s. The welfare programs in this country were a mess. There was not one national welfare program. Rather, there was a hodgepodge mix of programs, sometimes run by state agencies but often run by individual counties or even cities and towns. And many times, the people running these programs were not good bureaucrats carrying out the laws. They were bad public servants who enforced their own version of how they thought the rules should be. In one county in the South, a local welfare official was routinely denying benefits to anyone who was not white. In another jurisdiction in the North, the welfare administrator saw to it that her friends and family got higher benefits than they were due. Stories such as this went on and on.
That’s why President Richard Nixon decided to nationalize the welfare system by creating the Supplemental Security Income program and letting it be run by the federal agency that, at the time, got the highest marks for efficiency and good public service. And that would be the Social Security Administration. (I have written past columns about the effect that had on the SSA, and will no doubt write more about it in the future.) For now, I can just tell you that the welfare mess was straightened out by letting good public servants (bureaucrats, if you will) run the program.
So now let me circle back to those “bureaucrats” who denied my offer to fill a six-day hole in their vacancy calendar. On the one hand, I understand their thinking. A seven-day minimum stay probably ensures that they are not letting rabble-rousers onto their property for “one-night stands.” On the other hand, my 80-year-old wife and I haven’t roused any rabble in many years. Still, I see their point. Rules are rules!
