The impact of an Edifice Complex

I was in Washington DC for the last few days at a meeting of the Secretary of Education. I was struck by two things. First, the meeting today, to discuss accreditation, was actually much better than I thought it would be. The discussions about how do you relate the elements of the TRIAD (federal government, state government and accrediting agencies) who each have some role in licensure of institutions, encouraging consumer information and assuring that public money is reasonably well spent - were thought provoking. I have been concerned about some of Secretary Spellings' comments about accountability and transparency in the academy but as we concentrated on how to think about these issues - a much less homogenizing vision came to be. Was I won over? No. But do I think the discussions started today were and are important? Yes.

But the second image was one from being in SW DC, which is where my meetings were. My wife and I lived in SW DC in the early 1970s. And quite frankly, although I have been a frequent visitor to the city, I had not been in the back reaches of Southwest for 30 years. There has been a lot of building in that area since I lived there. Much of it is government edifices. Across from the meeting hall I was in, was the FCC. The picture above is the Department of Agriculture.

There is an old joke about a guy coming through Agriculture and seeing one of the bureaucrats crying pitiously. The visitor asks his host why the guy is crying so hard to which his host replied, "He just found out that his farmer died." The problem with building out all those buildings is that once built people beleive somewhat logically that they need to fill them. The Department of Education was a creation of the Carter Administration. It was part of the inexorable logic of that administration that we "needed" a federal department to give education "dignity." When the Department was created it was part of an office near the mall which also included Health and Welfare. But now the department occupies several impressive office buildings. The danger is that when you fill up all those buildings you need to have the people at the desks do something. Has education materially improved by any standard measure since the department was created? It is hard to find anyone who thinks it has. Of course there are some loons who believe that by increasing the size of the department, better things will come. But that is, by now, an article of faith not one of empircal belief.

In the previous post I offered a number of Friedman quips/quotes which have some relation to this issue - "The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government." "Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own."
"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."

After walking around the area where I once lived, I was struck with how hard it would be to reduce the size of the federal establishment, without some building razing.