Inside the executive branch.

When the Republicans began to talk about abolishing agencies like the Department of Commerce, a simple question occurred to us: Does anyone know what the Department of Commerce actually does? The Monthly has long bemoaned the lack of information on the executive branch. This is where policy is supposed to be turned into action; yet the public knows very little about what happens there--about which agencies are doing useful work and which are wasting money.

Almost no one in the federal government tries to answer these questions with comprehensive evaluations. The General Accounting Office (GAO) and the inspectors general usually focus on small slices of agency operations. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) spends the majority of its energy crunching budget numbers. When it does look at overall agency performance--which is not often or thoroughly enough, due to understaffing--it rarely shares its findings with the public.

Then there's the press. Perhaps because few reporters have experience working in the executive branch, the media seems lost in covering it. Indeed, with a few exceptions for national security agencies like the State Department and the Department of Defense, agencies get very little attention. The New York Times, with a 79-person Washington bureau, doesn't have a single person assigned to regularly cover the Departments of Labor or Education.

With this issue, the Monthly inaugurates a series of articles intended to point the way towards constructive agency evaluation. We've begun with the FAA and the FDA--two agencies that, because they deal with life and death issues, have received more-than-average (if still fragmentary) attention. By pulling together the work of other reporters and of various government auditors, and by doing some digging of our own, we have tried to begin informing an understandably confused public. The crisis of confidence in our government is grave. But constructive evaluations show that our public institutions fail for reasons that can be understood and fixed.

Our hope is that others will join the cause. If they do, some common problems will begin to emerge. In these two articles, for example, it is clear that conservative complaints about too much regulation are often off the mark; in many cases, the great problem is too little regulation. And once we identify not just the symptoms but the causes of problems, we can start to have a real debate about how to solve them. So maybe the next time the Republicans propose abolishing the Department of Commerce, or Bill Clinton and Al Gore propose reinventing the government, we won't all be flying blind.