Bureaucrats Need To Stay In Their Lanes

As someone who tried his hand as a bureaucrat (without much success) for a decade, I like to think that I at least learned a few lessons during my tenure in government. For starters, I discovered that it is much better to persuade government staff of the value of doing something rather than merely ordering them to do it, especially when they have civil service protection.

I also came to realize that big changes are nearly always impossible to achieve and that we should be content with affecting positive changes of any sort, even if they appear minor.

But the biggest lesson I took away from my life in government is the importance of remaining in one’s own lane and not interfering with other committees, departments, agencies, or branches of government. Managing one entity is complicated enough without trying to impact another.

Unfortunately, Rohit Chopra has yet to learn the last one.

Chopra recently became the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and prior to that he was a Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. Both are important jobs—especially in the current administration, which has made antitrust issues and greater consumer protections a key plank in its agenda. However, despite Chopra’s heady task of running a government agency—and one that is unaccountable to Congress—he has managed to keep a toe into the activities of two other agencies: the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. By doing so, he eroded a bipartisan working arrangement that ensured a modicum of comity in each of them.

For starters, Chopra’s parting gift to his Democratic colleagues at the FTC was to—in effect—give them his virtual proxy vote for a variety of issues that were on their agenda but not yet ready for a formal vote.

This zombie vote meant that despite the fact that his departure left the Commission with two Republicans and two Democrats remaining, FTC Commissioner Lina Khan could use Chopra’s vote on these issues for months after his departure.

Of course, Republicans objected mightily to it, and while angering the minority is no reason not to do something, their unwillingness to wait until another Democratic member—which was imminent at the time—was a myopic decision that granted Khan a modicum of short-term flexibility at the cost of making it more difficult for her to maneuver in the long run.

Playing hardball can make sense, but only when there is no risk of short-term reprisals from doing so. Unfortunately for them, the Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee felt aggrieved by this maneuver, and they responded by delaying the approval of Alvaro Bedoya, whom President Biden nominated to replace Chopra.

Despite Bedoya’s confirmation appearing to be a done deal in October, his nomination never came to a vote in the full Senate and was returned to the committee at year end per senate rule. Today, his nomination remains in limbo while the Committee waits for Senator Ben Ray Luján to recover from a stroke and return to the committee. Republicans feel no compunction to accommodate Luján’s absence, as had previously been the custom for incapacitated members.

Chopra also managed to undermine the remaining vestiges of bipartisanship at the FDIC, where he is a board member, by helping to engineer the ouster of Republican-appointed chair Jelena McWilliams, whose term would not have expired until 2023.

The FDIC is normally thought to be above partisan politics, and both parties had heretofore strived to appoint competent technocrats to run it and not threaten the other party’s nominee. But the Biden Administration had little use for past custom with regard to political appointments, and Chopra’s maneuver opened up the seat for a Biden apparatchik.

Waging a scorched-earth campaign that essentially undoes a decades-long agreement on personnel in executive branch agencies makes little sense for two reasons. First, the Biden Administration has struggled to put forth nominees for many important government positions—The Office of Management and Budget still does not have a confirmed Director, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the regulatory agenda of the administration, does not even have an Administrator nominated. Wasting time fighting over pointless posts when the Office of Presidential Personnel could be filling vitally important seats is just nonsensical. The lack of an OIRA administrator is slowing the Biden agenda across multiple agencies.

Secondly, the Biden Administration has struggled to come up with nominees that can get through the senate. For instance, its nominee for Administrator of the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova, was recently forced to withdraw her nomination after it became clear she did not have sufficient support to get confirmed.

It’s fair to point out that President Trump played the game of having administrators wear two hats, but no one would dare suggest that it worked out for him in any way: for instance, Mick Mulvaney spent time running both the OMB and the CFPB, and his tenure at the latter was as shambolic as can be expected.

In fact, one of the Trump Administration’s myriad mistakes was its delay in nominating people to fill the thousands of political appointments that an administration must make, which left career civil servants—who didn’t share his priorities—or incompetent acting administrators in charge of vital agencies for way too long. The hope of many Republicans who voted for Biden is that his administration would at least handle routine administrative details with a modicum of problems.

To Biden’s credit, the White House has many political professionals who are broadly respected in their areas of expertise for their knowledge and their previous public service: For instance, I’ve had dealings with both Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) chair Celia Rouse and CEA member Jared Bernstein. Both are extremely capable and dedicated economists I admire greatly, and each is respected throughout the economics profession.

But Rohit Chopra’s radical actions across three separate independent agencies are undermining the Administration’s attempts to instill confidence in the American people that adults are now running the government.