The Weed Agency (32 page)

For decades, the cliché of choice among those who disdain government has been to dismiss its employees as mere “bureaucrats.”

But bold, outspoken figures have refuted that tired notion in recent years.

The faceless government employees are no longer so faceless, and the American public is seeing that the government workers who keep the wheels of government turning are brave, righteous, dashing—and yes, even stylish.

FBI special agent Coleen Rowley, who excoriated her agency for missteps in catching terrorists before 9/11, was named one of
Time
magazine’s Newsmakers of the Year.

In 2004, Richard Clarke, the White House’s National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism,
heroically wrote a book about how no one listened to him.

Now, shortly after the election of a president who thoroughly defended the necessity and effectiveness of the federal government in the daily lives of Americans, there is a new iconoclast to add to that list: Adam Humphrey, the administrative director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species—soon to retire from government service after thirty years.

The Agency of Invasive Species was created almost as an afterthought after Jimmy Carter encountered a weed infestation on his peanut farm in 1974. Launched as a small office within the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1977, it became a separate agency in 1978, and Humphrey began as the agency’s first—and until quite recently, only—administrative director. His longtime deputy, Jack Wilkins, will take over sometime in the coming months.

“A lot of the attention in Washington goes to those who come and go,” Humphrey says in his office. “The talking heads, this rising star on the Hill, presidents and so on. The true unsung heroes of Washington—the ones whom the Republic would quickly collapse without—are the vast armies of largely unknown, diligent federal workers, keeping their heads down and making sure that everything works as it should.”

As an administrative director, Humphrey found himself at the forefront of Washington’s budget battles over the past decades, a fight he feels represents an existential one for the kind of America he and his fellow federal workers envision.

“It seems a never-ending battle, with our budgetary existence forever on the precipice,” Humphrey says. “It’s always tossed around so willy-nilly, this talk of ‘cut spending!’ and ‘oh, cut this, cut that,’ but so few really stop to examine the real-world consequences of those bland lines of zeroes on the balance sheets.” He pauses, gazing out at the cramped cubicles outside his office. “All too many among the cut-government crowd don’t understand that what we do isn’t about politics. It’s about people.”

The Agency of Invasive Species toiled in relative obscurity for most of its existence, until a cheatgrass weed infestation in 2006 caused enormous crop losses in California.

The agricultural crisis generated headlines and screams that the agency had dropped the ball and failed in its mission. More than a few voices on Capitol Hill blamed Humphrey, and several lawmakers, including former Rep. Nicholas Bader, R-Penn., called for his resignation.

“Dark days indeed,” Humphrey says. “Of course, Congressman Bader had been calling for my resignation every year since he arrived in 1995.” (Bader did not return a request for comment for this article.)

But Humphrey artfully dodged the slings and arrows of the right-wing critics, and ultimately a bipartisan commission concluded that the agency’s response to the weed outbreak was hindered by “systemic failures.”

Now the agency will soon be moving into newer state-of-the-art offices, settling into a particularly envied patch of Washington real estate.

The construction site just southeast of the Washington Monument has generated its share of grumbling from architecture critics, and more than a few Washingtonians have wondered why a relatively small agency should get such a prominent space.

“First, we need to be close to the rest of the Department of Agriculture, just down the street. And the claim that the architecture is ostentatious is simply ridiculous. Look at the Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria,” Humphrey says. “It’s

A recent
Washington Post
Style section article by Siobhan Nivens profiled Adam Humphrey, the soon-to-depart administrative
director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species, in laudatory terms.

From 1993 to 1999, I worked as a systems analyst at the AIS, and returned there as a contractor from 2001 to 2006 before departing to write about the relationship between government and technology for
Wired
and other publications.

Far from a role model for other managers in the public sector, Adam Humphrey is perhaps better described as the personification of all that is wrong with the federal government’s workforce.

Budget data show that the budget for the Agency of Invasive Species grew at four times the rate of inflation from 1977 to 2009. During this time, data compiled by the agency—a not entirely reliable source—indicate that the number of responses to invasive species infestations grew at less than half that pace. While the number of agency employees is maddeningly difficult to ascertain from public records, it is safe to conclude that the number of employees under Humphrey across the country also increased by a rate much greater than inflation. And then, of course, the agency had its most prominent failure during the cheatgrass crisis of 2006.

A lot more money, and a lot more employees, yielded only a modest increase in action during Humphrey’s tenure, climaxing with a catastrophic failure four years ago. Despite a pledge during subsequent hearings that he would resign, Humphrey has hung around for three years.

The agency doesn’t fail every day; it succeeds often enough, toiling in an obscure manner on a topic most Americans ignore. But it is spin to argue that it generates anything more than mediocrity at best, offering abysmal value, with little inclination to improve its performance. Humphrey didn’t deserve a 2,000-word send-off with a glamorous photo; his career deserved a dissection of how the federal government can defenestrate his mentality from its ranks.

This is not the complaint of a bitter former employee; both of my departures from AIS were voluntary.

If you read publications like
Government Executive
and talk to anyone in human resources, they will tell you that the federal
government needs young workers, that it covets their energy, their drive, their enthusiasm.

This is all a pack of lies.

If a young worker has the patience to go through the Byzantine hiring process, they get the signal, early on, that no one is really interested in utilizing their energy, their drive, their enthusiasm. Oftentimes those traits will be perceived as a silly waste of time or an annoyance. At far too many federal offices, a culture of complacency took root years or decades ago, and shows no sign of lifting. Most offices have well-established routines and have no interest in disrupting them.

And then there is the incompetence. Most federal managers are terrified of firing workers—fear of lawsuits, fear of confrontation, fear of workplace violence. The “Peter Principle” may be universal, but in the federal government, the least competent workers are often reassigned and shuffled around.

When competent workers see the incompetent among them hanging around with no repercussions for repeated failure—often enjoying a lighter workload, since no one trusts them with any task of any consequence—it is a corrosive acid to their drive, diligence, professionalism, and pride. The message is clear: No one really cares how well you do your job. Just punch in, keep your head down, and punch out.

It doesn’t help that promotions and raises are often allocated based on seniority, instead of actual performance or innovation.

These problems are worse in some federal offices than others, but pervasive enough to be a national problem, and one that receives astonishingly little attention from the so-called “serious” thinkers in the public policy world. The American people’s skepticism and criticism of government is not some result of a propagandizing effect of talk radio, Fox News, or blogs. It is the result of decades of interacting with federal workers and finding the quality of service rendered to be way less than the increasingly expensive cost.

Public skepticism and derision is fueled by unresponsive offices and their incomprehensible voice mail trees, by regulations written and enforced by those who will never have to follow them, by allegations of Minerals Management Service staff
partying with the companies they were supposed to be regulating, by the unprofessional wandering hands of TSA workers, by sleeping air traffic controllers, and by the revelation that tens of thousands of federal workers owe billions in back taxes. Each new scandal—grabbing headlines for a few days, then fading away—paints a vivid and more detailed culture of waste, inefficiency, and an entitled, even spoiled view of the public treasury.

I hope that there is a greater culture of accountability and focus on results in places like the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, with life-and-death consequences to their duties, than I saw at the AIS under Adam Humphrey. My sense is that there is, as well as in other corners of the federal government where complacency or incompetence can have lethal results: the Centers for Disease Control, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Food and Drug Administration, the military. But changing the culture of the non-life-and-death jobs within the federal government requires a president, a cabinet, a Congress, and indeed a public that demands much better than what they’ve been getting for a very long time.

Ava Summers covers government and technology issues for
Wired.