In 1960, there were 17 different executive titles in federal departments, and 451 people held those titles. The government resembled a pyramid, with most employees at the bottom, working on the front lines.
Today, the number of titles has swelled to 64 and the number of titleholders to 2,592, and the government looks more like a bloated pentagon, with a bulging middle and top and a shrinking bottom.
Light says this explains a lot — like why it's so hard to get someone to answer the telephone at federal agencies, or why there aren't enough FBI agents on the street or enough Border Patrol agents along the Rio Grande.
And, he says, it explains why people at the top of the heap often have no idea what's going on at the bottom. There are simply too many people in between, disrupting the flow of information up and down the line and distorting and corrupting it along the way.
"It's like that game we used to play as children, called Gossip or Telephone," he said. "You whisper a message to a child, the child whispers to the kid sitting next to him, and it is passed around the room. At the end of the game, you find out the message coming out is absolutely and completely different than the one you put in."
So is it any wonder that clues about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were not put together in time to prevent them? Is it surprising that top Pentagon officials were unaware of the photos showing abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, or that FBI officials didn't know about missing firearms and Los Alamos officials didn't know about missing computer disks?
And how was NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe to know that lower-level engineers were worried about damage to space shuttle Columbia's wing if no one deemed the information important enough to pass to the top people before the shuttle broke apart over Texas?
"The private sector experience has been that less is more in terms of layers," Light said. "The government philosophy is that more layers and more leaders equals more leadership and more accountability, and it's just not true."
