The Consequences Of Poor Service

The Center for American Progress recently commissioned a nationwide survey by Hart Research Associates on American attitudes towards their government. Here is an excerpt from the conclusion of the report:

Public confidence in government is at an all-time low, according to our survey. A common interpretation of this and other recent negative shifts in public sentiment toward the federal government is that it reflects an ideological rejection of “big government.” The results of our survey, however, reveal that Americans have not significantly changed their opinion of what government should do or its proper role. Indeed, clear majorities want more federal government involvement in areas like developing new energy sources, reducing poverty, and improving public education. Moreover, they expect government’s role in improving people’s lives to grow rather than shrink in importance in the years ahead.

How, then, can today’s undeniably negative sentiment toward federal government be explained? Americans’ critical view of government, the survey data reveals, has much more to do with perceptions of government’s competence than concern over “mission creep.” People’s concern is not that government is addressing too many problems, but rather that it will not succeed in carrying out its critically important tasks. And looking forward, people say quite clearly that their priority is improving government’s performance more than reducing its size. Americans
want a federal government that is better, not smaller.

Social Security is a lot more competent than the public gives it credit for being but the service the agency gives the public can only be rated fair at best. That is a big step up from what it was two years ago but it is still inadequate. It is almost impossible to get through on the telephone to Social Security's field offices. It can take several minutes to get through to a live person when one calls the agency's 800 number. Once callers get through to a human, far too often they receive inadequate or misleading information. Disability claims and appeals take entirely too long.

For the most part, I do not blame Social Security employees for these problems since the root cause is inadequate staffing. The only blame I assign to Social Security management is for not speaking out more clearly to tell the public why service is so inadequate.

Poor government service has political consequences, as Thomas Frank has written:

Conservatism ... seems actively to want an inferior product [government service]. Believing effective government to be somewhere between impossible and undesirable, conservatism takes steps to ensure its impotence. The result is predictable enough: another sour truckload of the mother's milk of conservatism, cynicism toward government.