"Go Along, and Get Along"

"Go Along, and Get Along”

The key participants in Please Remove Your Shoes are lower level instruments of government, trained to fight for your safety and well being. They are all either veterans, or law enforcement, or both. They were born to protect and serve. Sadly, in many many cases their managers were not. Career bureaucrats have little incentive to succeed. They just don’t want to get caught when they fail. It becomes all too easy for an upper level manager to become a professional at treading water, shedding criticism, and protecting those around him in a social code known as “go along and get along.”

It’s a pernicious employment condition that has plagued government since the beginning. Without doubt, the motive to preserve the status quo dissuaded anyone in the State Department from notifying FBI of caller threats before PanAm 103, and prevented the FBI from giving proper attention to terrorist intelligence before 911. Yet three years later the Federal Air Marshal Service was ignoring field reports of suspicious passengers from its own air marshals.

GAO (now “the government accountability office”) performed a study and subsequent report in 2000 of federal agencies and their proclivity to recognize employee efforts towards strategic goals. The results were strikingly low. Any private sector corporation with this condition would have died on the vine in a week. And until we fix this problem we won’t have airport security, economic oversight, or anything else we’ve built our agencies to provide.