Widsom Dictates Government Needs Experts 'On Tap, Not On Top'

Does President Donald Trump understand the vital role that experts play in competent administration?

Among the many federal government employees recently fired have been experts in various subjects including economics, warfare, science, medicine, statistics, and public health. Apparently Mr. Trump did not like the advice or information he was getting from these experts.

His wholesale firing of expert administrators with whom he disagrees may seriously reduce his effectiveness as national leader as well as the overall welfare of Americans.

The United States is far more complex than it was a century ago, with a correspondingly more complicated government.

To cope with today's complexity, many new specialties have emerged.

Our government today may need more specialists, not fewer

Nobody can be an expert in all of these fields.

Mastering even one of them requires extensive education and/or experience.

Nobody, including top leaders, has enough time to become an expert in all specialties.

But in weighing the costs and benefits of a proposed policy, top leaders need to consider all of the consequences it will produce, not just some of them.

And predicting different kinds of consequences is a job for experts of all different kinds.

As business professor Vikram Mansharamani has noted:

"Among the many qualities that distinguish successful leaders from millions of less-successful executives in the world is an awareness of the limits of their knowledge.

"They know what they know, they appreciate what they don't know, and they have a healthy respect for what they don't know they don't know. In short, they have great meta-knowledge."

So if top leaders do not want to "shoot from the hip" they need the help of expert advisors in fields that they themselves do not know much about.

As Will Rogers once famously said, "We are all ignorant. We are just ignorant about different things." Even experts are ignorant outside their own specialties.

Their advice is useful only in arenas in which they are competent. And they will inevitably give conflicting advice, based on their own specialized perspectives.

Effective leaders must take advice into consideration but not allow any one expert to dictate their decisions.

Policy choices always require tradeoffs between conflicting government objectives, and it's not for experts on only some of a proposed policy's consequences to decide what should be done.

It has long been understood that these advisors should be "on tap, not on top."

The ultimate compromises between conflicting considerations need to be made by responsible (hopefully) political leaders to whom the important consequences have been honestly spelled out.

A leader who just picks advisers known to agree with his or her own preconceptions might as well have no advisers.

And any leader who thinks that he or she knows everything about everything is worse than unwise. As Socrates ( c. 470-399 BC) told his students, "the awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom."

A top leader must be a special kind of specialist, one who can be a good judge of talent in picking specialized advisers and who has the wisdom to make sound decisions after consulting with them.

He or she must understand that It is unwise to fire advisers who bring bad news, since this will discourage honest advice when the news is actually bad.

You certainly do not want to fire a top government statistician for reporting bad news about employment trends, especially when this top person did not make the calculations!

One of the weaknesses of absolute monarchs and dictators is that their subordinates may fear telling them the truth about what is happening, for fear of being fired or even "liquidated."

Messengers will not bring bad news to such rulers. But a leader who does not know what is really going on can make fatal mistakes.

Political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) warned that "a prince who is without any wisdom himself cannot be well advised."

We no longer call most rulers princes, but his warning still holds true for today's top political leaders, no matter what we call them — prime ministers or presidents.

Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. Read Professor Paul F. deLespinasse's Reports — More Here.