On Jan. 28, 1986, over the objections of engineers who described a high probability of catastrophic failure, senior NASA managers authorized the launch of the Challenger. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight.
In the last week of September 2013, a "pre-flight checklist" indicated that 41 of the 91Healthcare.gov functions for which a key contractor was responsible were not working. Another checklist prepared a week later showed serious, and in five cases critical, defects in functions previously categorized as working. Nonetheless, the website was launched on Oct. 1 and failed almost immediately.
Healthcare.gov's problems were the subject of a Nov. 14 news conference. Win McNamee/Getty Images
These episodes have a common feature: In both, the pressure to meet deadlines overrode evidence that screamed for delay. But there is a key difference. President Reagan memorably eulogized those who died when the Challenger disintegrated, but he bore no responsibility for the disaster. The Affordable Care Act, by contrast, is President Obama's signature legislative achievement, and the trail of responsibility for its botched rollout ends at the Oval Office.
Over the past century, we have come to see the presidency as the principal source of the legislative agenda that Congress considers, and we tend to regard the enactment of the president's program as the key test of his efficacy. In the process, we have played down the importance of presidential management. The travails of the Affordable Care Act have reminded us that this understanding of the presidency is distorted—and reflects a neglectful reading of the Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton, in defending the presidency that the proposed Constitution would establish, remarked that "the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration." The Federalist's co-author famously saw "energy in the executive" as a leading characteristic of good government, in large part because such energy is "essential to the steady administration of the laws." Section 3 of Article II of the Constitution states: The president "shall take care that the Laws be faithfully executed." The occupant of the office is rightly (and revealingly) called the chief executive.
In the early days of the Republic and for much of its history, executing and administering the law mostly involved enforcement. With the rise of the administrative state, a step prior to enforcement became essential. This involved translating Congress's will into terms specific enough to be workable and providing the means of administration. The chief executive's role expanded correspondingly to include ultimate responsibility for regulations and for the administrative activities of an increasingly complex executive branch beyond the White House.
No president, of course, can possibly do all this directly. As chief executive, his core task is to establish managerial arrangements that transmit his priorities to subordinates and ensure the flow of accurate and timely information up the chain of command, all the way to him if necessary.
Every experienced manager knows that, left to its own devices, the system will not always behave this way. The agents acting on the president's behalf may have their own priorities and may not deem it in their interest to share information with superiors, especially if the news is bad. So the president must lean against these perverse tendencies, not only by demanding regular and detailed progress reports but also by establishing a zone of safety and encouragement for truth-tellers. The president's subordinates at every level must be on notice that candor will be rewarded and the failure to transmit vital information will be punished.
In recent weeks, it has become clear that President Obama failed to institute such arrangements. He rejected excellent advice from many quarters to appoint an overall project manager, reporting directly to the White House, who was a skilled executive with experience implementing complex information systems. The day-to-day links between the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services frayed, and responsibility for the website shifted four times before ending up in the hands of a midlevel bureaucrat at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who lacked the authority to crack heads and break logjams. Although there were dozens of contractors, there was no prime contractor, a role for which CMS was ill-suited but filled by default.
Making matters worse was a tension between politics and administration. The emerging narrative suggests that key regulatory decisions were delayed to avoid giving Republicans potent lines of attack before the 2012 election. Technology experts contend that crucial parameters were specified too late to permit adequate design and testing, and they are incredulous that testing of the overall system did not begin until just weeks before the launch.
The American people are losing what little confidence they retained in the capacity of the national government to act effectively, and the president's standing as a competent manager of his own government has eroded badly. Unless President Obama can restore confidence in the government and in his leadership, the people may well hold the rest of his ambitious agenda at arm's length.
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