All in the Game, Yo

I’m still amazed when I meet people that have never watched HBO’s “The Wire.” After all, this is the show that critics claim is the best drama in the history of television ... a show that has actually been cited as a literary masterpiece meriting comparison with the works of Dickens and Dostoevsky.

Actually, I think the best endorsement of the show that I ever read was from an anonymous person posting to the iTunes Store who wrote: "If I was a high school civics teacher I would make every student I could watch every hour of this show. To the ‘infotainment’ generation, it could be a wonderful tool to make young people learn to take a second look around and not confuse the perception of functionality with what actually works.”

The fact is, anyone that knows me well knows that I’m a huge fan of “The Wire”.  Why do I feel so strongly about it? Because The Wire provides us with an unparalleled portrayal of all the complex challenges that we confront working on USAID-funded development programs these days.

In this new blog series that I’m kicking off today I’ll be exploring some of these complex challenges, describing how I’ve watched them manifest in USAID's development programs, and reflecting on some of the most important lessons that I think we can take away from the show ... and apply to our work as the Agency’s implementing partners.

But before I dive in to the specifics I’d like to explain why I believe the challenges we all face doing USAID funded-development work today are so similar to the challenges that Baltimore law enforcement officials were confronting in The Wire.

One of the things that television critics often laud about The Wire is the intimacy involved in the show’s portrayal of the inner workings of Baltimore law enforcement. Whenever David Simon, the show’s producer, is asked about this he attributes it to the fact that he worked for The Baltimore Sun newspaper as city reporter for over ten years and spent the majority of his time at the paper covering the crime beat.  He further explains that his tenure on the crime beat at the Baltimore Sun happened to overlap with two significant changes that he believes tore the soul out of the Baltimore Police Department.

Significant Change #1

The first important change Simon witnessed while working at the Sun was a dramatic reduction in the capacity of the Baltimore Police Department, something Simon traces back to the War on Drugs. He argues that federal sentencing reforms in the mid 1980s, and a series of subsequent local measures, caused a radical change in the incentive system driving police behavior in Baltimore. Specifically, according to Simon, it created a new environment “where good investigation went unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, and loitering – the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make – became the path to enlightenment, promotion and additional pay.”

While Simon spent a fair amount of screen time in The Wire depicting the immediate consequences of the drug war era’s new incentive system, his real objective was to illustrate the longer-term consequence ... the fact that the Baltimore Police Department essentially stopped teaching its police how to do real police work. As Simon later explained “so you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work ... who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work?” As The Wire shows us over and over, there is a real skill set involved in doing good investigative police work. Unfortunately, because the Baltimore Police Department spent a decade promoting people into leadership roles without those skills, eventually the skills largely disappeared within the Department.

Significant Change #2

The second important change that Simon witnessed was a sharp increase in expectations of the Baltimore Police Department. Simon attributes the dramatic shift in expectations to Martin O’Malley (Baltimore’s mayor from 1999 to 2007) and his grandiose political aspirations.

Given the state of the Baltimore Police Department when O’Malley became mayor, the kinds of crime reductions he needed to become a credible gubernatorial candidate were virtually impossible. Immediately after he became Baltimore’s mayor O'Malley realized that he had to come up with a different approach to get the kinds of crime numbers he needed to become Governor. As Simon later recounted, "and so there were people from City Hall who walked over to {the police commissioner} and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, {they} got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper."

I have gone through a lot of what Simon has written and said about The Wire and Baltimore politics. One thing that has become clear is that neither of the two significant changes, by themselves, could have caused what happened. What happened in Baltimore was a result of both changes happening - in the order they occurred. Remember that the dramatic reduction in the Baltimore Police Department’s law enforcement capacity started in the mid 1980s; by the late 1990s the department had essentially been gutted. Mayor O’Malley started setting unrealistic expectations when he took office in 1999 ... and the first season of The Wire aired three years later in 2002.

Here’s the takeaway. Every form of public service is vulnerable to the kinds of challenges that are depicted in The Wire. To some degree the challenges are universal. Under certain circumstances, however, there is a real threat that the challenges start getting out of control. The specific circumstances that we need to watch out for are (1) A dramatic decline in workforce capacity, followed by (2) A sharp increase in expectations.

Where else have we seen a one-two punch like this happen?

Consider this Foreign Policy article from 2015 that asked a poignant question: "Why is the United States letting its best foreign aid tool fall apart?" In that article the authors argued that "USAID’s capacity is on the cusp of crisis: Its staff is divided between veterans who are aging out and greenhorns, with too few in the middle. From the standpoint of national capacity, America has a development donut.” A closer look at the data is pretty sobering. According to the article 50% of USAID’s workforce is now past retirement age, and 35% have less than 5 years of experience. And this “cavity” in USAID’s workforce isn’t getting any better. The Foreign Policy article claims that the cavity is actually growing larger every year because a lot of the most promising, younger leaders in USAID's workforce are opting not to stay.

In 2010 the Obama Administration issued a policy directive on global development (PPD #6). It  got a lot of people’s attention because it was the first time that International Development had ever been the subject of a Presidential Policy Directive. Secretary of State Clinton followed PPD #6 with the first ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). And then USAID Administrator Rajeev Shah turned the expectations needle up another several dozen clicks with the announcement of a planned transformation of the Agency based on a new operating model and absolute demand for results. It’s hard to imagine a sharper increase in expectations than what we’ve watched since 2010.

In short, we had a dramatic decline in the capacity of USAID's workforce, followed by a sharp increase in expectations. So it should be no surprise that embarrasing things like this started popping up in the news:

At a 2011 congressional hearing, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform national security subcommittee, listed some of the USAID's success claims on Iraq: “262,482 individuals reportedly benefited from medical supplies that were purchased to treat only 100 victims of a specific attack; 22 individuals attended a 5-day mental health course, yet 1.5 million were reported as beneficiaries; 123,000 were reported as benefiting from water and well activities that did not produce potable water; and 280,000 were reported as benefiting from $14,246 spent to rehabilitate a morgue.”

and this ...

A 2013 Congressional Research Service report lamented that many AID staffers are “defensive … concerned that evaluations identifying poor program results may have personal career implications, such as loss of control over a project, damage to professional reputation, budget cuts, or other potential career repercussions.”

and this ...

The Agency for International Development (AID), the largest foreign-aid bureaucracy, was caught last week {September 2014} massively suppressing audit reports revealing waste, fraud and abuse. More than 400 negative findings were deleted from a sample of 12 draft audit reports, The Washington Post reported. In one case, more than 90 percent of the negative findings were expunged before the report was publicly released. Acting Inspector General Michael Carroll buried the embarrassing audit findings because he “did not want to create controversy as he awaited Senate confirmation to become the permanent inspector general”

We don’t talk about it very much in the open, but behind closed doors nobody in our industry denies that we have a problem. Of course there are still some really good projects being implemented that we’re all familiar with, but the collective level of frustration is palpable and it’s building; the situation is not sustainable.

I don't think it's too late to reverse course. It is going to require a new generation of leadership with genuine interest in - and unwavering commitment to - doing real development; with enough patience to persevere. I think what we need is already out there. Based on what I've seen the last few years I believe the millennials can bring new life to the Agency. In them, I see light at the end of the tunnel.   

It is going to take time, but I am convinced there is a new spirit emerging that we can all harness to turn this situation around. We just need to acknowledge the problems and commit ourselves to address them. And The Wire can help us do it ... because its all in the game, yo! 

- DS

Next Up .... Optics vs. Impact