When you run a company, you have to make sure people do what they’re paid to do. Every employee, wherever they are in the hierarchy, represents an investment on the part of the company. By paying someone $35K a year, you are not simply being charitable; you expect to get a return on your investment. That person must generate at least $35K of value each year, or you’re getting screwed. If you actually want to take home some money yourself, that person must generate more than $35K of value. I don’t think there’s anyone I know who would dispute what I’ve just said.

If an employee is not generating more value for the company than his salary, or (more commonly) if an employee makes mistakes which cost the company more than he is paid, someone is responsible for making the decision to fire him. Part of being a manager means getting paid to decide who gets paid (and who gets laid off). Managers have their own managers, and on and on, so that within every organization there ought to be a hierarchy of responsibility. A manager who lives in constant denial that the people below him are not doing their job, is not doing his job. An effective company keeps itself from stagnating by enforcing responsibility. Sometimes, this means firing those people who aren’t willing to hold the people below them accountable for failure.

Now, on to politics.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Last year, when superheated gas melted the Space Shuttle from the inside out, several brave astronauts died in a brief moment of fire and terror. It was a tragic loss for the country, and the grounding of the remaining fleet has been a serious setback for scientific development. Damning testimony from NASA workers would later reveal an inept bureaucracy, even more functionally challenged than the FBI and the CIA.

Not only did mid-level managers dismiss the idea that the shuttle might have been damaged during take-off, they denied requests to take photographs of the shuttle from orbital satellites, and actively worked to silence those men and women who tried their best to alert NASA leadership. This was not a failure of engineering; this was a failure of leadership.

It’s been over a year since the Columbia accident, and our space shuttles remain grounded. At a time when private industry is only months from achieving manned space flight, NASA needs a radical shift in focus. Space shuttles cost too much per pound, and new ways of reaching space deserve serious research and funding.

We do need to go back to the moon; there is a wealth of geological data we could get from renewed analysis of sub-surface moon rocks. We should also keep our sights on Mars; while a manned mission is a silly idea, because we don’t have the faintest idea how to accomplish such a monumental voyage, Mars can still shed light on important questions about life and its origins. So, George Bush gets a little bit of applause for adding this to NASA‘s focus.

But manned missions to the Moon are just a matter of logistics, and manned missions to Mars are still the realm of science fiction. Private firms are starting to get into the business of space flight, but they still lack the resources and the engineering knowledge to put a human into full orbit, or to get people off the surface and back down again. NASA needs to be pushed towards something revolutionary, towards something that will redefine space travel the way Apollo 1 did. This requires not only new vision, but new leaders, new organization, and a whole lot of “mea culpas” from those parts of NASA‘s bureaucracy who let their own turf wars kill seven astronauts. I don’t see any of this coming out of NASA, and I worry that the world’s most influential space agency will allow itself to become irrelevant, doomed to keep supporting a space station that has outlived its usefulness.

World Trade Center

It took just nineteen men to prove that America is not omnipotent, and that our intelligence services, emergency response teams, and our bureaucracy in general was ill-prepared for a massive suicide attack. Bureaucrats refused to share their turf with each other, and thousands of people died for their incompetence.

To date, President Bush has yet to order that any person be held accountable for this failure. Sure, George Tenet has resigned, but that happened three years after September 11, and only because someone had to defuse the political heat generated by a scathing Senate report on the CIA. Robert Mueller and George Tenet should have both been quietly nudged out of office, as a matter of principle, once the war in Afghanistan was over. On top of that, the President should have been the first to order a thorough assessment and restructuring of intelligence services, to meet the changing nature of defense intelligence.

The Department of Homeland Security is just another level of bureaucracy, another vague and powerless abstraction; not only has Tom Ridge done nothing to secure our nation, he’s made the lines a lot longer at the airports.

What we’ve seen recently — the recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission, the Republican bill to split up and reorganize the CIA — are all good signs, because it means the nation is finally starting to debate how to fix our intelligence services. But this is a very complex question, and we should not rush to action (as we did with the USA PATRIOT Act, a catastrophe for both civil rights and for judicial process). We’ve waited so long to start this debate, people are already screaming for an answer — and quick answers are never the right answers.

President Bush should have opened this debate years ago, so that the nation could have real time to think. He should have made an example of those people who failed us three years ago; he should have held them accountable, so that we could hold ourselves accountable for an answer.

The War against Al-Qaeda

I’m sick of hearing all this dribble about how September 11 shifted our nation’s priorities and made us more aware of the world around us than we had been in the 90s. The sad truth is that most parts of our nation’s government have not shifted priorities, changed their internal focus, or become more aware of how our actions abroad affect our relations with the rest of the world.

I’m not a pacifist and I’m not an appeaser. Those peaceniks who insisted we negotiate with the Taliban in September 2001 were deluded. Afghanistan had become a haven for terrorists, and the Taliban knowingly and willingly provided shelter for the Osama bin Laden. We invaded, rightfully, with a broad coalition of forces, and drove the fundamentalists out of Kabul.

But that’s just the problem. We stopped at Kabul, and a handful of other major cities, and didn’t really do much about the large numbers of Taliban troops hiding (and waiting) in the hinterlands. There is still a dreadful shortage of reconstruction funds, partly because of the bureaucratic complexities involved, but mostly because the Bush administration simply hasn’t given them a lot of money. In the years since then, it has become increasingly obvious that the Taliban are quietly waging a guerrilla war against peacekeepers, aid workers, and anybody who collaborates with them. At the same time, warlords — whom we should have bought off a long time ago — still refuse to relinquish control of their own pieces of Afghanistan. The situation is only nominally better than it was in 2000, and the only difference is that we’re stuck in the middle.

George Bush is not personally responsible — he’s a busy man, and we can’t expect him to bust heads over Afghanistan every day. But we should expect him to bust heads when things aren’t working, when our plan for reconstructing this war-torn country is failing, and that’s exactly what he’s not doing. Nobody is being held accountable for letting our mission in Afghanistan go to hell, and for letting that country go back to behind a haven for terrorists.

This is not a “war against terrorism”, because terrorism will always exist, and there’s nothing you can do to eradicate it. What we should be fighting is a war against al-Qaeda, which is a discrete (and discreet) global organization that is actively working to kill Americans and destroy our nation. We should be working to disrupt their operations, to thwart their goals, and to deny them safe haven anywhere. Instead, we’ve cut funding.

The War against Saddam Hussein

I call this a war against Saddam because that’s what it was — or at least, that’s what it should have been. Had Dubya listened to Colin Powell, and waged the same kind of war we did in 1991 — fast, but with overwhelming force — we would probably be in a much better situation than we are now. Instead, our President allowed Donald Rumsfeld — a man with an all-out love affair with the engineers who make guided missiles — to run a war that was light on troops, light on supplies, light on long-term planning, and heavy on media presence.

We saw images every day of reporters following our troops across the front lines, of cheering Iraqis kissing American troops, and of ragged Iraqi soldiers laying down their arms. We did not see the supply shortages reaching all the way from Qatar to Baghdad; we barely heard about the abandoned weapons depots and nuclear facilities, left unguarded, for which we had no spare troops. We saw the looting, the wholesale decapitation of Iraq’s civil infrastructure, and all this administration could come up with was a weak line about how bad people will be bad people.

This administration had a golden opportunity: to show the Arab world that America could be a force for positive change. We had a chance to show that our enormous military power could help an enslaved Arab country regain its freedom and its independence. And it could’ve been done, if our leaders had been even mildly interested in admitting their mistakes and trying new strategies when old ones didn’t work. But from start to finish, the people directly under Bush — Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Condi Rice — sidelined and ignored Colin Powell, who has already led a successful war against the same country. Somebody should have been made to resign after the awful mistakes we made in Iraq, but instead, the American public is asked to believe that nothing bad ever happened.

Accountability and Enforcement

When someone in any organization, be it a company or a Presidential administration, screws up, they should be held accountable. Under the watch of President Bush, many have committed grave errors and gaping oversights. O’Keefe, at NASA, had failed to prevent bureaucracy from strangling proper engineering practices and endangering the lives of our astronauts. Ashcroft, for all his new toys and new powers, has failed to make any real progress in hunting al-Qaeda within our borders. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz oversaw the worst military blunder in years — the failure to secure post-war Iraq — and it has cost us billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, has wasted millions of tax dollars on a personal crusade against Howard Stern. (You’ll notice Colin Powell is not on this list; he hasn’t made any mistakes, other than choosing to align himself with an administration that silenced and marginalized him the moment it could.)

Yet from our leader, nothing. No reprimands, no demotions, no public admission of mistakes made and lessons learned; this President has chosen to put his blinders on, and to insist that all in his party do the same. Rather than learning from his mistakes, quietly nudging aside those who made them, and moving forward with a better plan, this President has ignored every indication that things are getting worse for our country.

When a CEO refuses to acknowledge that he and his staff have made egregious mistakes, the Board of Trustees finds it their responsibility to fire him and hire a new leader. We, the People, should make it our responsibility to do the same.