Here’s a thought I had: what if we had a flexible system of executive offices, in addition to ministries, to handle persistent long-term responsibilities? For instance, one way this could work might be:
- Similar to ministries, the Prime Minister can create offices to focus on particular policy concerns.
- Unlike ministries, creating or shutting down offices is subject to Assembly approval.
- Similar to ministries, each office is led by a director, appointed by the Prime Minister and confirmed by the Assembly.
- Similar to ministries, each director serves until the end of the Prime Minister’s term.
- Unlike ministries, each office continues to exist indefinitely until shut down by the Prime Minister (with Assembly approval).
Like most ideas I float here, I’m not necessarily sold on this myself, but I’d be interested to see how people feel about it.
In my experience, executive responsibilities can be broadly divided into two categories:
- ministerial portfolios, focused on particular policy areas or term-long projects, and driven by specific agendas each term; and
- recurring institutional responsibilities, focused on particular infrastructure maintainence, and driven by specific desires for ‘things’ we want to have.
For example, consider a hypothetical cards program. Launching the cards program could fall into the first category, where the agenda consists of getting the program off the ground. Maintaining the cards program could fall into the second category, where the focus is more on maintaining a steady stream of cards (which requires continual upkeep in the form of card farming) as a sort of ‘infrastructure’ for other parts of the government that want to use those cards as rewards.
Because we haven’t sought to differentiate these two categories, we’ve sometimes strayed into bureaucratic bloat without a clear solution to clean it up. For example, with the Ministry of Engagement and the staffer system, we ended up with an expansive staff roster despite having few individuals actively participating; but in the process of trimming things down, we ended up in a situation where just a handful of individuals — Viet, myself, and maybe anjo — are in essence responsible for our dispatches, outside of any executive structure. The pathway from noticing an error in our dispatches to getting it fixed should not be posting about it on Discord, hoping Viet sees the message and pings me, and waiting for me to just fix it myself, without any involvement from the executive. It also should not be sending private messages to people without knowing who can actually edit the dispatch or who’s supposed to sign off on that change. I’m speaking from experience here!
Separating this work out into its own office ‘isolates’ the bureaucracy. An office doesn’t have to do a whole lot, but it allows us to identify the kinds of work that actually need continual upkeep and separate it from the ministerial portfolios of people who want to pursue their agenda, not manage the bureaucracy. For instance, a Minister of Integration could focus on launching their new mentorship program without worrying about how to do dispatch maintenance, and an office could focus on gradually making that dispatch maintenance more approachable without worrying about churn every three months where the Ministry of Integration might not even exist.
We already have one office, the Office of World Assembly Legislation. Arguably, we could just create more offices. But I think we don’t have a culture of doing so, in part because OWL was not created to be a permanent executive institution in contrast to transitive ministries. It was created as a compromise between a full-fledged WA ministry, back when our ministries were fixed, and no ministry at all. It’s just happened to be grandfathered in as a permanent fixture of the executive, and it kind of works because a lot of what OWL does or has done is opening voting threads — the kind of recurring work that I’d argue better fits an office than a ministry.