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U.S. Federal Agencies Could Benefit From Bureaucratic Reform

Former chief of staff for White House National Space Council calls for cultural and incentive structure change to better meet national security needs.

Former White House National Space Council chief of staff spoke on the need for bureaucratic reform across federal agencies. Photo by Senior Airman Perry Aston.

Cultural and bureaucratic change within U.S. federal agencies could foster stronger economic and innovative development, said Jared Stout, vice president of government and external relations at Axiom Space, during a Defense Writers Group gathering in Washington D.C. on January 7.

Having begun his career as a staffer on Capitol Hill, Stout previously served as the deputy executive secretary and chief of staff for the White House National Space Council. Before that, he served as the chief of staff and senior adviser for communications at the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Office of Commercial Space Transportation. The positions he held gave him a broad perspective on the ways in which U.S. government agencies operate.

“I think we have to change our incentive structure for creating capability that is necessary for our long-term national security competitiveness,” he told reporters. “Right now, the incentive structure is, ‘As long as I show up to work and I move this paper from this pile to this pile, I’ve done my job.’”

Unlike the business world, in which a day is measured by its accomplishments, many government employees are incentivized to do the bare minimum, Stout stated. The key to change, he added, is instead incentivizing extraordinary behavior, therefore leading to more efficient operations.

Much of this change must come from a deeply rooted government agency culture, however.

Speaking from his experience at the FAA, Stout commended the agency’s commitment to safety while noting the disadvantage bureaucracy plays against rapid innovation. In a fast-paced technological landscape, which involves businesses working for profit, agencies such as the FAA are not bureaucratically built to respond at scale, therefore hindering further innovation advancement.

“At the time that I was [working for the FAA], some of the rules that we were using to regulate SpaceX existed before SpaceX existed,” Stout shared.

“I would humbly suggest that the biggest problem that the [U.S. Department of Defense] has to moving fast in high tech areas where we’re worried about our national security is solely based in our acquisition systems. I don’t think it’s a lack of willpower; I don’t think it’s a lack of ideas; I don’t think it’s a lack of innovation,” Stout continued. “I think that we have really smart people up and down the national security enterprise that know what needs to happen but [are] hamstrung by a bureaucratic system that will not let go."

Speaking on adversarial threats, Stout stressed the importance of leveraging the key ingredient in U.S. mission success.

“The secret sauce of the U.S. is our innovation economy and our entrepreneurial capabilities,” he stated. “We can never out-centrally plan China, but we can out-innovate them, and so what we need to do is take those shackles off the innovation economy and take advantage of all of those capabilities that are being developed.”