The Limits of Control: The Market State, Divided Power, and the Response to 9/11

ABSTRACT

The 9/11 attacks demanded a response from the U.S. government, but designing and executing that response was not easily done. The United States is an advanced market society in which power is highly dispersed. Federal policymakers were confronted with challenges that we now regard as typical of the network form of governance. Their ability to act decisively was constrained by public law, by the political influence and superior knowledge of private industry, and by widespread skepticism about the legitimacy of federal authority. While many commentators worried about the excessive concentration of power in the federal executive branch after 9/11, it might be more accurate to say that the post-9/11 period was typified by a prolonged, and often unsuccessful, effort to induce cooperation and coordination by a range of public and private actors.

Notes

In fact, this sort of network was a domestic product: the white nationalist Louis Beam had advocated “leaderless resistance systems” as the best structure for resisting government attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the movement.

This statement is subject to two major caveats. First, it must be recognized that leaders in bureaucracies may lack actual, rather than formal authority, because of informational asymmetries and resource dependence problems. Second, there is a body of literature that take a less anarchic view of networked governance. Agranoff and McGuire have defined “public management networks” as “multiorganizational arrangements…led or managed by government representatives”(2001), while Milward and Provan have studied “decentralized and devolved governmental regimes” in which public agencies execute programs through contracts with a variety of private, non-profit or governmental organizations (2003).

Data on the value of goods imported by the United States is provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Department of Commerce.

Statistics on the percentage growth of homeland security programs since 2001 may not convey this reality sufficiently. It may be that in certain areas spending has grown “hugely” in percentage terms, but in some areas pre-9/11 expenditure was negligible (Benjamin and Simon 2005).

World War One, the Great Red Scare, World War Two, the second “red scare” of the early Cold War period, and the “law and order” crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in John Doe v. Ashcroft was given in September 2004; the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut was given in September 2005. In the Connecticut case, “gag provisions” were found to violate the First Amendment. In the New York case, the Court also found that the terms governing the National Security Letter itself violated the Fourth Amendment.

National Security Letters cannot be used to obtain certain records collected as part of libraries' traditional functions, and recipients of letters have the explicit right to consult lawyers.

This argument is consistent with the approach taken by scholars in the historical institutionalist school (see Thelen and Stienmo 1992; Pierson and Skokpol 2004).

Theodore Draper and Aaron Wildavsky made the same point when they argued that the U.S. system actually includes a “bifurcated” or dual presidency, consisting of one part that is tightly constrained in matters of domestic policy and another that is loosely constrained in military affairs (Wildavsky 1969; Draper 1991).

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Alasdair Roberts

Alasdair Roberts ([email protected]) is an associate professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of School of Public Policy, University College London. He is interested in the politics of public sector reform. His website is http://www.aroberts.us.