Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is alive and well

Interesting and tragic. From A Pedophile on the Reservation by John Hinderaker.

Basically, the U.S. Indian Health Service has difficulty staffing medical facilities on Indian reservations because the locations are grim, remote and spare. In the private sector, under such circumstances, you raise the compensation until the market clears. In government agencies, you lower the threshold of standards until the market clears. You will always have a few saints such as Dr. Mark Butterbrodt, but they are few and far between and you make do, defending the indefensible.

The Wall Street Journal reports the appalling story of Dr. Pat Weber, a pediatrician who apparently preyed on young Indian boys for decades without being held accountable. The story caught my attention because it featured, in a positive role, one of my closest boyhood friends:

At first, officials at the U.S. Indian Health Service overlooked the peculiarities of their unmarried new doctor, including the children’s toys he hoarded in his basement on the reservation. They desperately needed a pediatrician at their hospital in Browning, Mont.

By 1995, after three years, they became convinced Stanley Patrick Weber was a pedophile and pushed for his removal from the government-run hospital.

“You’re going to have to leave,” Randy Rottenbiller, its clinical director at the time, recalled telling the doctor after learning a child patient had stayed the night in his house.

But the Indian Health Service didn’t fire Mr. Weber. Instead, it transferred him to another hospital in Pine Ridge, S.D. He continued treating Native American children there for another 21 years, leaving behind a trail of sexual-assault allegations.

The villains of the story are Dr. Weber, of course, and the Indian Health Service. My old friend, Dr. Mark Butterbrodt, was a fellow pediatrician on the Pine Ridge reservation and tried repeatedly to turn Weber in:

On Dec. 2, 2008, Mark Butterbrodt, another pediatrician at Pine Ridge, contacted the South Dakota medical board alleging that Mr. Weber “selectively cherry-picks young teenage boys in clinic,” according to a copy of the complaint described to the Journal and Frontline. The board investigated. It declined to comment on its findings.

The following year, Dr. Butterbrodt documented the allegations in a letter to his IHS bosses, including Jan Colton, then the hospital’s clinical director. She appointed a panel to investigate. “There were suspicions, but they could find no hard evidence,” said Dr. Colton, a dentist who is now retired.

Tragically the situation became a classic example, in the same fashion as the Catholic Church with its pedophile priests, of Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

After a clash with Mr. Weber, Dr. Butterbrodt was pulled into a supervisor’s office and, within weeks, transferred to a remote facility in North Dakota and stripped of bonus pay, which amounted to around one-third of his annual salary, according to personnel records and Dr. Butterbrodt.

“I was chased off by a pedophile and the people who chose him over me,” said Dr. Butterbrodt, who retired soon after.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

I am dealing with a similar, though far less consequential example of this right now. There is a public infrastructure development advocacy group masquerading as an environmental group. They are backed with corporate and developer money, have a well connected lobbyist. They have ready and routine access to city politicians and city departments. Their objective is to push surfaced trails through a series of environmentally fragile parks and preserves (old growth forest, flood plains and watersheds) in residential neighborhoods.

Where built, the trails have already done immense environmental damage as well as driven up crime by 40% in three years. From a residents point of view, this is a proposition with no upside. From the city's perspective, the developers want this as a vanity project or a transportation alternative (depending on who you listen to).

The politicians and agencies want to deal with the deep pockets and not interact with residents. They have circumvented all sorts of environmental laws, spent tax payer money that was dedicated for other purposes, and closed off all avenues for resident involvement.

All the City agencies have missions that include "citizen involvement", "community engagement", "environmental protection", "sustainability", "respect", etc. Over the past decade, those good City employees who attempt to live those commitments get transferred into dead-ends or, usually, see the writing on the wall and leave. The members of the departments who remain operate like the old fashioned city machines. "Nice neighborhood. Shame if something were to happen to it."

It is a tangle of power and money defending bureaucratic and financial interests in the face of fact-based citizen opposition. Another clear example of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.