Authority vs. Responsibility

A commonly heard complaint from managers in large corporations, military officers in the field, school teachers, and myriad others is that they’ve been given the responsibility to get something done but not the authority to do it. They see what the problem is and understand how to fix it, but they’re not allowed to hire or fire the needed people, or spend the needed money, or give the needed orders to others.

If the problem doesn’t get solved, the person who is “responsible” is to blame, and if it does get fixed, then the person with “authority” gets the credit. Most of the people that find themselves in this bind don’t really care about credit or blame – they just want to do their job and achieve a positive outcome. Especially when lives are at stake.

When Brett Crozier, Commanding Officer of an aircraft carrier with over 4000 people under his command, realized that there was a Covid-19 outbreak on the ship and no way to slow contagion in the ship’s close quarters, he knew that the only way to save lives was to off-load the sick for treatment and test and quarantine anyone else who was infected. But he didn’t have the authority to do it.

He wrote an urgent letter to the Secretary of the Navy outlining what needed to happen, but the letter was “leaked” outside the chain of command. Crozier was relieved from his duties by the acting Naval secretary, Thomas B. Modly, who said Crozier “cracked under pressure”.   Weird how just about everyone in the administration of Donald John Tweety Trump is “acting”, isn’t it?  Much more convenient for Tweety, though, when it’s time for the acting guy himself to be terminated, as all Tweety enablers eventually are.

Modly said Crozier should have known the letter would be made public and if he didn’t realize that, he was either “too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer.” Modly made these remarks over the ship’s P.A. system and of course they were immediately made public, so he, too, has now had to resign. Too naïve or stupid for the job, it seems.

Captain Crozier is now himself infected and in quarantine, and sailors on the U.S.S. Roosevelt have begun to die.  All so predictable. And Tragic. But these events happened over a week ago, and in the sped-up world of the hit reality show, “The POTUS”, we can barely remember them now. No point in going over ancient history anyway – the only question we need to address is “where to from here?” Some might say we need to talk about how we got here before we can figure a way out, but that just seems like the kind of “expertise” that always gets in the way.

I stopped listening to Trump’s daily Covid-19 “updates” a while ago for the obvious reason that they are not designed to impart useful information, but rather to put Tweety’s greatness and omniscience on display for all.  He’s a very stable genius and we must never forget that.

But every now and then some outrageous example of Trump topping himself at one of his crypto-rallies seeps into my consciousness. Yesterday he had an apparent meltdown, choosing to show some bizarrely-edited campaign propaganda video about how every decision he has made has been perfect, and then screaming at every single person who asked a question about the video they had just seen.

Apparently no one asked, “if you’ve done everything perfectly, why do we have more than three times as many cases as any other country, and 25,000 people already dead with no plan announced to end the contagion?”

The one question that was foremost on this day was whether the President actually had the authority to “open the country”, or was this ultimately going to be up to the governors of each state. Predictably, I suppose, Tweety said that, as president, his “authority is total”.

Of course, no constitutional scholar agrees with this pronouncement. For the record, though, Tweety does have total authority to control the day’s news cycle, limiting it for today to a heated discussion of whether or not he has total authority over everything else. And, of course, “many people” believe he does, which is usually all that matters these days. I’ll leave it to you, GOML reader, to guess which “news” network those believers are appearing on.

What was interesting about this tantrum was that it was just a short time ago that Tweety declined to issue a national stay-at-home order, saying it was the responsibility of the state governors to do so. He said it was because he believed in the constitution, perhaps more than anyone, and the constitution says the governors are responsible for a shut-down order, not the president.

He said it was also the governors’ responsibility to procure ventilators, N-95 masks, and other personal protective gear for their own states, thereby setting up a bidding war between the states for these things, with the federal government also goosing prices higher by bidding themselves.

So it’s a puzzle, right? Tweety first says only the governors can decide to make people stay at home, but then says only the president can decide to make them go back out.  Leaving aside the obvious, i.e. that Tweety says everything and its opposite all the time, and therefore no one can take anything he says seriously, how can these two apparently contradictory statements co-exist?

Well, it’s actually pretty simple. Just as those who really want to get things done can point out that they have the responsibility but no authority to do them, Tweety’s game is rigged so that he has all the authority and none of the responsibility.

A person who is doing their job to achieve the best outcome for all doesn’t really care if he is blamed when things go wrong or not praised when things go right. Tweety, on the other hand, cares nothing about others and is obsessed only with his own “ratings”. He needs to make sure that he gets credit for anything that goes right, whether he had any part in it or not, while blaming others for everything that goes wrong, even when he is wholly responsible for the fiasco.