[TRG] A Closer Look

Day 3,054, 21:57 • Published in USA USA • by J.A. Lake

Alright, I'll allow that my last article was a little rushed. There was a major misconception I don't think I did enough to dispel.

I was not attacking the people in either proposed Cabinet or Cabinets past.

That said, I decided to delve a little deeper into the Cabinets of 2015 (and 2016, thus far). I included December 2014 to compensate for not including December 2015, because that month was a little... messy.

Numbers and stuff inbound.

So I pulled up Excel and started going through old campaign articles. Those are my source. I broke it down Department-by-Department, getting the average number of months served by each Department Head and rounding it to the nearest tenth.

Findings:

Secretaries of Media: 1.4 Months Each
Secretaries of State: 1.6 Months Each
Chiefs of Staff: 1.6 Months Each
Dictators/Presidents: 1.6 Months Each
National Security Council: 2 Months Each
Secretaries of Defense: 2.5 Months Each

What we see is that in every department for which measurements were taken (I did not include Department of Homeland Security or Department of Citizen Affairs since both were broken up/created within the span of time I was measuring for) Secretaries have served for greater than 1 month on average. Ideally we'd be closer to the 1.4 that the Media Department yielded and further from the 2.5 in Defense (DoI, DoE, and DoCA together were a 2.1 Month Each average, but I chose not to include it because it was an amalgamation of multiple departments).

Let's talk about implications, then.

My previous article had a pretty small sample size- last month and one of two possible avenues for next month. While a pattern was suggested, there is little validity to it as a result of the aforementioned small sample size. I bumped it from 3 to 14 cases to get a wider look at the picture.

Predictably, the strong pattern suggested before grew considerably weaker, but did not, in my opinion, disappear. What I found shows that while it isn't something like 67 or 70% of the Cabinet (that case is unique to April 2016, it seems) all of the time, it is still a significant relationship. We still have multiple-month runs of the same people in the same office.

That doesn't even acknowledge people jumping from department to department between administrations. For example, Aramec has served every administration this year in a different capacity (Secretary of Media, Secretary of State, and Press Secretary). That wouldn't show up in the prior results. When one finds the average number of months served by people in the Cabinets of the past year, you find 3.85.

When you consider that Departments are all being held on average for 1.4-2.5 months by people holding cabinet positions for 3.85 months each, you can see where some of the difficulty lies. Fewer people are holding more cabinet-level positions, which would indicate a lack of fresh meat in each department.

Solutions.

A common criticism of the last article was that I claimed the Government to be exclusive, when all one has to do is volunteer. That's all well and good, but it took me half an hour when I sought out a form to volunteer for Department of Defense and Department of State when last I did. The forms need to be easier to find.

We also need to consider going to them, instead of adopting a fisherman's approach. What do I mean by "fisherman's approach"? I mean specifically that we need to seek out active members of parties here in the game and elevate them to Cabinet-level positions rather than relying on those that read the fine print of irregularly-released official government publications to come to us.


eUS Government seen here hard at work waiting for people to find it.

Outreach can't be limited just to someone lucking into the location of the gdoc applications or finding a patron with enough social capital to get them a position in the eGovernment. We have to go find them.

Beyond that, perhaps we need to look at passing laws limiting back-to-back terms for Cabinet-level positions. That may be worthwhile, and it would curb three- or four-month streaks with the same people in the same positions.

Anyone with another suggestion, feel free to post it. Let's talk about this problem.