Administration confirms 61 active task forces, commissions review of coordination between them
NEW YORK – City Hall has established a task force to examine coordination among the city’s existing task forces, following an internal count that identified sixty-one active bodies, of which eleven were unaware of each other and three were working on the same problem from opposite directions.
The new body will be called the Interagency Coordination Task Force and will report to a commission established in 2023 to improve interagency coordination.
The Count Itself Required a Working Group
Determining how many task forces existed proved unexpectedly difficult, as several had been established by executive order, several by council legislation, several by memoranda of understanding between agencies, and at least two by a press release that was never followed by any founding document.
The working group assembled to conduct the count took four months and concluded that the figure of sixty-one should be treated as a minimum.
We are confident about sixty-one, said deputy mayor for operations Ingrid Salcedo-Hartmann. We are aware of possibly four more. Two of those may be the same task force under different names, and one may be a mailing list that has been meeting monthly since 2018 without authorisation, which honestly is the most functional thing we found.
The Overlapping Mandates
The review identified substantial duplication. Three separate bodies hold a mandate on street vending. Four address small business permitting. Two are examining the permitting process for the other two.
Most notably, a task force established to reduce administrative burden on city agencies has itself issued four hundred and eleven information requests to city agencies, a figure its own quarterly report describes as necessary groundwork.
City agency structure and reporting requirements are documented by the Mayor’s Office of Operations, and independent assessment of municipal management performance is published by the Citizens Budget Commission, whose analysts have noted that the city’s reporting requirements have grown faster than the services being reported on.
Why Task Forces Persist
Governance researchers describe the task force as an unusually efficient political instrument because it converts an unsolved problem into a visible process at negligible cost.
Announcing a task force takes one press conference, said public administration scholar Dr Nadia Franchetti-Oduya. It costs almost nothing. It generates a headline. It creates a period during which nobody can reasonably demand an answer, because the matter is under review. And critically, it has no failure condition. A task force cannot lose. It can only continue.
She noted that of the sixty-one active bodies, nine have never issued a report, and none of the nine has been dissolved.
Observations From the Second Floor
- Every task force has one person who does all the work, and that person is never the chair.
- The final report is always excellent, always late, and always released the Friday before a holiday.
- Recommendations are grouped into short, medium and long term. The short term recommendations are implemented. The others are cited.
- A task force with a budget produces different work than one without, and the distinction is never mentioned in the announcement.
- The mailing list that has been meeting since 2018 has, according to the review, actually solved three things.
Delegating Decisiveness Is a Transatlantic Art
Substituting process for action is if anything more advanced in Britain. Westminster produced a sustained demonstration when a prime minister committed to resolute opposition without specifying its form or timing, later clarified when the resolute opposition was confirmed to consist of vocabulary.
The response from Washington was equally instructive, arriving when the American side supplied its own account of the arrangement, after which both governments regarded the matter as handled and no policy anywhere changed.
The ongoing comparative record is maintained at Bohiney Magazine, with the Westminster file collected at the assembled Westminster case notes.
First Meeting Scheduled
The Interagency Coordination Task Force will convene next month. Membership has not been finalised, as several proposed members chair task forces that would be within its scope, raising a question officials described as procedural.
Salcedo-Hartmann said the question would be referred to the commission.
The Report Format Has Been Standardised
All sixty-one bodies now produce reports conforming to a template introduced in 2021, which requires an executive summary, a methodology section, a findings section, and a recommendations section grouped by implementation horizon.
An analysis of thirty-one reports produced under the template found that the executive summaries were near-identical in structure, that eleven contained the same opening sentence with different nouns, and that the recommendation sections collectively proposed the creation of nine further working groups.
Franchetti-Oduya said the template achieved its stated purpose, which was consistency, and its unstated one, which was the elimination of surprise. A standardised report cannot startle anybody, she said. That is not a flaw in the template. That is what a template is for. If you want a document that changes a decision, you do not use a template, and the city has not commissioned one of those in some years.
Salcedo-Hartmann was asked whether the new body would eventually be reviewed by a further body. She said that would depend on its findings, and that the question was premature. Asked when it would cease to be premature, she said that determination would fall to the commission, which has not met since February.
Further reading at The Shovel.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/