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Top U.S. Scientific Misconduct Official Quits In Frustration With Bureaucracy
sandbagger writes "The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the 'remarkably dysfunctional' federal bureaucracy. Officials at the Office of Scientific Integrity spent 'exorbitant amounts of time' in meetings and generating data and reports to make their divisions look productive, David Wright writes. He huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI 'the very worst job I have ever had.'"
and its a large corporation in the private sector. Its hard for very large organizations to be efficient.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
The sickness is endemic, and not just in government either; pretty much all big business suffers from this once it reaches critical mass. Basically, when you have a hierarchy of people who are so separated by degrees of management tier that the bulk of them no longer care about the actual stated goal or task of the organization and don't interact socially or even actually know anyone high enough up in the organization who does, and then you let them self-schedule their time in business meetings, every business meeting will become an elaborate excuse to not do any work. The meetings themselves look like work from a distance though, so this type of dysfunctional situation can persist for decades without anyone who cares actually noticing.
I spent a lost year of my life working for a similar agency. The systematic fear and redundant covering of asses made for endless meetings.
The only thing worse than busywork is busywork with a profound sense of importance attached to it.
In a system where your rewards are based on the look of powerpoint presentations that are delivered to directors, you end up spending all your time optimizing the data on the slides. The same principle is applied all over the place, in almost every human endeavor. Using the wrong measure of progress means we waste time and effort. It also has a side effect of making everyone miserable, like the guy in this story. See health care, prison system, etc.
By the way, this isn't a problem unique to the government. His gripes sound very similar to my reality. I work in a large aerospace company.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
This reminds me of what Richard Feynman went through while investigating the Shuttle Discovery disaster.
They made a movie about it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt24...
Great post, thanks.
Why is Fox News politics on Slashdot?
Add to this the lack of incentive to save money and you've got a right good mess. After spending time and effort to save funds on a program (government in this case), we ended the year with a surplus of funds (in the 10x of 1,000's range, I know it's a drop in the bucket but, we were quite proud at the time). When next year rolled around we were suddenly "poor estimators" and had "poor financial management", so our budget was cut by several times over our savings from last year.
That was many years ago but, since then I experienced a similar mentality in the private sector, especially when dealing with government contracts.
Also, our parent company recently took over management of our capital purchases. We have the money, we have the need, we have reviewed the data but, now it takes and extra 4-6 months to purchase something (e.g. a upgraded SAN). It seems that another subsidiary had some issue with their purchasing process, so rather than deal with the problem, Mother (our loving term for our parent company), created several more.
Oh the irony.
Office of Research Integrity
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Given his recent experience with the ORI, I wonder if David Wright's talents might serve the public better by forming a watchdog group that essentially does the same thing as the ORI. It wouldn't have the teeth the ORI has in terms of access to data, that in itself may make it a non-starter; but if possible the group could serve to inform the public, and when necessary, embarrass the ORI by pointing out inaction.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
If true he could get another job where there's no paperwork.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
That is so true, in my experience also. Large companies have slow bureaucracies because they're large, and there's a lot of management overhead. The federal government is several orders of magnitude larger, and there's no incentive to succeed. Google is big, but Google employees know that if they don't get the job done , Apple and Microsoft will eat their lunch. If the federal bureau of whatever doesn't get the job done ... nothing, they'll still be there next year. Add to that the extra layers and layers of paperwork and crap because it's taxpayer money ...
We see examples on Slashdot all the time. Some government decided to build a fiber network. Ten years and a billion dollars later, it's still not working. Google takes over and six months later - happy customers.
Big companies are bureaucratic like an elephant is big.
Government is bureaucratic like Jupiter is big.
I spent a few years as a public servant before doing what I do now. It was, to say the least, an eye opening experience. If you want to learn exactly how NOT to run a business go work for the government for a while.
The procurement system is completely whacked. Everyone seems to know it but nobody wants to do anything to fix it. Democrats and Republicans alike have both had ample opportunity to fix it and both have shied away from it.
It is nearly impossible to fire an incompetent federal employee. The best management can do is put the person in a crummy job and hope they quit. Likewise, management is forbidden from giving bonuses to top performing employees. It doesn't take long before people realize that they get paid the same whether they put in an honest days work or sit there with their feet up on the desk.
Efficiency in government is punished, not rewarded. If you find a way to save money your reward is a reduced budget for next year. No raise, no promotion, no bonus, no thanks. So you end up with year end spending sprees to ensure that you spend every penny allocated to your department.
It's very difficult to measure success in government. If you are selling a product you can say we sold X last year and this year we sold X+2. Therefore, this year was better than last. In public service how do you measure it? We had fewer complaints this year than last?
It seemed to me that if you worked in government you had one of two choices. You could either suck it up and wait for your pension or leave and do something else. I chose to leave. I did find a lot of good, hard working people in government. I also found a lot of lazy, good for nothing doorstops. Such is life.
Government exemplifies Parkinson's Law. With essentially unlimited resources (just raise taxes) the bureaucracy can expand indefinitely until all "work" being done is perpetuating the bureaucracy and nothing useful is accomplished.
Have people stopped reading the last sentence of the typically summary altogether with the part of the brain that doesn't type?
On a not-so-tangential side note, it would be nice in the eagerly awaited Beta Redux to be able to click preview prior to furnishing the subject line, and actually get the preview to go along with the lecture. Just about every time this happens to me I want to paste "cat got your tongue" into the subject line until I've actually seen the damn preview I requested, at which point I'm far less than entirely motivated to go back and remove the shim.
It's like childhood. You ask a question. Someone corrects how you presented the question. The question itself never gets answered. If the question can't be properly understood, it needs to be addressed before diving off into an answer. If it's just a matter of persnicketty dress code, probably the answer needs to come first if you're raising a young scientist rather than a young bureauocrat.
However, one must make an exception to this basis rule in extreme cases of shifting the burden: when someone publishes something for thousands to read, and every damn reader has to read the final sentence three times because you've changed "The" into "He"—a hundred times worse than the natural error "he"—which is enough to turn us all into syntactic Cylons.
FFS whoever submitted that, get your mental back-light fixed.
s/basis rule/basic rule
That's a natural error, where my brain had the right word, and my speedy fingers went "close enough" as they often do when there's a hot, fresh, unfinished coffee on my desk they're trying to rush off and levitate.
Semantic interference often contributes. I think my brain went square dancing for a brief moment with the Peano postulates.
What good is it to be director of the agency if he couldn't streamline their processes? Don't like frivilous reports? Give bad performance reviews to people who write them. Don't like meetings? Remove all the chairs from meeting rooms. Etc.
It would seem to me that the solution is to put an end to guarenteeing the jobs of Federal employees.
Maybe the department would still be there next year, but the fear of individuals having their position removed or getting fired and replaced might be enough to keep things moving.
Just my two cents -- I don't and never have worked for the government, so I can't say too much.
I know of a large telecom operator that's been offering virtual datacenter services to its (also large) enterprise customers. There's this rumor that it takes the tech guy around 5 to 15 minutes to create a virtual machine for a customer...which is always preceded by 20 days of paperwork and approvals.
ymmv
Seriously, we have a paid staff looking into this?? WTF business is that of the federal govt?
Seems like that should be something policed by the biomedical community, no?
Is biomedical misconduct in research against the law or something???
If not, what is the govt doing spending tax money on this?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'd say that you're buying into the whole "governments are bad, mkay..." syndrome that affects a large swath of the population these days. In my experience, I've had great government work experiences and ultra-crappy private sector experiences and vice-versa. Perhaps the reason that government project failures get more attention is a combination of a very active propaganda machine always on the lookout for any government failure so that they can hype it mercilessly and that - overall - government projects tend to be larger. Just a thought....
I'd like to see a (I think) novel approach: contract the exact same job twice. Concoct some metrics for success and reward the contractor who "wins" each year with a bonus.
You don't have to be too wasteful - the work can be divvied up so that you are not literally doing the work twice.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That may not be a bad idea, even if you are doing the same work twice. A project that Google or Apple would spend $100M on could pay $75M to the loser and $130M to the winner and still come out better than the current system.
However, to make it worth doing for $150M, you'd need to seriously reduce the government paperwork and delays, the layers of approvals for little minor stuff. Where I work, a government agency, the budget specificity is maddening. The state approves $X million for new computers, I had to spend $4,800 on a new workstation even though the old one has 16GB of RAM, four monitors, etc. A few months later, my UPS battery went bad and needed a $25 replacement. It's been weeks and I'm still waiting for approval to replace the battery.
My colleague saved $30,000 on a project by pointing out we had already purchased the thing we were supposed to spend $30,000 on. This is a big problem, trying to figure out how to send that $30,000 to /dev/null. We can't spend it on things we need, like batteries, because it's not approved for that use.
It's government, what did you possibly think was going to happen?
Because, as we all know, nations are eternal, can never collapse or experience hardship, and don't compete with each other.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yes, biomedical misconduct is against the law, especially when it's funded with federal dollars. ORI only investigates (when bureaucracy allows them to) alleged incidents that are reported to them which only applies to HHS funded research, which is mostly NIH funded research. So it's 100% the business of the federal government. A typical investigation doesn't cost the government that much, anyway, since a lot of it involves making the institution that was awarded the grant (typically a university) conduct most of the investigation and report back, and most will because they want to continue having their other investigators receive NIH funding. Not to mention the university doesn't want to have the reputation of having faculty who misrepresent their research.
Now, if you want to argue that the government shouldn't be funding this research in the first place in which case this office wouldn't be necessary, that's a different story (although I personally disagree with that).
There is a push at the moment to replicate results, especially for potentially high impact studies. The problem is, who's going to pay for it? Granted, it should be cheaper to reproduce a result (or fail to do so) than it was to do the original research, but with the NIH payline currently only funding something like 12% of all proposals in the first place, which additional grants are you going to refuse to fund in order to do this? I really don't see the political will to change this, if anything the current budget's slight increase will keep things from getting worse w.r.t. funding. There's also the issue that "original" research is far sexier than reproducing other things.
There's also an issue of WHO is going to do this. I think you'd need to set up an institute that does nothing but replicate results. No PI is going to spend 6-12 months and $10s of thousands doing work that is at most going to get a little note published saying "we got the same result" unless it's critically related to other things going on in the lab. Publish or perish, after all. Also, in niche fields, there may only be a few dozen individuals worldwide capable of doing the work.
Finally, what if the research is on a rare disease that affects 10-20 people/year and requires enough subjects for a clinical trial? Where are you going to find a second set of individuals with the disease, who weren't part of the first trial and are both able and willing to take place in the second?
Really, I'm not arguing that replication shouldn't be done, just trying to point out how impractical it can be.
I agree, it is a waste of time to investigate fraud. Every study should be independently replicated to catch all types of false results.
It would be much more expensive to replicate each study than to investigate fraud; in some fields independent replication would be almost as expensive as the original. If we are going to flash anywhere near that amount of cash around I'd rather see grant proposals graded a bit more on bigger sample sizes and internal replication (reviewers could look at applicants' prior publications to see if they follow through on those promises) with funds increased accordingly. NIH could also have requirements for training in experimental design and data analysis for any grad students or postdocs that its grant money pays.
I hear all the time that Americans are scared of their government. How can they be scared of a government that is apparently to inefficient to get something scary done?
And of course, mind-bogglingly vast government excess. That's a contributing factor too. When you do something for three orders of magnitude less than a corresponding government effort, here, launching an airship to 18 miles, 4 miles higher than anyone else, including two US defense companies has done, you tend to get cynical about such things.
One of those defense companies, which was funded more than a billion dollars over the past couple of decades to develop high altitude airships, managed to hit about 4 miles before their 150 million dollar vehicle broke up. Sure, it had a bit more functionality, but "it works" beats functionality every time.
managed to hit about 6 miles
Oops. I didn't remember the altitude correctly.
You know, it's not all or nothing. We can and should investigate allegations of fraud/misconduct, but you also bring up some other real problems.
What you call p-hacking is a big problem in more biological/medical fields, I've seen a recent proposal for the grant agencies to fund and require someone be involved who actually understands statistics (and their limitations) with any project that's going to use p-values to "confirm" results.
As for publication bias, I think this takes on 2 forms. The first is that something questionable gets published because the research is question is currently "hot", or because it's related to the editor's field. I'm really not sure how to deal with the first; most journals have multiple editors and I suppose you could recuse one in his/her own field, but at the same time that editor is best able to know who the external reviewers should be. Form #2 is more insidious; a paper gets published pretty much only because the lead investigator is a big name in the field, either solely because "he's big, this has to be good science" or because the editor/reviewer is afraid to recommend major changes or non-publication for fear of retaliation. I've seen this. The best solution, but one I fear most journals will be loathe to implement, is double blind reviewing where each paper is assigned a number when it gets to the editorial office and then the names are removed so it can be reviewed solely for the science. It's not perfect, and in many cases it's possible to have a strong suspicion which lab a paper came from, but would be a huge improvement over what we have now.
The NSA hasn't been cancelled, or even had a major budget cut. Ergo clearly bad government programs and agencies continue. Has even one person responsible for that mess been fired?
"Temporary" programs designed to address conditions during the great depression continue to this day.
Of course you can also find ridiculous examples of programs that worked well being shut down. It doesn't appear that there is any logic to it.
If by "these days" you mean "all of human history and experience", then yes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Why would they be? The NSA "gets the job done". The job it's doing is dirty, but the fault for that lies on the feet of the people who gave it its mandate - ultimately American people.
Besides, even if the NSA was destroyed, the problem that gave it birth would still exist: taking national security to be a concern overriding all other considerations, including rights of individuals. As long as America is more important than Americans, something like the NSA will always exist.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The income gap got so wide that education could not out pace dumb. And it will pull down everything except very small pockets of ultra rich. The world will be right back in the dark ages I have no idea what we will call it. But it is happening so fast we no longer have graves for them all and cremation is now the norm.
And yet, in spite of your accurate assessment, there are still legions of dogmatic libertarians and "conservatives" who resolutely insist that Big Government is inefficient and evil but Big Business is saintly and svelte and can efficiently solve all the world's problems where those inefficiently evil governments are doomed to fail.
To those dogmatists I ask a simple question: when have you ever seen a business who customer base was exactly the size of the entire United States population? Or asked another way, if we scaled your eternally efficient business up to the size of the networking nightmare required to serve such a huge clientele such a diverse array of products and services, would your business still be more efficient?
"The US economy is rapidly splitting in two, into a blue-collar/lower education economy where unemployment is high and job prospects are low; and a white-collar/higher education economy where unemployment is low and that's where all the growth is happening (tech, finance, etc.)"
I agree the first one is not coming back, but as I see it, the second one is mostly going away too. To over-simplify, robotics eliminated blue collar jobs, but AI eliminates white collar jobs. A "basic income" is one solution to this. Below is a further elaboration on that theme.
Blue collar jobs making and mending things (and some "pink collar" service jobs like massage, hair cutting, bartending, nursing, and waitressing) are eliminated (or greatly reduced) by robotics and similar automation that can recognize and manipulate physical things (or empower one person to do more, like a powered exoskeleton or semi-autonomous welding rigs requiring only partial supervision). Better design of tools and products (including eventually 3D printing) also reduce such jobs by making "DIY" easier or making products that last longer or are easier to assemble and install yourself (like "John Guest" plumbing connections that press together).
White collar jobs and some other "service jobs" (like librarians, accountants, insurance agents, travel agents, system administrators, managers, teachers, radiologists, telemarketers, telephone-based support positions) are eliminated by AI and lesser programs that can recognize and manipulate information, or at least amplify the ability of an individual to "Do it yourself" like tax software. Again, even if they don't replace such jobs, they can empower one person to do what used to take dozens of people.
There is some overlap because most jobs in practice have a variety of aspects. Radiologists work mostly with visual patterns, for example, so software for robot vision is affecting them. Hair styling requires creative application of general principles to an individual with a certain shape of head and character of hair, so AI may be an important aspect for planing overall strategy. Improved telephone support may require recognizing human speech and holding a conversation.
So, the value of hiring a human for any job is going to diminish over time as robotics, AI, ad other automation improves. We saw that first in agriculture (in the USA, going from 90% of employment to 2% over two centuries while output grows, although gardening remains a popular hobby). Now we are seeing it in manufacturing (in the USA, going from about 35% to 15% over 50 years and still falling while output grows, and while the hobby maker movement rises). We will see that with white color jobs too. That is why we need a healthy mix of basic income, an expanded gift economy, improved subsistence, and more participatory democratic government planning.
By the way, it is true the USA imports more and more manufactured goods like from China. However, the smaller national US workforce still produces more than ever as well. The USA may bring those manufacturing back from China, but there will not be significantly more jobs from it because such jobs will be automated. Steve Jobs said this about Apple's manufacturing for example. The choice is between using humans acting like robots for pay in China (and shipping costs etc.) versus using real robots in the USA. Even China is automating to reduce labor costs. More discussion:
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
Other issues make this worse, such as ultimately limited demand for most goods and services with a law of diminishing returns, as well as money supply issues as most money moves to a mostly zero-sum FIRE sector casino economy concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and away from most human
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
See my reply here agreeing with your main points:
http://politics.slashdot.org/c...
Here is an essay I put together with about 100 positive and negative responses to the situation. ...
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"There are a large number of possible cures that can be tried either to create jobs or to deal with the problems posed by widespread chronic unemployment, each with various different long term societal consequences (both good and bad). There are also other possible economic models like a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy where paid employment is not required to obtain basic goods and services, or a Gandhian swadeshi ecovillage economy that emphasizes community and family over abstract exchange. Some heterodox economists suggest moving towards those as another possible approach for dealing with the problems posed by a jobless recovery and other related economic issues like social equity and sustainability.
There is a paradox that many people may be happier with more free time to spend with friends, families, and hobbies, if they still can acquire the basic goods and services they need somehow -- but this positive increase in satisfaction might appear as negative economic indicators like a shrinking GDP or a continually increasing unemployment rate. Also, not all jobs created by a recovery are equal in terms of their implications for overall societal well being (for example, more prison guard jobs may indicate some other social dysfunction is taking place).
Here is a list of possible ways to deal with joblessness.[53] Some "cures" emerge mostly on their own; some require political action to start or to prevent. This list is intended to be complete in order to help in understanding the interaction between social changes and job creation; not all possibilities are desirable by most societies. The ones in the first half of the list (like wage subsidies, a shorter work week, or a basic income) in general would usually be considered more positive and adaptive responses than the ones in the second half of the list (like war, escapism, and luddism), although actual preferences or ordering of desirability and acceptability may vary depending on political beliefs and feelings about things like government intervention and taxation. Many of the items in the second half of the list have profit-making aspects for some individuals within the current economic system, although usually directly at the cost of others in society (like crime). Not all items on this list are compatible with each other. Not all might be considered moral or would be legal under international law or existing trade agreements. Some of these "cures" create new jobs (like public works), others make it easier to survive without a job (like frugality), others eliminate the unemployed individuals from the official statistics in various ways (like prisons), others in some way destroy abundance which has a side effect of creating jobs to build it back up (war), and some allow someone unemployed to take a job that someone else was doing but who no longer can do the job anymore for various reasons (like mandatory retirement). Some of the "cures" that help individuals survive without a job may actually increase the unemployment rate as they reduce demand for items in the market place produced by paid employment, contributing to overall increased joblessness even as the individual may be helped locally. Because these items may interact in unexpected ways, and people have many different feelings about them as different groups may benefit or be harmed in different ways, and many vested interests are involved, it is challenging for any economist, political scientist, politician or private citizen to make sense of all these issues or to pick a best way forward, even though people are trying in various ways to do that.[
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Besides the somewhat obvious problem that with size comes not only economies of scale, but also diseconomies of scale, where things get harder to do, the bigger the organization. This is in part due to the "owner-agent problem". Unless the managers and owners are the same people, you have to deal with making the incentives for the managers align with those of the owners -- and make the incentives of the managers subordinates align, too. You have to take precautions against dishonesty, sloppiness, sloth. At some point, the effects of the economies of scale may get swamped by the diseconomies of scale, and getting bigger means getting less profitable (or less effective, if profit is not the objective). A company that fails goes bankrupt, and goes away. (Or, less ideally, gets bailed out by the government.) Its assets get sold to new owners, and its employees get hired by new employers, presumably better ones. If not, they go toes up, too. Failing government bureaucracies, on the other hand, don't generally get shut down. I'm hard-pressed to give an example of one, at the federal level. The FSLIC, perhaps. (Or did it just get folded into the FDIC, or some other quasi-independent government "corporation"?) There might be some at the state or local level.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.