Legislative Organization and Administrative Redundancy

Congress regularly enacts legislation providing for redundant administrative programs. For example, there are more than 100 federal programs for surface transportation, 82 programs to ensure teacher quality, 80 programs to promote domestic economic development, and 47 programs to provide employment and job-training services. Recent high-profile legislation–-such as the financial-industry reform measure and the health-care reform measure–-add new programs without repealing existing ones directed at the same policy goals. Prior academic analyses generally have not considered why Congress pursues redundancy. This article addresses that question through both theoretical and institutional analysis. The article first constructs an organizational theory that attributes redundancy in administrative programs to the congressional committee system. Specifically, the article demonstrates that two critical components of the existing committee system-–fragmented jurisdictions and parliamentary prerogatives–-systematically bias legislative outcomes in favor of redundancy. Building on leading theoretical accounts of congressional committees from political science, the article then presents a novel cost-benefit analysis of this tendency toward redundancy. It shows that redundancy allows legislators to increase distributive favors for constituents and interest groups but that redundancy is also linked to the desirable pursuit of informational efficiency. Thus, the institutional structures facilitating redundancy have mixed effects. Consequently, the article describes and analyzes specific institutional reforms that trade off the distributive costs and the informational benefits associated with redundancy. One approach would subject more legislative decisions to external advisory processes such as that used to close unneeded military facilities. A second and more promising approach would preserve existing committee jurisdictions but would scale back committees’ parliamentary prerogatives, thereby encouraging redundancy in program design but discouraging redundancy in program implementation

High-speed civil transport flight- and propulsion-control technological issues

Technology advances required in the flight and propulsion control system disciplines to develop a high speed civil transport (HSCT) are identified. The mission and requirements of the transport and major flight and propulsion control technology issues are discussed. Each issue is ranked and, for each issue, a plan for technology readiness is given. Certain features are unique and dominate control system design. These features include the high temperature environment, large flexible aircraft, control-configured empennage, minimizing control margins, and high availability and excellent maintainability. The failure to resolve most high-priority issues can prevent the transport from achieving its goals. The flow-time for hardware may require stimulus, since market forces may be insufficient to ensure timely production. Flight and propulsion control technology will contribute to takeoff gross weight reduction. Similar technology advances are necessary also to ensure flight safety for the transport. The certification basis of the HSCT must be negotiated between airplane manufacturers and government regulators. Efficient, quality design of the transport will require an integrated set of design tools that support the entire engineering design team

Deagnostic market feedback attenuates the benefits of ABC for competitive price setting in a heterogeneous market.

Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is intended to assist managers to make better pricing decisions than those taken using traditional volume-based cost methods. The added value of ABC should be assessed against that of signals emanating from the competitive environment in which the firm operates. Prior research has often shown market-based information to be overwhelming, thereby calling into question the wisdom of investing in cost systems to better approximate actual costs. We compare experimentally the pricing decisions of decision makers in a price-competitive duopoly market, characterized by considerable heterogeneity in customer-serving costs. Our results show that the incremental value of ABC depends on the quality of market signals. Decision makers receiving uninformative feedback revert to costing data and ABC outperforms volume-based costing. The presence of a well-informed competitor attenuates but does not completely eliminate the value of ABC.Activity based costing; Managers; Pricing; Decisions; Methods; Value;

The safety case and the lessons learned for the reliability and maintainability case

This paper examine the safety case and the lessons learned for the reliability and maintainability case