Brad DeLong sends us to Ezra Klein, Obama’s Management Problem.  Klein itemizes the issues.  Here are the first four:

1.  It’s good that VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned. Shinseki is a great American. But that doesn’t make him a great administrator. As Yuval Levin writes, the interim report of the VA inspector general uncovered “a pattern of exceptionally widespread, systematic, and even criminal deception throughout an agency Shinseki oversees.”

2.  President Obama’s reluctance in accepting Shinseki’s resignation speaks to deep problems in the way this White House views its managers. “I think he is deeply disappointed in the fact that bad news did not get to him, and that the structures weren’t in place for him to identify this problem quickly and fix it,” Obama said. But it’s the boss’ job to build the structures that make sure problems are surfaced and can be fixed. Shinseki wasn’t wronged. He failed.

3.  This is reminiscent of the White House’s reaction after HealthCare.Gov launched. The president often seemed furious on behalf of his senior managers who didn’t know about the problems rather than being furious at his senior managers for not knowing about the problems.

4.  Some of this goes to how the federal government is structured. The various agencies are staffed by civil servants who the president has fairly little power over. But they’re led by political appointees who the president often knows well and trusts deeply. The result can be that rather than blaming political appointees responsible for the failures of the bureaucracies they run White Houses sometimes blame bureaucracies for the failures of their political appointees.