Dmitry Kozak has finally assigned two deputies to each “civilian” minister
Photo: Valery Melnikov
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Aides and Gentlemen
// Bureaucrat’s Day Held in the White House
The Crew
Yesterday the government discussed itself. Contrary to expectations, it took only one hour and fifteen minutes to sort out the structure of the new cabinet. On April 1, bureaucrats received a notice of a 20% staff cut as a present.
The Front Line
Like a careful general, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov opened the session by immediately warning his subordinates that things would not be easy now, and that this was a serious cutback, unlike the previous ones. It will not affect everyone: Mr. Fradkov stressed that “conscientious civil servants” would not have to worry about their jobs. In his words, government reform implies “tough decisions” to eliminate duplication of functions and axing of superfluous functions and transferring them to other administrative levels. The number of structures, subdivisions, and deputy ministers in the ministries would have to be substantially reduced.
Actually, eight ministers of departments whose future was decided yesterday knew about the new structure (the ninth, Minister of Economic Development and Trade German Gref, was away on business in Germany), since they had agreed to it the day before in meetings with the prime minister. According to the government's new “disciplinary rules” (Dmitry Kozak, head of the government staff, promised that all activities of government officials would soon be very clearly specified by administrative regulations in order to “eliminate possible ambiguities”), even the new deputy ministers would be given permission to make a speech only as a last resort, e.g., in the absence of the minister. However, even in this case, the deputy would have to be appointed acting minister for this period by order of the minister. The aim of the authors of government reform here was to increase both the status and personal responsibility of department heads. It appears that the innovation started working ahead of time; at any rate, German Gref's deputy, Mikhail Dmitriev, was not allowed to report on the progress of administrative reform. The only person to speak was Dmitry Kozak, the head of Mikhail Fradkov's staff.
One-Two Count!
We note that Mr. Kozak, who is one of the authors of administrative reform, officially became responsible for continuing it yesterday after consolidating two government committees under his leadership, namely, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Aleshin's administrative reform committee and Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Zhukov's structural organization committee. In the opinion of Minister of Finance Aleksei Kudrin, what has been done to the government so far is “only the start, ten percent of what still has to be done.” Obviously, the first step was taken yesterday when the ministers assigned the functions of the departments under them and also determined the number and payrolls of their subordinates. Of course, they did not determine the number of their deputies and heads of other administrative levels independently, but no one was prepared to argue with the boss. Mr. Kozak, who had recently divided powers among various departments, also remembered the regions and suggested that the new plan might be adopted in the regions and at the local level after proving its worth. However, he reassured everyone by saying, “we don't have the right to impose it.”
Aleksei Kudrin gave the details on numbers and the costs of carrying out reform at a press conference at the end of the meeting. He let on that nothing terrible had happened, and that the 257 or 253 or whatever deputies of the 59 former federal ministers (there are only 14 ministers in the new government) had nothing to worry about. Some of them might be chosen as deputies of the new federal ministers (according to Mr. Kozak, each “civilian minister” would get two deputies, and reform of the “force” ministries was just around the corner and would follow along the same lines). We note that Mr. Kozak's prediction began to come true a few hours later: yesterday Minister of Justice Yury Chaika reported to the president that his ministry's staff would be cut to one-third.
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| Photo: Dmitry Azarov |
| Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov is guaranteeing jobs in his cabinet only to “conscientious civil servants”. |
It was decided at the White House yesterday that the 9 civilian ministers would have only 18 deputy ministers. One hundred positions as managers of ministry departments were assigned to the rest. And not one position more. Following the strict logic of an army formation, each department manager can also have two deputies, bringing the total to “300 top managers”. The 46 heads of federal services and agencies will have 123 deputies in all. In Mr. Kudrin's estimation, a manager's status will be an order of magnitude higher than that of a former deputy minister and will pay much better. “Heads of federal ministry departments will become the country's top managers in the areas of policy development and working out rules for business, as well as economic management, while the heads of services and agencies will be the managers who implement this policy,” as Mr. Kudrin expressed it. In his words, the departments will be the “master units that will bear the main workload of the ministries,” citing his own ministry and German Gref's as examples. Thus, the Ministry of Finance now has 10 departments (including the Federal Treasury, which will be reorganized into a separate service starting in 2005) instead of 20; and the number of departments in the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade (MERT) has been cut from 42 to 16, “which is exactly the number of deputies German Gref will have.” What is most interesting is that despite a sizable pay increase (the amount will depend on the “scope of decision-making”), this reform will not require additional budget expenditures: with allowance for staff cuts and surrender of some superfluous functions, along with the budget -financed government offices that carry out these functions, the cost of reform is fully covered by this year's budget.
Quick March!
Up to this point, everything has been like a parade: each department head has two (and only two) deputies; there are exactly 100 department heads; and in the key departments their number will exactly equal the previous number of deputies. All that is left is to give the order “Quick march!” But there is a catch.
The fact is that bureaucrats need to see further ahead; they need to know what they can do and how, and what they cannot do. In bureaucratese, each government department must have a corresponding position, but they still do not. Therefore, not every minister knows how his new ministry will operate.
Ideally, the positions should have been prepared simultaneously with the restructuring of the cabinet of ministers. Since there are none, the president's order declaring that government reform was being undertaken to make it more effective remains unfulfilled. When the Kommersant correspondent asked yesterday's visitors to the White House whose fault it was that the ministries were still unable to work to full capacity, they first looked around fearfully and then answered: “The one who isn't here.” They were not talking about Vladimir Putin of course, but about German Gref. They explained to the correspondent that the Kremlin (where Dmitry Kozak was working at the time) decided how to reform the upper echelons of government, and MERT, whose minister was pushing to become one of the authors of the reforms, was supposed to look after the lower levels. Specifically, the departments were supposed to submit only approved documents to the cabinet of ministers and MERT would generally reserve the right to final say in these agreements, although the number of committees will be sharply decreased.
There are also other weaknesses in the reforms being implemented, which Kommersant has already written about. How can you speak of the division of lawmaking and control functions if the control agencies are subordinate to the ministries? Dmitry Kozak replied to this question yesterday: “No principle, including the principle of division of functions, can be absolute; otherwise, the number of federal government departments would have to be increased to infinity. There isn't one country in the world where this principle is applied in its pure form.”
&The Prime Ministers of Russia and Ukraine Agree to Another Meeting
Prime Minister of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, who arrived in Moscow yesterday, became the first foreign colleague to visit Mikhail Fradkov (President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, had previously met with Mr. Fradkov). According to Aleksandr Zharov, Mr. Fradkov's press secretary, they discussed “trade and economic cooperation, including cooperation in the fuel and energy complex” at a working meeting. They also agreed to hold the 10th meeting of the Russia–Ukraine Intergovernmental Committee for Cooperation in Moscow in late June–early July.
Russia and Ukraine have unsolved problems going back several years, e.g., gas debts and the formation of a gas transport consortium. The Ukrainian prime minister recently gave orders to speed up work on the consortium, but Mr. Fradkov is not pleased with the retention of import quotas on Russian cars with engine displacements of 1000–1500 cm3, although the quota itself increased 20% to 20 826 vehicles. It also appears that Mr. Fradkov will not get reverse utilization of the Odessa–Brody oil pipeline, since Ukraine has already decided on a quick startup in the standard regime. However, the main disappointment for Moscow is the fact that Kiev has effectively blocked the creation of a single economic space that would have included Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
Alena Kornysheva
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 02, 2004
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