Link Harvest: DoT v. DoJ, will other agencies also protect industry?
The NYT runs this piece on how Christin Varney, the new chief of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, has met resistance from the Department of Transportation (DoT) in her effort to investigate airline deals as potentially anticompetitive.
It is a useful article to highlight several issues, one is how something as complex as the federal government works. It is worth considering when one blames "Obama" for something fairly low down at the implementation level. But it also highlights the importance of having mechanisms to resolve this sort of interagency squabbling when it comes to light.
One of the problems in the Bush Administration was that agencies pretty much operated as their own fiefdoms. This attitude reached deep into the surviving career level. The new political appointees are going to need to figure out how to overcome what has become an entrenched culture of non-cooperation.
It is a useful article to highlight several issues, one is how something as complex as the federal government works. It is worth considering when one blames "Obama" for something fairly low down at the implementation level. But it also highlights the importance of having mechanisms to resolve this sort of interagency squabbling when it comes to light.
One of the problems in the Bush Administration was that agencies pretty much operated as their own fiefdoms. This attitude reached deep into the surviving career level. The new political appointees are going to need to figure out how to overcome what has become an entrenched culture of non-cooperation.